In condemnation of ‘dumb democracy’
The propensity for voters, in the U.S. but also Canada, to make ballot box decisions on the most trivial of criteria can turn those societies in a direction they really don’t want to go, argues former Canadian diplomat-turned-academic Kimon Valaskakis.
The rise of Sarah Palin has been fuelled by her engaging smile and her appeal as a “hockey mom.” Despite the constant mocking by the U.S. media deploring her lack of preparedness for high office, she appeals to the average voter, or “Joe Six-Pack American,” as she calls him. In the U.S., average voters seem to want an average vice-president or even president to represent them. University professors are looked down on when aspiring for high political office, while celebrities, actors, sports stars and even former professional wrestlers get the nod.
Although this anti-intellectual bias is less predominant in Canada, both American and Canadian voters are very vulnerable to mediatic factors such as body language, winking at the audience, ability to tell jokes and being folksy and cute. This media-enhanced trivialization started in the first television debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and it’s been said that JFK won the televised debate because of Mr. Nixon’s sweaty face while Mr. Nixon won the radio debate because of his arguments. Today, the spin doctors and image makers try to appeal to the lowest common denominator. We are very far from Plato’s philosopher king. …
The outcome of the U.S. election affects the whole world, not just in economic terms but in issues of life and death. How many people have died around the world because of Mr. Bush’s decisions? The privilege of empire must carry with it a greater sense of responsibility. The U.S. voter from the Midwest or Deep South must realize his or her decision has global implications and act accordingly.
So what can we conclude? Governance is much too serious a challenge in an interdependent world to be left to superficial criteria. Would you entrust your future to a person who doesn’t answer your questions but just winks at you? Would you fly with an untrained pilot just because he reminds you of yourself ? Would you undergo an operation by an unqualified surgeon because he is charismatic?
A condition of intelligent democracy is intelligent and well-informed voters. It is the task of the media to inform the voters, but it also the task of the voters to take elections more seriously. Voting is a right, but it is also a privilege that must be used wisely because, when all is said and done, “dumb democracy” is the fastest road to totalitarianism.
This posting from earlier today — ‘Why feed the garbage machine?’ — offers some evidence that the media might be part of the problem. You can’t cast a vote on substantial grounds if you can’t get substantial information on the major issues.
Maclean’s national editor Andrew Coyne addressed the issue last month in a column headlined How journalists get in the way of the election.
The NYT’s David Brooks had an interesting column last week on the U.S. Republican Party’s continuing slide into anti-intellectualism:
… Over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.
What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans developed their own leadership style. If Democratic leaders prized deliberation and self-examination, then Republicans would govern from the gut.
And of course, what column on this topic would be complete without a mention of the hockey mom?
(Alaska Gov. and Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah) Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.
She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.