News flash: Rich white guy doesn’t want you to vote

“I will do many things for my country, but I will not pretend that the careers of, say, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt involve serious philosophical differences.” —George Will, Statecraft is Soulcraft, 1983

Arich white guy took objection to my column last week in which I suggested the vulnerable had better vote in self-defense because American elites could no longer (if they ever could) be depended upon to behave decently.

He writes, “To suggest/urge everyone to vote even though there are so many who know little or nothing of what’s going on and really couldn’t care less is ludicrous. To have those types selecting our leaders is worse than not voting.”

Maybe you folks reading this column should take that personally. Because you’re the audience I was addressing. Which I guess makes you “those types.”

Or, to be fair, probably not. Rich white guy isn’t really talking about you. He’s talking about the types who don’t read the newspaper or pay much attention to the news. He had a hot take about the unwashed he just wanted to get out. In his hurry to make me feel bad about myself, he just didn’t think it through.

Because if he had, he’d have realized that people who spend Sunday mornings reading a column in the Perspective section of a daily newspaper are an elite class. Most of them aren’t as rich as he is, most of them don’t have plaque-studded walls and race horses, but he’d probably allow that they’re pretty high up in the intellectual hierarchy. Because most people don’t read much of anything.

Which poses an existential problem for our industry and our civic infrastructure, which is crumbling in part because we no longer expect people to do anything hard. For a variety of reasons having largely to do with the ubiquity of electronic and digital entertainment, a lot of us have become intellectually lazy and willfully ignorant.

I’m guessing those intellectually lazy and willfully ignorant people (who conveniently will never see this column) are the ones the rich guy thinks shouldn’t vote.

And what I said in my last column was that I used to think that not voting was a viable option for a lot of Americans because of certain constitutional protections and the basic decency of our kind. We’re a big diverse country, and since most of us belong to some sort of minority—ethnic or religious or philosophical—protecting the rights of the minority ought to be a first principle for Americans.

But there is the world of theory and the world of practice, and given what we’ve seen in recent years, I’ve changed my mind.

We have to vote in selfdefense. Because too few of our elected representatives worry about representing the interests of anyone other than rich white guys who think most people shouldn’t bother engaging the democratic process.

The email I got from the rich white guy proves my point.

Not that I’m saying he’s not decent. He probably is. He’s just like a lot of people when they write emails—they say things they wouldn’t say in person, that they wouldn’t have said if they’d thought about it more.

But he’s right when he observes there are people who don’t know what’s going on. Not by design, but because our system has failed in a fundamental way. There are people who feel they can’t make any difference, and some of them base this feeling on experience. We don’t do a good job of talking about how things really are in this country. We pretend labels such as “conservative” and “liberal” mean something serious when all they do is identify sides. Most Republicans aren’t conservative any more; fewer Democrats are genuinely liberal.

It’s self-serving for a newspaper columnist to say all cable news is infotainment, but that’s what I believe. While it’s probably OK as recreation, serious people shouldn’t pay it much attention. That plenty of serious people do is partly the fault of newspapers.

Newspapers make a big mistake when they try to appeal to non-readers at the expense of serving those who are invested in their product. One of the places we went off the rails was when USA Today tried to replicate the TV news experience in print. A lot of newspapers started running shorter, less detailed items for modern people on the go who didn’t have time to spend six minutes with a story. More pictures, more color, more flash, more jiggle.

Which is a mistake. Because people who like newspapers are people who like to read. Maybe that’s a relatively small audience, but it is a sustainable one that newspapers should be aware of and cater to. Nothing wrong with liveliness, with presenting important information in a straightforward, direct manner, but take the time to explain things. Newspapers should be willing to delve into nuance.

Which was one of the reasons George Will is such an influence on me—when I started columnizing one of my key texts was his 1983 book Statecraft is Soulcraft. I agree with its central tenet: “Government cannot be neutral on major moral issues and shouldn’t try … Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, much legislation is moral legislation because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres of life.”

One of the other ideas expressed in that slim book with which I agree is that the basic political right is to good government, not self-government. And the best way we’ve discovered to achieve this involves democracy.

Will writes that the aim of politics is “a warm citizenship, approximating friendship, based on a sense of shared values and a shared fate.” While politics should be only the tool through which we achieve these means, I would not cede it to the likes of rich white guys.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll take his suggestion and write about my dogs.