There was a recent discussion on Heinlein’s idea of limiting the franchise from Starship Troopers.
In For Us, The Living, Heinlein has the franchise limited as follows, “Required voting helps ---- only those can draw the dividend who vote, and the franchise calls for a rather stiff course in the details of the mechanics of government…There is no examination. If there were, the party in power might use it to disenfranchise the opposition, just as such laws were used to disenfranchise the negroes in the South in your day. We just make sure that the citizen has been thoroughly instructed in the machinery of government. All these things help to make a more intelligent electorate and bring out better candidates. In spite of everything we get a certain percentage of stupid, or unqualified, or small-souled men in office. This isn’t Utopia, you know. This is just the United States of America in 2086.” (FYI: The “dividend” is money that Americans receive. It’s enough that no one has to work in order to maintain a basic existence. However in order to get it, you must be a voter.)
I had just been reading that passage. The next day, because it related to our conversation, I ended up showing a friend the piece I’d written for this week, “The Top Ten Dumbest (Political) Things Republicans Have Ever Said to Me”. Beyond her scoffing at people who would say those things, when she got to number 2 on the list, she turned to me and exclaimed, “Aren’t they educated?!!” (She also wanted to know what happened with the person who said it and I told her I printed out the Constitution, highlighted the relevant section and gave it to him with my finger on the section. For a rarity on that list, he actually thanked me. Normally they either refuse to believe or they get pissed at me.)
Since I’d just read Heinlein’s simultaneously earliest and last way of limiting the franchise in For Us, The Living, that combined with my friends comment got me to really wondering, “What if, in order to vote, you had to take — not pass, but take — ‘a rather stiff course in the details of the mechanics of government’”?
So add your thoughts on that idea of Heinlein’s about the franchise…
Voting in Starship Troopers — 2 pages worth of replies
Voting in For Us, The Living — 86 views and not one reply (besides this)
So no one in this group, this group, has an opinion on if voters should be required to be educated about the government they’re voting on before they can become voters?!:eek:
For the three people who might care, I have avoided discussing FUTL in any open forum since I first read the MS a couple of years before it was published. It’s a complete mess in every way, essentially a brain-dump from RAH/1938.
Fascinating from a scholarly perspective and filled with endless useful bits for evaluating Heinlein’s later work, but almost unreadable and very difficult for modern audiences to interpret unless they have an excellent grasp of 1930s social movements and politics.
The two-page footnote really says it all.
But I’m always interested in seeing other people kick it around.
Just because we have a high number of old-school science fiction fans here does not mean we are interested in dissecting everything any given author had published, even RAH. I have heard of far more interesting voting requirements than taking a required civics course.
I have not read For Us, The Living and really don’t have any desire to add it to the to-be-read warehouse.
lalaith – am late to the party: sometimes life intervenes, even for the sadder saddos among us…
With my own position, as given in my OP in the *Starship Troopers * thread, being that people who vote, should indeed have some interest in and understanding of national and world affairs (I’m eligible to vote in my country, but because of my great lack of such interest / understanding / informed-ness, I refrain from voting): Heinlein’s For Us,The Living suggestion strikes me as a very good idea. Likewise, re there being no qualifying examination at the end of the course – because of, as cited, the risk of abuse of this feature to disenfranchise groups regarded with disfavour.
On the other hand, the lack of a qualifying exam could allow the franchise to some people whose true deserving of it might be doubtful. One thinks of folk who are highly stupid; and / or just have no head whatever for “mechanics of government” stuff; but who nevertheless might greatly desire to have the vote; maybe “just because”, or maybe by reason of one or a couple of isolated issues, which for whatever reason they passionately care about, and over which they want to have an influence on national policy. Such bods might sit through the course, but be able actually to learn very little indeed from it – nevertheless, they’d end up with the vote. One suspects that the number of such people ready to undergo to the bitter end, what would be for them the misery of the course, would be fairly small; and that the ability to persevere which they would demonstrate thereby, might indicate their potential, as more solid citizens than some.
Envisaging myself living under the For Us,The Living system – likeliest scenarios: the expected tedium of the course would put me off taking it; or even if, for whatever reason, I embarked on it; screaming boredom would in all probability have me dropping out before completing it.
Ok, it’s simple, here’s what the GOP would do: In rich white areas, make the class super easy to get to, take. In Black or Hispanic or poor area, make the class nearly impossible to take, making it hard as possible.
If you work three jobs and have kids, when are you gonna have time?
I haven’t read FUTL, but I will give my thoughts on the scheme as you propose
We ALREADY give a “stiff course in the mechanics of government”… it’s called civics, and it’s required in every high school curriculum I’ve ever heard of. Even if you only take the nebulous “social studies” in middle school, it’s covered there. This hasn’t really created informed voters, so I don’t see how making the vote compulsory in return for money (which, really, who would turn down?) is going to improve anything.
And this from someone that wants more stringent education and thinks a basic income is a good idea.
Your dictionary must have a different definition of “stiff” than mine.
7-12 civics and government and “social studies” (par’n me while I gag) are about as well-structured, well-taught and connected to reality as history classes in the same range… that is, not very and from a bizarre, sanitized, simplified viewpoint only loosely connected to reality.
Any adult immigrant can probably kick the ass of even an AP Civics student on a real understanding of how politics and governance work.
If you’ve read enough '30s sf from the pulps, you’ll know that footnotes (not two page ones, though) were pretty common. RAH at least got better, fast. Interesting in seeing the beginning of some of the future history stuff, but it was never sold as a good novel, just an interesting one.
Considering some of the wackos running around on the radio when he wrote that, I can see where he was coming from. As for today, the average person has forgotten as much high school civics as they have forgotten high school algebra - but unlike algebra, they don’t know that they’ve forgotten it.
I guess I’m a bit puzzled as to how having a good knowledge of the mechanics of government is going to help you make a decision between candidates.
Sure, knowing that there are currently X senators in your party and you need X+Y senators to have a filibuster-proof majority might motivate you to get off your butt and vote in an off-year election but that’s information that could be easily covered in a campaign ad.
Knowing the issues of the day and where each candidate (claims to) stand on those issues is important when voting, but that doesn’t seem to be what RAH is saying.
Now if the proposal was that anyone running for office had to have taken a comprehensive course in the mechanics of government, that I could get behind. Because a lot of elected officials seems to be frankly baffled by basic concepts such as separation of church and state and the Supremacy Clause.
Voters would be better served with courses in logic and rhetoric than in civics. The voter’s job should be to not let lying, pig-ignorant but charming sonofabitches through, not worry about the minutiae of how they’ll fuck us over afterwards.
A population would be better served in all ways if they came out of basic universal education (== high school) with a solid grounding in critical thinking and little else besides rote learning. Call it tuning everyone’s BS detector before they leave the factory.
As it is, critical thinking seems to be a one-semester module taught by an English teacher around the sophomore year on a pass/fail basis. When it’s not cut to make more room for “sensitivity” ed.
Maybe not any more. “Common Core” is about rote STEM learning and feelgood, so it doesn’t leave much room for, you know, thinking of any kind. But I’ve encountered the “This week we’re going to learn Critical Thinking, kids” module a few times.
I think you’re right. Some people are going to sit through it and not learn anything. But the requirement of having to sit through it when they’re not interested is going to discourage them from finishing.
Yes, I expect they’d try. Ultimately I expect they’d fail in court challenges. If taking the course is a requirement, the courts would come down against “make the class nearly impossible to take, making it hard as possible.”
Based on the way Heinlein structured learning in FUTL, very little teaching is done in classrooms. Most of it is what we’d call online learning. That you fit in when and where you can.
Curious though, how many people who work three jobs and have kids do you think are registered to vote and then vote now? My gut feeling is not many more like hardly any to barely over none. In that case, this wouldn’t make a difference.
The aspect of voting I most remember from FUTL is that declaring non-defensive war requires a nationwide plebiscite - and voting “yes” is equivalent to signing up for the Armed forces.
If that were true, we wouldn’t have so many people so ignorant in how their government operates. Even people running for office like someone who thought she was qualified to be Vice-president when she didn’t know what the Federal Reserve was or when asked to name a Supreme Court case other than Roe v Wade that she disagrees with couldn’t come up with one case. (I could name a list.)
If that were true, I wouldn’t have gotten into an argument with someone over if the electoral college exists.
