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You Agree with Jonathan Gruber (And He Agrees With You)
Ask any conservative why their fellow Americans elected Barack Obama President of the United States not once but twice and you’ll usually get a variation on the theme that includes the phrase “low-information voters.”
In other words, your countrymen are stupid — exactly what MIT professor Jonathan Gruber has been saying very publicly since he helped engineer the beginning of the end to private healthcare in America. This doesn’t necessarily put us on his plane, because we decry the situation while he believes in celebrating it and taking advantage of it. Still, we too should be ashamed — ashamed because we’re not doing a helluva lot to counteract that ignorance, neither as individuals or collectively as members of the center-right.
Sure, we blog. In the almost five years that this site has been up and running there isn’t a topic I haven’t opined on or scrawled my electronic box of crayons over. Yet I do so mainly for the amusement of the choir. (Like the church I’ve accepted that “like” is the new “amen.” Retweets are a “hallelujah!”)
But what have any of us done to educate those who we need to help turn the ship of state away from the iceberg? What has our party done? Thirty-second blurbs during election season, pushing emotional buttons, trying to elevate ourselves to the lesser of two evils — it doesn’t quite cut it for the long term.
How do we put the words of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on the lips of black America? How do we convince waves of immigrants that socialism will only impoverish their new home as much as it did the the lands that they’ve fled? This is where the strategy to save America starts, not with loyalty purchased by pandering to the so-called and self-proclaimed leaders of activist groups.
I must admit that I ask these questions because I don’t know the answers to them. Despite recent electoral successes in the midterms I remain terribly pessimistic looking toward 2016. It’s not enough to control the levers in Congress and play minutiae games with chamber rules. We have to have broader and more comprehensive discussions with folks that may suddenly be disenchanted with the progressive wonder boy in the White House.
We need somebody to point the way forward. While I celebrated their reelection, I’m not sure John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are the ones to it. And if we don’t start soon it will get late very early in the next election cycle.
Published in General
Yes, I agree that most of the American people are stupid — not in the IQ of 60 sense — but in the sense of being disengaged and uninterested in, and ignorant about, public policy and the workings of the institutions that shape it.
And yes, the difference between me and Gruber (and Gruber’s principle sin) is that he sees that state of affairs as an opportunity to take advantage of them for his subjectively well meaning but objectively ill-considered and coercive ideological purposes, and I do not.
When it comes to the project of educating the great masses of people who have by choice not even absorbed the basic civics lessons imparted in a School House Rock video, however, I must admit, I despair, and the reason goes back to the first point of this comment.
Our fellow citizens are not “stupid” in the incapable of understanding what is being done to them sense. They are, in the main, perfectly adequate in cognitive capacity. They are “stupid” in the sense of ignorant and uninformed, and that ignorance is chosen on an individual by individual basis, and perfectly rational from each individual’s perspective.
I think it unlikely that we as a movement will succeed in encouraging large numbers of people to do the fairly time consuming work of educating themselves about subjects about which they are not interested, and about which they do not feel that they have a meaningful ability to exercise any control in any event.
I agreed from the instant I heard. And I really truly doubt it’s an American problem. It’s an everywhere problem. What to do? Don’t work too hard on increasing voter turnout.
I’ll go further, and say that this is exactly why the founders restricted the franchise.
Yes, it’s true. Anybody that has read The Myth of the Rational Voter knows that the electorate doesn’t make decisions based on well-researched knowledge of the people, the issues, and the available options. Instead, political decisions are made largely on image and good intentions.
That merely means that campaigners need to tailor their messages to their electorate. It doesn’t give campaigners a free hand to intentionally mislead the electorate about their intentions.
It means that campaigners need to research their electorate to find out which messages resonate the strongest, and to avoid bringing up messages that do not resonate. It doesn’t mean telling the electorate something they’ll like with the full knowledge that you have zero intention of delivering on it.
It means that campaigners need to think about their candidate’s image. It doesn’t mean that campaigners need to think only of their candidate’s image.
If the electorate doesn’t care about an issue, it means you don’t bother bringing it up. If the electorate does care about an issue, you tell them what you’re going to do about it. The fact that they probably subconsciously care more about the timbre of the candidate’s voice doesn’t mean the candidate gets to lie about the issues..
In a sick, weird way, I’m somehow attracted to the idea of a “Gruber for President” ticket. Yes, the air will stink, but at least you could readily identify the source with absolutely no ambiguity. Now, who to suggest as his running mate?
Gruber is right in that far too many American voters vote stupidly – with insufficient information and little or no principled thinking. I think voting should be made more difficult, not more convenient. Voter ID is a start. But I think every American should have to pass the American citizenship test every 10 years or so in order to get to vote for anything higher than dogcatcher.
My thoughts exactly EJ , I’m filled with despair. It seems we are atop Masada and surrounded by the forces arrayed against us. We need a free press and an articulate opposition party , unfortunately we have neither .
I disagree that “low information” equates to stupid. Unlike us here on Ricochet, I think most Americans think that the dramas of their everyday lives are more urgent, if not more important, than political study and awareness. That is not stupidity and it is not wrong. It just is. Low information voters frustrate those of us who keep up with and study the issues.
We understand and believe in the importance of it. But I would be hard pressed to criticize the hardworking man or woman who is trying to figure out how to handle aging parents, rebellious teenagers or any of the myriad other life problems that are more urgent to them than rates of GDP growth.
I agree with this statement. I wager that Gruber does not.
I don’t know… I’m coming around to a different view after hearing Dr. Larry Arn speak last night. I’m not sure I can blame the people anymore.
No one is informed enough to vote as we often do on public policy issues or to choose a candidate based on his public policy prescriptions. It’s a conceit of us political junkies to believe otherwise. We all suffer a deficit of information.
That’s because government, at all levels, but particularly the federal level, is too damn big and complex. It’s trying to do orders of magnitude more than our “limited” government is authorized or even able to do.
At this point, it isn’t so much a matter of informing voters on the particulars. A familiarity with a broad survey of general principles would probably be enough. We can appeal to people’s intuitive understanding of nature and Nature’s God. As Dr. Arn said (roughly), “If we don’t have an agreed upon external standard, we’ll have a man-made standard, which happens to benefit the people in power rather than the public good.”
Dr. Arn recommended that our immediate concern might be best addressed by a “sun-setting” of all these damnable regulatory agencies by defunding any agency operating on a budget of $100 million or more which isn’t re-approved by Congress within a 90 day window. Apparently Paul Ryan had something like this in the works.
We’ve got to demonstrate to the people that their lives and liberty are enhanced by smaller government.
The two concepts are not identical, but neither are they mutually exclusive.
There is certainly such a thing as rational ignorance. But there is also just plain ignorance – and we don’t lack for that among voters in general elections in the US. There are also people who are well-informed but nonetheless very stupid (these are sometimes the most dangerous voters of all).
Just because some low-information voters have good reason to be so doesn’t mean we don’t have an excess of genuinely stupid voters.
Let me add that I agree that in an ideal world, most citizens would not need to spend any significant portion of their lives worrying about public policy. This is one attraction of having a government whose scope and powers are limited (especially at the opaque federal level).
The voters I consider problematic are the ones who intuitively want the government to fix their problems, yet spend their time watching Dancing with the Stars instead of trying to figure out which leaders will best do their bidding. If voters want someone else to take care of their difficulties, they need to put in the homework choosing that person.
We have ignorant voters (who are otherwise benign) and then we have stupid voters. The stupid voters are the ones who are unteachable. IOW, people who voted for Obama the second time.
“Stupid” isn’t my favorite descriptor, though. These are people for whom the gesture of voting for the first black president (and all around good guy who only wants what’s best for America) overcomes the reality of his epic failure to accomplish good things for America. It’s vanity all the way down.
In 2008 they voted for the first black president. In 2012 they voted to prevent the first Mormon president. IMHO, of course.
Obama’s coalition included
Blacks are significantly overrepresented (with respect to their percentage of the population) in the Federal workforce, and the same is true in many cities and states. Historically, government employment has been the path for various groups over the years, but historically government jobs traded security for top pay. That is no longer the case. Control of the civil service is of tremendous economic and political value. So for those voters, Obama was an obvious choice if they voted their own interests. To the extent people on welfare voted, again Obama was an obvious choice. Anyone with an appropriate business (Solyndra, anyone?) or an idea for one who saw the Chicago flavor of Obama’s team was justified in thinking that cronyism and leftist rent-seeking would be the name of the game was right, and voted their self-interest. So did anyone working for companies likely to do well in the new climate.
There were true low information voters, a small but pivotal percentage. Among them were union members who didn’t see the extent to which SEIU and AFSCME would be going against the interests of other labor sectors. The low information was due to deliberate deception by a media establishment that was reverting to partisan yellow journalism while wearing the mantle of being objective professionals.
How do we put the words of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on the lips of black America? We go back a generation and stop the Leftist long march into academia and two generations to stop the final Progressive consolidation of control over the education schools, and rein in affirmative action.
Actually, the Republican success in the midterm elections is what put Obama on the road to his illegal amnesty declaration. It made it imperative to import a new group of voters that would arrive to find its entry into welfare client status was being eased (administratively, regardless of what the law said and Congress could accomplish before the tipping point arrived) in time to get them on the voter rolls for the next Presidential election.
However lousy things get here, however crappy medical care becomes, it’ll still be better than what a poor family from Honduras or Chiapas could expect at home. For them, it’s a rational decision to risk heading north.
And if they’re fleeing the cartels? The multifactorial destruction of the working class is feeding the demand for meth, since the cartels can bring it in cheaper than cooking it here.
The real fight is over border security and immigration control, and many “conservatives” are on the wrong side of that one. That’s the first place to put our energy.
I think I agree most with Cato Rand. The problem is not educating voters, it is figuring out how to motivate voters to want to become educated about the issues. The problem is that voters seem to want to get educated only during times of crisis.
I don’t agree.
There’s a difference between “low information voter” ignorance (including rational ignorance) and stupidity.
Democrats think the electorate is too stupid to be trusted with the facts.
Republicans think the electorate is ignorant (mostly because the media is biased).
(slightly modified comment from http://ricochet.com/accidental-transparency-or-nemesis-exacts-her-retribution-on-jonathan-gruber-again/comment-page-2/#comment-2687761 )
Not only that, many political campaigners are pleased that the electorate is so stupid, as they believe it makes their work easier. They encourage ignorance and stupidity by propagating misinformation.
If Gruber believed that the stupidity of the American electorate (as he described it) was a “bad thing”, then he wouldn’t have acted to increase that stupidity by promoting information that was not true.
Instead, he believed that increasing the stupidity of the American electorate is a “good” thing as long as the stupidity is channeled and exploited in service of creating “good” laws.
Is this talk available somewhere?
Preferably, as a podcast? (One can dream, right?)
The very best take on this issue appeared yesterday on Megan McArdles’ blog:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-19/grubergates-insider-problem
Government has become too complicated for ordinary citizens to comprehend, and the journalist professionals who are supposed to interpret legislation so big that its printed form requires a wheelbarrow to move down the hall have completely abused their positions.
What have I done? Well, I have politely informed and explained and opined on various aspects of Obama to many of my friends – always concluding with a statement along the lines of “this is how you will know whether I am right or wrong: I tell them how it will turn out” . And in every case even I am surprised that my prediction was insufficiently horrible. I live in the SF Bay Area – where the “tolerant” are not very tolerant – except for their tolerance of head choppers and public defecators, so this conduct has cost me two friends. Not facebook friends, real friends of long term standing. Including one professor who I carried up 3 flights of stairs into his home after his knee surgery – because, you know, liberals can’t actually do something like that. (Sometimes only a real, strong, man, who does what he says he will do will work out for you.)I wonder what they think now- this amnesty will drive them nuts. I suspect they will think my prescience is merely blind luck of the racist.
I have also repeatedly written my legislators, though that is futile and not recommended. They literally don’t even respond – not even a pro forma “Your input is very important to me”
Last night I was reading The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Adam Smith was advising that politics is not life, and advising that approbation and disapprobation be applied to enforce moral behavior on others. It is imperfect, he concedes. But lets all be scrupulous in how we apply it to journalists. On an encouraging note, it appears that voters have wised up some.
But your argument doesn’t end there.
There are currently a number of various media outlets available to all Americans – indeed, everyone with cable has easy access to Fox News 24/7.
People have a free choice between more-biased media sources and less-biased ones. Is not their choice of media consumption a reflection of their “stupidity” (or to be more charitable, call it “very poor decision-making”)?
If the media is making the public ignorant, then the public is willfully choosing to remain ignorant by making bad media choices. I call that stupidity.
I’m not sure at what threshold willful ignorance crosses over into stupidity, but I think you have a point.
However, I doubt most ignorant people realize how biased the media is.
As you probably know, Walter Cronkite in the 1960s was seen as an unbiased and credible journalist by many, which is what apparently made his criticisms of the Vietnam war so persuasive (although part of me wonders if that is overblown, not having studied much on this bit of conventional wisdom). The tradition continues today.
If I remember correctly, the morning/nightly news on ABC/CBS/NBC reaches far more people than cable news. Those are the “unbiased” news sources that ignorant people think are trustworthy because they don’t know any better.
And it seems younger tv viewers trust comedy shows like The Daily Show, or The Colbert Show for their news (behold).
I doubt most who accept the liberal ideas they are bombarded with (liberal by default) realize there is another valid viewpoint since they are trapped in “the bubble”. And why would a the average joe “decent” person be interested in watching a channel full of “Sexist” “Intolerant” “Homophobic” “Racist” “Bigoted” (h/t to Dennis Prager for SIXHRB) “anti-science” “evil” “liars” and “idiots” anyway?
p.s. On the occasions when I have watched Fox News on cable (which is a shrinking market from what it once was), I have not been impressed. They do have some good stuff on there, but they also have their share of tabloid news.
You also have the problem that your average Congressman doesn’t understand what they’re voting on either. Half of them couldn’t spell cat if you spotted them a “C” and a “T”.
How much of what gets passed is written by elective office holders as opposed to lawyers, interest groups and staff?
Agreed.
They need to simplify so they don’t get 1,000+ page omnibus spending bills that they have to vote on without reading them.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/12/rand-paul-introduced-three-bills-last-week-that-would-dramatically-change-the-way-congress-passes-laws/
I agree with EJHill, and he agrees with me: Posting on Ricochet, writing a blog (and I do both things) will probably have, in the long run, an incredibly small effect. It won’t move the needle much, in other words.
It’s satisfying, yes. But those hours spent writing might be better spent volunteering for a local school board candidate, a state representative that you trust and spend time mailing letters for, etc.
What really needs to happen are spending reductions at local, state, and federal levels. When all is said and done, gov’t is what it spends money on, just like a company – you know what they’re interested in by what they spend money on. For the federal govt, it’s entitlements (under a big umbrella here), which are by far the biggest chunk of spending.
That’s all you need to know. And while some level of entitlement spending is needed and desired, having 50 million people on food stamps cannot be a desired outcome. It cannot be. It’s only an outcome because those in govt who seek out and want to hold onto power are spending those dollars on that entitlement because it gains them something.
Those are the idiots that we need to beat from the fort.
I was just today reading about Samuel Gompers, who as an immigrant, teenage cigar-maker, with his peers attended free classes at NYC’s Cooper Union. Subjects included economics, elocution, history, biography, electricity, mathematics, astronomy (this was in the 1860s).
At 3500 Lancaster Ave. in the University City area of Philadelphia, a few blocks from the Univ. of Pennsylvania and adjacent to Drexel Univ., is the Community Education Center.
I have been on that block several time a week for the past 14 years. So far as I can tell, what they teach is African drumming. (The yellow banner announces the 2014 African Arts Summer Academy.).
Remember how Bill Ayers and Barack Hussein Obama spent $150,000,000 of the Chicago Annenberg Project’s money on just that sort of racial-cultural identity stuff to no discernible benefit to the schools they were supposed to be helping? Franco had one “Fifth Column”. The Liberal Fascists in America have many many fifth columns.
Another example would be to compare the offerings of the public libraries when they were first built by Andrew Carnegie with the offerings at public libraries today.