Democracy needs … less

Critics will say today’s offering is anti-democratic. I think it’s anti-destructive. Y’all decide, or at least think about it if you have the inclination. And, if you don’t, that’s all right, too. We’re all about easycome, easy-go. Indifference is the word of the day.

Occasionally you hear someone propound the noble and time-honored theory that what our democracy requires is an informed electorate believing strongly in our democratic system.

A new higher-academia study released last month suggests a different precept. It is counterintuitive to nobility—and to civics class—but perhaps right if only for our perilous time.

It’s that, at least for the troubled moment, we need more people burdened less with political information. We need a few more people possessed of a vague indifference to politics. Or at least we need fewer people who think they know a lot about politics and who apply the arrogance of their ignorance to strident disruption.

Here’s what was reported in The Washington Post: Two professors, one from the University of Massachusetts and the other from the University of Michigan, dived into data from a Harvard study of voter attitudes in 2020. They presented a seven-point questionnaire to a sample of participants. What they found was that those professing a high confidence in their knowledge of politics tended to despise anyone disagreeing and couldn’t possibly see themselves voting for or working with a differing political thinker. Those thinking they didn’t have a high knowledge of politics seemed more willing for the politicians of the different sides to work things out constructively.

All participants were presented with a scenario in which a business executive was considering candidates for an internship. He made his choice based on his bias against one kind of political identifier and for another. The participants who said they didn’t think they were particularly knowledgeable took offense at basing a business internship on politically partisan criterion. Those believing themselves to be highly informed politically were five times greater than the low-knowledge recipients to support political discrimination in business hiring.

Well, sure, you say. You ask: What’s your point?

It’s that a person should not be discriminated against in the workplace for his political views. There was a time when that was the universal moral truth—the fair and just answer. The study suggests we could more readily get back to moral, fair and just if people had less contemporary political information in their heads.

But doesn’t democracy inherently mean informed people making informed decisions? Well, say these academicians, that depends on what you want democracy to do and be.

Do you want it to be a free-for-all in which people emotionally apply the passions of their biases drawn from plenty of information, though much of it often intentionally partisan in the modern information culture? Or do we want democracy to function as a thoughtful reflection of majority rule with fair consideration given to minority views, occasionally applying give-and-take to produce workable if imperfect solutions in a complex time?

Democracy can’t work if the democrats, small “d,” don’t want it to work—unless, that is, one side becomes such an overwhelming democratic majority that it is no longer democratic but despotic.

Naturally, the underlying problem is bad information shared with modern speed and ubiquity through algorithms that spew versions rather than facts to targeted audiences known to want versions they preconceive as facts.

That’s the real artificial intelligence.

A lot of people who identified in this study as highly knowledgeable politically may not in fact be highly knowledgeable. They may be vigorously and closed-mindedly misinformed.

But calling them stupid is not the democratic answer. That’s certainly not the path to indifference.

I’m referring to both sides, of course. Right-wing insurrectionists believing themselves to be highly informed politically are wrong about that, and destructive. Left-wingers believing themselves highly informed politically who insist Donald Trump was calling for violence when he predicted an automotive industry bloodbath are only a little less wrong in that they didn’t invade the U.S. Capitol to try to stop a constitutional process.

Surely Trump says enough outrageous and ominous things for real without anyone having to exaggerate.

This study suggests that American democracy needs, if only temporarily, some extremists grown bored and obsessed with something new. It needs folks like my parents and their friends back in the day who sat around saying politics was such a dirty mess they wanted nothing to do with it. It could use a few professed evangelical Christians converting from Trump-like back to Christ-like, reading the Beatitudes instead of the dark Web.

American politics needs a break.