You know, I’ve been reflecting upon that yesterday, and that’s really it, isn’t it ? I mean, I’m sure there are plenty of sincere retards among the right-wing global warming deniers, yet I simply refuse to believe that so many of them who’ve had extensive educations and seem to be intelligent, if wrong, people could get seduced by arguments like “urr durr there’s snow, so there !”. I mean, say what you want about a guy like Newt Gingrich, but however loathsome and unprincipled he might be, one thing he’s not is a complete idiot. And yet even he went from just disagreeing with the Democrats with how to tackle AGW, to plain denying it’s a Thing that happens.
So what must really be going on is that their constituents actually need the jobs, the old economy, be it making gas guzzlers or mining coal. But you can’t just go out and say “yes, the whole planet will burn, by I need to get reelected so fuck everyone everywhere, neh ?”. Plus, yanno, that sweet Koch money.
So they kinda have to twist themselves into these ignoramus pretzels for lack of a better moral alternative. But the problem is, to do that they had to also support anti-intellectual, anti-city rhetoric (because that’s really what “elitists” means in their mouths : big city folk) backing the position of ignorance, and policies towards that. And so, down the pike, Trump. The crown jewel of ignorance-boosting.
I admit my unfamiliarity with the American voting process, but it seems to me that being low-information about the presidential race isn’t that big a deal - the power of one individual’s vote is at a minimum and the effect on that individual’s life may be trivial.
In contrast, the personal stakes and the voter’s influence get higher the more local the vote gets. If a voter knows only vaguely what about their presidential candidates, they should know a bit more about their senate candidates, a few solid facts about their house candidates, a fair amount about their gubernatorials, and have a firm line of reasoning about their state assembly candidates, ballot measures, mayoral races, etc.
The current system is inverted, though - the presidential race gets an absurdly disproportionate amount of coverage, to the point where how a voter gut-feels about the big popularity contest guides them to (often?) blindly down-ticket every member of the favourite’s party, and years when the presidency is not in contention get significantly lower turnout. Elections likely to have the greatest effect on the individual get the least attention.
That’s why many state races are held in non-presidential years, and many local races are held in odd years. Turnout on an odd year is less than 10% of what it is in a presidential year, and really only the people who are informed on things come out to vote.
My vote on mayor of my city is much more powerful because it is not competing with uninformed voters, this is useful because in alot of ways, that is going to have a much greater impact on my life than the president.
Cool. Incidentally, this is (partly) what a Canadian ballot looks like; typically an election is called for a single race (local, provincial, federal) or a single referendum issue, and there’s no set calendar date so these races all happen independently, and a single box is chosen with a (hopefully unambiguous) pencil mark. I admit my childhood bafflement at pictures of American voting booths and seeing dozens of levers and buttons and whatnot - they looked like cigarette machines.
…and just as deadly…! dun-dun-DUNNNNN!!!
“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”
Churchill knew what he was talking about. One of the biggest weaknesses of democracy is that everyone’s vote carries equal weight no matter how well or ill informed that voter is. And there’s nothing particularly new about having massive numbers of ill informed voters.
Despite this, I still think it’s a better system of governance than having even the most enlightened despot in charge. The antidotes for ill informed voters are: 1) don’t vote if you recognize you don’t have a clue (fat chance); or 2) educate yourself on candidates and issues. Just because this all pretty obvious stuff doesn’t make it any less true.
Sure, there are various forms and degrees of democracy, but even representative democracy still suffers from this problem. Instead of having voters ignorant of specific issues, they’re ignorant about the candidates/representatives and their qualifications (or lack thereof)
Well then, there’s a 66% chance that their conclusions are inoperative. (people who say “you can’t trust published research, I read an article about it in this journal” seem to have a critical irony sense deficiency).
Those who want to damn expert opinion need to point out specific holes in that opinion, rather than just saying “well, experts have been wrong before”.
How much this relates to the Presidential election is open to debate, but it seems that the triumph of Trumpism is in part due to resentment/suspicion of experts, fostered by an unholy alliance of Internet conspiracy-mongers and Google University graduates.
“The hell with professionals, let’s just download this neat-o diagram of how to run a country and see how it goes.”
Which is why the electoral college wasn’t meant to function the way that it does. We weren’t supposed to vote for a president. We were supposed to elect a person that we trusted to investigate the Presidential nominees and validate that they had the qualities that we would want in a President, and that body would elect the President based on their research.
The states and parties chose to do it otherwise, because it was advantageous to them and the people like direct democracy.
(people who say “you can’t trust published research, I read an article about it in this journal” seem to have a critical irony sense deficiency).