Are voters idiots?

Dominic Hilton will will be on a panel discussing 'the world after the US election' at the Frontline Club, London, on Friday 26th November. For details, please see Transatlantic Institute

“At its best, political writing offers arresting metaphor and acute diagnosis. More commonly, political columnists, mindful that few people share their interest in the subject, obscure the ephemeral character of their output with extravagant exclamations about its significance.”

The Times (London), 13 November 2004

Back in my university days, before the wage–slave (and slave–wage) deluge, I’d frequently wake to find myself chairing a heated squabble about public ignorance.

“You mean to tell me those ghastly mutts on the buses have the vote?” I’d exclaim, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. “Since when?”

It always surprised us educated elitists that, for all our superior knowledge, politically we only wielded as much power as the filthy tramp who’d rummage nightly through the canteen pigswill.

Any fair system, we insisted, would give us at least fifty votes to his one spoiled ballot paper. The motion never failed to carry (unanimously, if you didn’t count the Trot vote, which we didn’t).

Meanwhile, our tutors, as they were hilariously termed, did zilch to humidify our sense of self–satisfaction. Many a lecture series relayed the benefits of a staggered voting system – the more degrees you have, the more votes you get. I was young and naïve and it all sounded fair to me. After all, I knew better than the stinking mass. I had the lecture notes to prove it.

The past couple of weeks, all this hooey has re–entered my daydreams. Inevitably, the result of the United States presidential election has triggered a cacophony of chitchat regarding the suspected idiocy of the US electorate. I hesitate to suggest that not even the most confoundedly ignorant among you can have failed to notice that.

Britain’s tabloid Daily Mirror did its worst, leading with the headline “How can 59,054,097 people be so dumb?” (These are the number of people who voted for George W. Bush, not the Mirror sales figures.)

In a painful election–day howl slapped in black–and–white across the New York Times, Nicholas D Kristof asked how the heck the idiot hillbilly electorate could be “Living Poor, Voting Rich”. John Kerry supporters, Kristof suggested, “should be feeling wretched about the millions of farmers, factory workers and waitresses who ended up voting – utterly against their own interests – for Republican candidates.”

What is it with those no–good proles, eh? Why can’t the blighters wake up and smell the fair–trade coffee?

We’ve been here before – many times. Friedrich Engels, co–author with Karl Marx of The Communist Manifesto, accused the proletariat in 1893 of an insufferably annoying “false consciousness”. For some godforsaken reason, Marx repeatedly told a sparse assembly of similarly unhygienic communistic reprobates, the masses couldn’t see how he had calculated the solution to all their ills in three doorstop volumes of incomprehensible, contradictory, Hegelian–inspired theory.

In other words, not only are they illiterate and lazy, the great unwashed simply dunno waz good for ‘em.

When Marx’s “inevitability” prediction failed to materialise (so to speak), Marxists tried to sneak Marxism in through the backdoor. The result was socialism. Among other things, socialism is the belief that for some godforsaken reason, the masses still can’t see how Marx had the solution to all their ills, so, I know, let’s force the solution upon them.

Socialists believe that, for a myriad of reasons, the masses cannot be trusted to act in their own interests (which happen to coincide with the interests of socialists). Leave people to take care of their own business and their own money, for instance, and they wouldn’t dream of looking after their fellow man. This is not because people are innately evil. It’s just that they’ve been corrupted and made evil through some horribly knotty sort of exploitation.

As an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of this tragedy of consciousness, until ignorant fools like you and I come to understand our true selves (an epiphany that heavily relies on our starving to death in a gutter), socialists have no choice but to steal our belongings off us, on threat of incarceration, in order to distribute them in the way we’d distribute them, if only we knew what was best for ourselves and everyone else.

Thankfully, democracy stands as an obstacle between the masses and those who profess to know what’s in the masses’ best interests.

Perhaps the greatest and most invaluable beauty of democracy is that it allows a perfectly decent and sensible chap to be unfairly thrown from office just because the voters prefer his opponent’s hairstyle.

Rightly or wrongly, it also puts George W Bush not John F Kerry in the White House.

Democracy rescues us from ideology. It allows us to vote against “our own interests”. It allows us to make perfectly awful decisions and then either regret them or forget about them. It is imperfect, and that is its everlasting beauty.

Perfectionists – and beware, there’s a lot of these dangerous people around – simply can’t stand democracy. Democracy, they say, gets us nowhere. Not only is this untrue, but often, going nowhere is an entirely reasonable way to live.

So next time you complain that the voters are idiots, remember this: so are the politicians, so were my tutors, and so am I.

Idiots rule, and long may it remain so.