I didn’t see this 7 years ago, so I don’t expect this response to serve any purpose, but my point was that your average person isn’t very idealistic. Usually, the most bigoted and racist people are at the bottom of the income ladder and it’s the effete, ivory tower idealists leading the way on social change - openness to miscegination, homosexuality, etc. Your average MAGA-hatter doesn’t have a college degree. Minorities have, historically, not been particularly benevolent to other minorities.
But if you flipped all the colors, that would still be the same. If whites were at the bottom of the heap and largely uneducated, Native Americans and African Americans at the top with Harvard degrees, I would expect everything to be the same. It would be the college graduates, working white collar jobs with reasonable working hours, doing the best job arguing that we should do more to help lift up the whites out of poverty and integrate them into society.
It’s not a bigoted standpoint. A cynical one, yes, but it’s also an observation of history and human nature.
And certainly, that’s not to imply that there haven’t been a large number of important and influential activists among minorities. Ida Wells should be a big name in the modern world. And nor is it to imply that people with no or very little education can’t be well-considered and philosophical people. Red Jacket and Sojourner Truth were both well-regarded speakers and looked at things for the bigger image.
But most people aren’t Ida Wells nor Red Jacket. Most college graduates aren’t. Most people are selfish and unconcerned with the welfare of others and completely blind to greater ideals and basic long-term thinking. But the ones who naturally are tend to go to college. Poor families, when they see that one of their children is smarter than everyone else, they dump all of their resources into that one kid to make sure that they get into a good school and get a scholarship and all of that. The other kids in the family get to work on the farm or in the shop or whatever it is that the family does for a blue collar living. The kid who goes to college becomes a widely different person than the ones who stayed back and only finished high school. The one who went to college will, likely, be thinking about race and how it affects the country, and what steps might be taken to solve the issue. The ones who are working in a factory are just thinking about making ends meet and how they hate those Mexicans who are taking all of their jobs.
I like that we have someone like Ocasio Ortez in Congress. We should have representatives of the different walks of life in the capital, bringing different experiences and viewpoints in. But AOC is not your average bartender. Your average bartender has no opinion on economics and global warming, that isn’t just parroting whatever news channel they listen to, based on their peer group. They just want a heavily muscled guy with a lot of tattoos to make a lot of babies with and go to the beach together.
There’s nothing wrong with being an average person. The average person is a good and well-intentioned being. But, at the same time, they ain’t philosophers. The only people thinking about the question of whether it’s more important for states to have freedom of self-governance or for centralized power that ensures consistent rights are a tiny minority - most of whom will have gone to college. The people thinking about the question of what their life would have been like if they’d been unlucky enough to be born a different color, born in a different country, born as part of a minority voting group, born with a debilitating disease, etc. and what that means in terms of fair and reasonable laws are people who will most likely have gone to college.
Expanded enfranchisement of the general populace does, certainly, bring in greater representation for everyone. But if I get a class of middle school students and vote on what we should eat, yes, they’ll be getting representation in the meal choice that outweighs mine. That doesn’t mean that the daily pizza that they vote for is actually more healthy than the scientifically approved diet of whole grains, a mix of vegetables, high omega-3 proteins, etc. that I would choose as the lone arbitrator of the school menu. And while you may think that they would switch over to voting for healthier food when they got older, I suspect that you would find that the menu would just start to include beer after they hit 21, but otherwise stay basically the same as when they were still middle schoolers.
As said, most people ain’t philosophers.
But there are strategies that you could implement which are better than open enfranchisement. You could set up mechanisms to ensure that the voting pool is representative of the general populace - the same percentage of women, the same percentage of African Americans, the same percentage of wealthy and poor, etc. But, at the same time, make sure that they’re the Alexandria Ocasio Ortez’s of their area of the demographics. Get a group of a hundred janitors together and one of them will stand out as strangely wise and well-spoken, and they’ll vote for him to go be their voice.
Though, like I said 7 years ago, just something as simple as making sure that the people voting are the most educated would be a better solution than open enfranchisement. College graduates are pro-SSM at a 66%+ (plus for postgraduates) rate. High school graduates are mostly opposed to SSM.
Most college graduates aren’t gay. They aren’t voting for same-sex marriage because of selfishness. It’s because they’re being more philosophical about life. If you agree with same-sex marriage and you think that it’s a shame that Congress isn’t 50% female and so on and so forth, the odds are pretty good that you’re a college graduate and very good that if you asked the people around you, in your social group, who the smartest person is that they know, that they’d point at you.
You can change all the colors and genders and it doesn’t change the message, nor the polls, nor the history. It’s an anti-democratic message, but we don’t live in a democracy, we live in a republic. There’s a reason for that, it’s because the founders were snooty cynics and because they looked back at history for guidance. Modern people would well do the same.
It’s not nice, in modern think, and it’s amazingly paternalistic and egotistical to think in those terms for how to run the show, but you’ll note that I wouldn’t ever give an anti-vaxxer a voice if I ran a newspaper. Your average modern person would feel obligated to, just to not seem like they were being paternalistic and egotistical - they have to be inclusive of all views and give them a fair shot.
Fewer children would die, doing it my way. I wouldn’t advocate for me to be the only gatekeeper or the god-emperor of the nation - but a good representative sample of top minds from a wide range of backgrounds is not only sufficient, it’s as good as it gets. Including the non-top minds is going beyond philosophical and just being stupid for the sake of ideological purity.