It's Not Just Ignorant Voters

It was an interesting coincidence that the day I finished reading a new book a publisher had sent me gratis, I picked up this week’s copy of USNWR and found an article summarizing that book’s argument with an interview from the author. (See here) Such serendipity demands affirmation, and so I comment.

I found Mr. Shenkman’s book engaging, quite succinct and convincing in its general parameters. He documents well the failures of our society reflected in the public’s selected awareness of politics. These include the failures of an educational system to teach, and students to learn, fundamental civics and how our republic functions. One must assume this also includes the history of our civic institutions and a wide range of current events beyond Lindsey and Britney.

A second factor he cites is the role of the media in all this – both print media and television. We may be able to correct the educational deficiencies, but we’ll have to learn how best to manage the effects of media technology and entertainment because it’s not going back in Pandora’s box. Media is entertainment is drama is simple conflict. If news people want to be taken for something of greater consequence they must learn to distinguish between reporting the facts and interpreting events. The first is reportage, the second is commentary.

However, I do believe Mr. Shenkman’s story then begins to veer into murkier waters. First off, his example of the public’s knowledge of the Iraq war as a sign of stupidity is fatuous. I daresay none of us know very well what is going on in the Middle East beyond what we see on TV and read in the headline news. Our foreign policy is run by a small cadre of Washington elites that include the Department of State, the DoD, the military corps, and the presidency and cabinet, with oversight by both houses of Congress. Even well educated political professionals must evaluate this information against their pre-ordained mental frameworks.

What Mr. Shenkman attributes to stupidity on WMDs is in fact a loss of confidence and trust in the media and the political establishment. Because both parties have politicized Iraq, the public has decided to believe what confirms prior beliefs and disbelieve whatever contradicts those priors. So, anti-war groups refuse to believe reports from General Petraeus or the administration and hawks refuse to give credence to reports from the NY Times, Washington Democrats or the Iraq Survey Group. This loss of trust is not stupidity; for the average voter it’s a lesson well learned.

Mr. Shenkman should be castigating a news media that has politicized reporting and misinformed to the point where everybody chooses to believe whatever they want. The tarnished reputation of the NY Times is the most serious casualty here. Next, Mr. Shenkman should train his sights on the educational establishment that has elevated political correctness over truth and self-criticism. We have let ourselves become defined by our racial, ethnic and sexual identities and this has poisoned our politics. The major political parties have been front and center on this and the Democrats can shoulder much of the blame for stitching together a coalition based on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. This has yielded the red vs. blue subculture nonsense that now defines our politics. If we vote our immutable identities, how can we possibly compromise?

There is no indication in the current election cycle that voters are ready to discard this self-defeating calculus. In fact, Democratic primary voters divided themselves up, with the eager prompting of both Clinton and Obama, into camps of red v. blue conflict with nary a Republican operative in sight. It was working class whites, women and Hispanics against blacks, academic and urban elites. In this sense, we voters are stupid to allow our identities to cast our votes. This is the change we should demand of ourselves, but one that neither Obama nor McCain can deliver.

My last quibble is with Mr. Shenkman’s idea that to correct our politics we must strengthen labor unions. Huh? In an information economy that is becoming highly entrepreneurial and fluid, it makes absolutely no sense to focus on peak labor organizations. I can only think this is nostalgia for a New Deal past talking. Both manufacturing’s share of national employment and union participation rates are approaching the low teens as a percentage of the labor force. Why should we focus our national attention on such a rapidly shrinking share of the population?

Unions have a positive role, but in developed countries this role should be focused on securing equity participation for its members, not restricting the supply of labor to increase bargaining power. Let organization membership drives and the empowerment of labor versus capital migrate to developing countries, but foreign worker unionization can hardly be a high priority for smart American voters.

I found it unfortunate that Mr. Shenkman’s argument is a bit tainted by a left liberal bias because it will diminish serious consideration by those who disagree. This does not mean I believe Mr. Shenkman is a rank partisan or that he is trying to slip a liberal screed by us. I take Mr. Shenkman at his word concerning objective intent, but we should recognize that those of us who live in professional, academic and urban enclaves tend to view the world through a narrow self-referential prism. Toleration, diversity, negotiation, privacy, civil rights, government regulation, etc. all appear inherent to our chosen lifestyle preferences and we view those ideals as the American norm. Thus, they appear eminently reasonable and centrist, certainly not biased. With this mindset liberals appear mainstream, conservatives appear out-of-sync, and the NY Times appears as the epitome of right reason.

However, US electoral politics have been divided up according to rural, suburban and urban interests and the parties have targeted their appeals to these different segments. I would recommend a book by Bill Bishop titled The Big Sort that explains how this political geography has happened. It is important for any serious student of American politics to understand the grassroots details of American voting patterns and the complexion of political tradition and not rely on the NY Times or Fox News to interpret it.

Instead of liberal-conservative, Democrat-Republican, red-blue, I prefer to classify the dominant political ideology in America as what I would call “tolerant traditionalism.” It’s a less charged conceptualization that captures the vast crossover territory between the two extremes and thus becomes more useful to understanding our varied political preferences.

Another caveat is that opinion polls and sampling never reveal a truth as accurate as what people do, rather than say. Voting is hard data, polling is soft data; when they disagree the hard data wins.