On another site, I came across this post in response to a scathing article by Glenn Greenwald (on Salon) pointing out how the media covers up the destruction of our constitution by people like John Yoo in favor of endless reporting of trivia like Obama's bowling scores. The media hacks he singled out made a defense that amounted to little more than derision at the mob who dare criticism them for doing their jobs. Here's a response on Megan McCardle's site that cuts right to the heart of the battle we face in America today. The battle between those who care about Democracy and those who flat don't understand it.
I have to agree with McArdle and Dresner on this one. Greenwald apparently has little idea of what the average American is like. Are there some nerds and wonks who think that Yoo's torture memos are fascinating stuff? Sure. But there’s twenty times as many people who don’t care about details, and just want to have some sort of idea who the major candidate are. That's as much effort as they're willing to give: a few minutes to decide who to vote for next time. And there's probably an equal number that don't care, at all, about any of it.
She continues:
I have great sympathy for this latter group. To my mind, one of the most offensive things about democracy, is that it requires you to have opinions about all sorts of things. Well, I may not be interested in democracy, but democracy is certainly interested in me. So I keep up, to some extent. But I still don’t want to have to.
Greenwald, and many other of the world’s goodthinkers, invert this reasoning. To them, the goodness and desirability of democracy is a given. Since we should all care about how we are governed, and we do and must have the power of voting that affects it, we should all be interested in informing ourselves about everything the government does.
But yet... we are not interested. Normal people can do simple cost/benefit analysis. They realize that their one vote, their one voice, has near zero effect on the system. They spend a commensurate amount of time informing themselves about it: nearly zero. Hence many of the great problems with democratic government: the people remain rationally ignorant and the politicians and bureaucrats do what they will.
There's no reason to criticize this individual because there are tens of millions just like her, who aggressively DON'T WANT TO KNOW and are unhappy with anybody who wants to push unpleasant information in their faces.
This is the true battle we face, not with Conservative politicians, generals and lobbyists who force self-serving and disastrous policies on America and the world, but with those Americans who fundamentally don't understand or like Democracy -- and instinctively lash out, not against Bush for his abuses of democracy, but against those who would make them uncomfortable by pointing out that the emperor has no cloths. They are, in the words of Daniel Drezniel "simplistic and Jacobian," ignorant, "disgusting," "bizarre, even lunatic" and "the kind of frenzied conspiracy-theorizing. . .generally associated with Ron Paul's more wild-eyed supporters."
And yet our ancestors during the Revolution faced this exact problem, how to motivate the mass of ordinary people who just want to be left alone and don't want to focus on the crimes of the government.
Of course in the 1770's people didn't have mindless distractions like "reality" game shows and other popular entertainment, so getting their attention to things like the increased taxes they were paying to pay off the costs of Britain's imperial wars against France was probably a lot easier.
The question is how we reach the millions of people who just assume that no matter what happens with government and how many of our freedoms are taken away that it flat doesn't affect them -- unless the Nieman Marcuses are closed down I suppose.
We take for granted that everybody understands that democracy is something fragile that has to be nourished and that for their own convenience government will always seek to destroy those freedoms. The belief in the importance of democracy and democratic institutions and legal norms used to be something that all Americans took as their heritage, even though millions never wanted to put it into practice when faced with official enemies like communists.
This is fundamental. Conservatives have proselytized for their positions on government and freedom for decades, and now those ideas are reflected everywhere in society and government. We have to do similar work and establish institutions that fight back and take nothing for granted.
We to often take for granted that the American people actually believe in Democracy -- or else despair that they do not.
But, it's really a battle of ideas forcefully put forward, relentlessly, day after day, until even the head-in-the-sand people like this poster are dragged kicking and screaming into the light.
We did this with race relations in America, until today it is NOT OK in conventional society to mock black people and indulge in vulgar racism or racial stereotypes. Americans didn't want to face up to the ugly reality of institutionalized racism, thus the hardships of the civil rights movement. We didn't want to face the reality of the horrors and genocide of the Vietnam war, thus the road-blocks faced by the anti-war movement. These problems continue today.
But with regard to the more fundamental assault of the Bush administration on the central norms of democratic governance, such as the right NOT to be arrested and held indefinitely without trial in some secret prison, the right NOT to have your private email and telephone conversations tapped, just in case some computer program somewhere might decide that you're a terrorist suspect, the right NOT to have the government drag the nation into an unjust war of aggression based on lies, and keep us there based on lies, we have to do something more fundamental.
We have to have a campaign to convince the American people "why Democracy is important and why your participation is important." A kind of national civics lecture on an ongoing basis seems in order.
Ideas?