However you define stupidity, half the population is by definition stupider than average. Our government is the government of all the people, and in our system everyone gets to participate in politics. This is not true in aristocracies or restricted-franchise democracies, and there are in fact people in the US who want to return to the restricted franchise and restrict voting to those who are capable of voting intelligently.
These people are called “Republicans”. The Republicans have been running voter-discouragement and franchise-restriction programs for decades -- Hans von Spakovsky has built a lifetime career on these projects. The biggest problem with the liberal Stupid Voter meme is that if these liberals had their way, Republicans would gain control of government, and liberalism would simply disappear.
So who are the stupid voters? There are three groups of voters who Democrats routinely accuse of being stupid: hard-core Republicans, “low information voters”, and non-voters. (There are inevitably plenty of stupid Democratic voters too, but liberal whiners don’t talk about them, though conservatives and anti-democratic elitists do).
The hard-core crazified Republicans are not, in general, stupid, and it’s totally wrong to think of them as trailer trash. A high proportion of them, perhaps the majority, are well-educated and prosperous. Some of them are economically motivated, and some of them are culturally motivated, and many are both. In Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State Andrew Gelman shows that the culture-war divide is not between rich liberals and poor conservatives, but between two different kinds of well-off people, and I’m convinced (based on personal experience and without hard data) that something like this also holds true for the hard right’s educational status. (In general, prosperity and educational level track pretty well, and I've run into many well-educated wingers). The next two groups of supposedly-stupid voters, low-information voters and non-voters, are purely and simply the product of Democratic failure. Low-information voters decide how to vote based on ambient information (i.e., free media and local scuttlebutt), and the free media are predominantly right wing. Non-voters, the second group, either are entirely unaware of politics, unconvinced that the Democrats have anything to offer them, or else prevented from voting by concrete problems such as lack of transportation or lack of time. In any case, both these classes of voters or potential voters are people who the Democrats, one way or another, have failed to reach.
You may ask: Aren’t non-voters people who the Republicans have also failed to reach? The answer is a resounding NO! Year in and year out, voter-discouragement is an important part of the ongoing Republican campaign. In that seanse, non-voters are often people the Republicans have succeeded in reaching. Except for the most highly-educated tenth, the more Democratic an educational demographic is, the less likely it is to vote. Obama’s worst demographic was college graduates with no advanced degree, who make up 19% of the population but 28% of the voters. By contrast, Obama’s best demographic was the 14% of the population with no HS degree, but this demographic is the one least likely to vote, making up only 4% of the actual voters.
Now the obvious solution is, first, to get the word out to the non-voters and low-information voters, and second, to get the non-voters to vote. These are, however, the weakest parts of the Democratic program. The Democratic Party seems to fall asleep between elections, and it has been historically very poor at the kind of message development and dissemination done by think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, etc. Over a period of decades these think tanks have propagated their ideas everywhere, and their ideas have thus have become “ambient”. The Democrats have nothing to match them. Similarly, the Democratic voter-registration and get-out-the-vote efforts have been spotty at best, and it’s notable that the individuals and groups doing the best job of this (ACORN recently and Jesse Jackson a couple of decades ago) have been very little appreciated by the ruling group in the party.
When smart, well-paid, experienced people fail in stupid ways, it’s always a good idea to ask whether there's a discrepancy between their actual and their professed goals. There are many reasons to think that this is what is happening in this case. The Democratic Party is a business like any other, and just as newspapers get their money from advertisers and not from readers, the Democratic Party gets its money from donors rather than from voters. Bringing new voters from the lower orders into the party would almost certainly require policy proposals which would negatively impact the big-money people, and even if the Democratic Party started winning elections that way, the boodle coming in would be reduced, and boodle is what pays the mercenary pros at the party headquarters.
In large part this explains the constant refrain from the Democratic leadership: we’d like to do the right thing, but political realities make it impossible. The truth is that the Democratic leaders are very happy with the political realities and don’t want to change them. If it were "politically possible" to pass single-payer, for example, the Democratic Party would lose incredible amounts of money from key donors in the medical biz. Single-payer might make the voters ecstatically happy, but these happy voters are not at all likely to replace the money the party lost.
If you look at the present healthcare debate, it’s all been about process: the filibuster, and the conservadems, and the committee chairmen, and the Congressional procedures, and various delaying tactics like holds and demands for readings, and so on. This kind of last-minute crisis manoeuvring is what the pros thrive on. It puts them in control since they’re the only ones who really understand it, and they especially love it because it allows them (ever-so-politely) to flip off the Democratic voters who expected better. The Democratic Party is going to make a lot of money from the failure of healthcare reform.
With strongr campaigns and more Democrats in Congress, lawmaking would go much differently. It would be harder for the Democratic leaders to play their donors off against their voters, much harder to engineer short-term crises (like the present Lieberman crisis) in order to bully people into accepting second best, and the Democratic leadership would no longer be able to tell the voters “We’re sorry, but what you want is not politically possible”.
In these crisis discussions, nobody ever talks about the long term, and when the crisis is over, no one talks about the long term then either. A year ago, where was the Democratic effort to get the word out about healthcare reform? Why do the low-information voters only hear disinformation? Why did so many of the people who most desperately need health insurance not vote? Why do so many nominally-Democratic Congressmen have Republican attitudes toward healthcare reform? Why do Democrats tolerate the crippling House and Senate rules, which they could change with a majority vote? The list could go on, but the answer is that everyone who counts (i.e., not me or you) likes things pretty much the way they are. The present reality facilitates the expert wheeling-and-dealing and extortion of boodle that the party pros are best at, and it lets the candidates and the parties fatten up. The officeholders and pros are doing very well for themselves, and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem.
This brings us back to the Stupid Voter meme. Talk about stupid voters reinforces the idea that not much is really possible. If nothing is really possible, the party pros can talk about filibusters and holds and so on and pretend that they tried, and they can also jeer at the liberals who “don’t understand the political realities”. Elite liberal anger can be gradually shifted from the party pros to the stupid voters who elected Lieberman, Snowe, Lincoln, Landrieu, and Nelson -- even though these individuals themselves are highly honored members of "the greatest deliberative body in the world" and have just had their asses kissed by the Democratic leadership constantly for six months. And elite liberals can still feel good about themselves in failure, since they tried, but were defeated by the stupid voters. The only way to improve the political realities would be to persuade and recruit more stupid voters, but there is no reason for the party pros to want to do that. 2. Last week I talked about “the wonk demographic” -- the 10% of the adult population with graduate degrees, who made up 19% of the actual voters and 18% of the Democratic voters. What I said then was a little off the mark and I’d like to put it differently this time.
Today’s electorate (by which I mean the actual voters) is historically unique: almost half of it is college educated. If you take the “wonk” group with the advanced degrees and add the bachelor’s-only 19% of the population (28% of the actual voters), you’ll end up with a college-educated demographic consisting of 29% of the adult population and 45% of the actual voters. When you consider that educated voters are also more prosperous, more likely to donate money, and more likely to volunteer, it’s possible to say that college graduates – the Smart Voters -- are the dominant group in American politics today. (Though you should keep in mind that even large groups of educated, well-off individuals are rather insignificant compared to people like the Koch brothers or the Elder Brother of Jesus, Reverend Moon).
If the base voters of both sides are complaining that the real problem is the stupid voters on the other side (and they are) even though stupid voters are not dominant on either side of the line, it’s pretty reasonable (as it always is in politics) to suspect that something that fishy is going on. What makes the most sense here is to say that we're mliving through a version of the cultural politics of the Bourbon / Standpat era (1870-1896 , or maybe 1870-1912, or even 1870-1932). During that period the two major parties were in substantial agreement on the big questions and divided up the voters according to culture: North v. South, Catholic v. Protestant, wet v. dry, and black v. white. There was some real conflict (resource industries v. manufacturing and finance v. manufacturing), but both parties were controlled by big money, and neither cared to represent the workers and small farmers who made up the majority of the population.
In the present case, the politics of sex and gender is the divider, with much the same results. Scary cultural conservatives are used to scare mostly well-off cultural liberals into the Democratic net, and scary cultural liberals are used to drive mostly well-off cultural conservatives into the Republican net. Liberals think of the typical Republican as an illiterate hillbilly Holy Roller, and conservatives think of the typical Democrat as an AIDS-infected prostitute, and fantasies of these types decide elections. Under these circumstances, the well-off, reliably-voting groups on both sides tend to find their own particular issues being treated with some seriousness, and the interest groups who provide the really big money get most of what they want. The losers are the Stupid Voters, who even though they are over half of the voters and 72% of the population, and even though both sides talk about how much they care about them, scarcely count at all.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY
It’s stupid to talk about “the stupid voters”, and liberals should quit doing it. But my recent internet experience has taught me that this bad habit is deeply ingrained and that many find it very satisfying, and I suspect that many liberals are going to find changing their ways hard or impossible. The educated tend to define their own identity and their relationship to the rest of the human world in terms of their own educational success and their difference from those without it.
Since the educated elites have done pretty well for themselves, at least so far, it may be that they (like the Democratic pros) are happy enough with the status quo, since the ones who are being hurt are mostly from among the stupid people. On the other hand, the present economic downturn hasn’t found bottom yet, and as time goes on, more and more smart people might unexpectedly find themselves stuck down there with the stupids.
APPENDIX I:
BOURDIEU
Citing a French author will tarnish my populist cred, but the Republican-Democratic split is a lot like Bourdieu’s split between the dominant part of the dominant class (business, industry, finance, the police, and the military) and the dominated part of the dominant class (education, social services, and the arts). These two sectors trade control of government back and forth, with the dominant-dominants usually winning, and they’re always fighting for the support of the dominated 70%. Democrats are pretty well entrenched with the bottom 10% of the dominated class, but the next 60% is up for grabs, with Obama winning every educational category in the most recent election.
APPENDIX TWO:
MORE ON THE WONK DEMOGRAPHIC
Last week I identified the wonk demographic as the 10% of the population with advanced degrees. It would make better sense to describe them in Bourdieu’s terms as the dominated (idealistic, Democratic) part of the entire college-graduate 28%, which stands in opposition to the dominant (practical, Republican) part of the educated elite. As it happens, those with advanced degrees tend to end up in the Democratic dominated part of the dominant sector, whereas the bachelor’s-only are more evenly divided between the parties. This does make sense, since many higher degrees are “impractical”, and many ambitious, talented people leave school just because they want quick success. (I suspect that there’s a R/D continuum running from business and economics majors at one end of the spectrum through the other practical fields, the liberal arts, and the humanities to the arts).
One peculiarity I noted before is that one way of reading the data, given the voting patterns, would be to think of the Stupid Voters as being those with bachelor’s degrees who didn’t continue their educations. This would make liberal elitists seem to be aspiring aristocrats or technocrats who want to abolish popular government entirely and disenfranchise the bottom 90% of the population, and while this certainly misrepresents the actual situation, I now and then do run into individuals whose personal opinions amount to something like that.
When I first used the term "wonk demographic”, it was something of a joke. Nonetheless, there are some important points here. First, the highly educated are not a numerically insignificant, effete group which can be disdained: they’re a hefty 18% bloc when election time come around. Second, the highly educated, because of their education and expertise, tend to empathize with other experts, including the political wonks who control the Democratic Party. They tend to forget that expertise is specialized by topic and that power goes with the official position held regardless of the positionholder's credentialization, so that to a PhD running a political campaign or a government office a generic PhD from the general population is just another layman outsider and a single voting unit.
I’m still working on the idea that Democrats lose because their educational background makes them unfit for conflict and hard bargaining. That’s complicated by the fact that the real wonks, the mercenary pros, may well be getting everything they want when they “lose” a fight with the Republicans. So perhaps my point should be that wannabe wonks always lose their debates with the real, hardcore, bloody-minded wonks (e.g. Rahm Emmanuel), and that the real wonks are simply manipulating the highly-educated wannabes the same way they manipulate every other voting demographic, using various sorts of wonky secret handshakes in order to do that. |
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