Book Review / Justin Rogers-Cooper
Democracy's Demons
Inside the Mind of the American Voter
The Myth of the Rational Voter by Bryan Caplan (2008)
Just How Stupid Are We? by Rick Shenkman (2008)
Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State by Andrew Gelman (2008)
Recent stories of America’s relatively abrupt fall from “exceptionalism” typically trace the corruption and incompetence of the executive branch. Much of this commentary focuses on the abuse of executive power during the administration of George W. Bush. The majority of it has come from journalists, pundits, or insiders near the White House (think Richard Clarke, Bob Woodward, or Frank Rich). In their narratives, the nation’s problems came from a relatively small group of political appointees that grossly abused the power locked into unelected positions of government: Donald Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales, and so on. By this point, we’re probably too familiar with the awesome corruption, decadence, and ethical decay exposed within the military/industrial complex–the CIA, the NSA, the EPA, the Interior and Justice departments, the Pentagon, and so on.
This general mindset has been described as a warped institution of policies inaugurated during the Ronald Reagan years. Reagan’s quip about “government being the problem” seemed to address the perceived failures of the Great Society programs and gave political cover for neo-liberal deregulation and free market ideology. While channeling Reagan’s rhetoric of small government, Bush used the one-party Congress to cut taxes to large corporations, legalize torture, and cow a compliant judiciary branch to re-write the Constitution. In July, a federal court ruled that Ali al-Marri’s status as an “enemy combatant” was legal; the same ruling allows for the indefinite detention of any American citizen. With no checks and balances until 2006, the zero regulation of government, banks, and Wall Street sunk the nation into recession, criminality, insolvency, and panic. Enter Barack Obama and the Age of Redemption. Right?
Not so fast. In the past year, several contemporary historians, economists, and sociologists have begun searching for other explanations about the Bush years. How did Bush and his cronies get into power, anyway? Who put them there—and why? They examine the role played by American citizens in maintaining the health of their own democratic institutions. These books follow the general thrust of Thomas Frank’s widely read critique of red state America following Bush’s re-election in 2004,What’s the Matter with Kansas? Instead of limiting their focus to the seeming contradiction between red state cultural and economic interests, they ask much broader questions about the role of culture, information, religion, passion, emotion, and education for voters in the United States. These questions rightfully strike at the very heart of participatory politics and government by the people and they don’t begin or end with Bush. The biggest problem, these authors contend, is not lackluster voter turnout for midterm elections. Nor is it about the apathy or ignorance of those that sit out elections entirely. What keeps these writers awake at night are the people that do vote.
If you want to understand the problem with democracy, they argue, you’ve got to start with how voters make decisions. In The Myth of the Rational Voter, George Mason University economics professor Bryan Caplan echoes Thomas Franks” central question: why do people vote against their economic interests? For Caplan, however, this question pertains to those voters who vote for protectionist trade policies. They don’t do this because they are ignorant. They’re “irrational.” They process information emotionally. They “tune out” information that upsets their beliefs. If democracy fails, it’s because it does what voters want. In short, voters want to feel good about voting. Their choices are irrational, and therefore democracy cannot behave rationally. This is his main argument against those folks who think democracy could be better if people were more educated. On this point, he seems to score.
You might contest that voters aren’t “disturbingly ignorant” or that the past few years are a “fragile, temporary condition,” but Caplan’s got numbers, facts, and studies to back him up. Some of these figures are from classic studies, and also appear in similar literature. In Just How Stupid Are We? for instance, another George Mason academic, historian Rick Shenkman, catalogues several of the same studies: Only 20 percent of U.S. citizens have passports; half of Americans don’t know how many senators each state has; half can’t name their congressman; only 40 percent can name all three branches of government; only 34 percent know that congress declares war; and 49 percent believe the president can suspend the constitution.
During the McCarthy hearings in 1952, only 19 percent of the population knew what the Foreign Service did. In 1986, only 30 percent of the population knew Roe v. Wade had to do with abortion. It goes on.
The effect of all this information could mean a few things. First, it appears that a majority of citizens have been ignorant of political events and the political process for a long time. Second, this knowledge implies that the education system is seriously flawed. Or, finally, it may be that people do, in fact, choose to vote based on emotions rather than reason. Since Caplan is an economist, he cares most of all about voters” ignorance of economics. If they could purge their basic biases about economic behavior, the political process would work better. This would happen because politicians could finally start implementing policies they know work for the long term, instead of trying to satisfy voter feelings about, say, jobs going overseas.
Voter sensitivity to protecting jobs is what Caplan calls antimarket bias. He also faults antiforeign bias (the public is scared of foreigners), make-work bias (the public believes more people working is good), and pessimistic bias (the public believes the economy is worse than it is). Antimarket bias is a core part of his critique and philosophy, though. At the end of his book, Caplan returns to it as he proposes that free-market economics be taught in schools. “People do not understand the “invisible hand” of the market, its ability to harmonize private greed and the public interest,” he writes. He believes the public doubts the ability for “profit-seeking business” to generate positive social effects. “They focus on the motives of business,” he writes, “and neglect the discipline imposed by competition.” Instead, voters should understand the benefits of comparative advantage, the danger of price controls, and the “long-run” benefits of labor-saving innovation. Indeed, Caplan prefers voters understand that jobs go overseas because “there are more remunerative ways to use domestic labor.” He doesn’t specify them, unfortunately.
It’s almost too easy to point toward the current economic crisis as a response to Caplan’s own “pro-market bias.” First, his old reference to the “invisible hand” refers to competition and greed among individuals. It does not refer to the combined, abstracted greed that powers a hundred-billion dollar company like, say, AIG or Lehman Brothers. Imagine that one of the figures the invisible hand tries to regulate is a single-income, black-female household in Cleveland. The other figure is a gigantic insurance company with thousands of employees all coordinating their activities to exercise the most exacting, overly clever, and seemingly sophisticated set of policies ever imagined to produce wealth. The invisible hand can probably nudge the grandmother fairly easily with a sub-prime contract: follow your greed and get this house re-financed. But the same invisible hand would probably get its fingers broken trying to stop AIG. What Caplan doesn’t account for is that gigantic corporations, like monopolies or trusts, are not equal to an individual. They have more power, more authority, more choices, more information, and thus their unchecked greed can do more damage. It’s not proportional. So when he criticizes voters who elect representatives that can express their antimarket bias, he neglects considering the way it might “balance” the greed he finds so productive.
Caplan might remember, too, the decline of union power during the neo-liberal era. If laid off workers can no longer organize, isn’t it logical to assume they might elect protectionists to office during times of economic crisis? In other words, they’re choosing to be “irrational” economists because they’re actually rational workers and consumers. Just because the milk and toys can be made cheaper in China, that doesn’t mean the labor-saving “innovation” of cheap Chinese labor is preferable. The milk and toys could have been made safer in the United States. Furthermore, without a social safety net voters anxious about jobs will never quit worrying about their next paycheck. So it’s no use telling them to worry about the benefits of free trade years down the road. If economists want more free-trade, they might ironically find it works better in a socialist state with more unemployment benefits, education, and health-care. Higher taxes for these benefits might translate into less anxiety about free-trade.
Less anxiety over these benefits might also lessen another of Caplan’s worries. He believes that voters are irrationally afraid of foreigners because they take jobs here and abroad. He desires they instead consider that “total output increases” when different places in the world concentrate on what they do best. “Imagine how much time it would take to grow your own food?” he asks. He rapturously cites the “The Law of Comparative Advantage,” which “shows that mutually beneficial trade is possible in every way.” As an example, Caplan offers a scenario where Americans should make cars and Mexicans should make wheat. Specialization increases production if each country focuses on producing what it does well. So when American wheat jobs go to Mexico, that’s a good thing.
But voters, Caplan says, often see lost jobs, lost wages, and wasted public services (think of those who argue against allowing illegal immigrants access to hospitals). I would again refer Caplan to reconsider the negative value attached to higher taxes in a socialist state. It would be harder for voters to resent the possibility of homelessness, unemployment, and getting sick if they understood their job loss didn’t translate into losing their lives. It’s hard to reconcile free-trade and pro-market policies with lower taxes and cuts in “liberal” social programs: ironically, it seems necessary to have more socialism if one wants to have more free-trade. This seems true unless one desires a standing reserve of poor, desperate, under-employed, sick, poorly housed, and angry people waiting around for the next job boom. These folks might, however, be the ones angry enough to fight wars.
If we know anything about American history, it’s that the anger of humiliated people can turn ugly fast. There is a vague sense of this for Caplan. He ties antiforeign bias to sentiments about foreigners who “look like us” and those that don’t (note the “us”). He then cites 1980s surveys that show the United States preferred Canada and England to Japan during a period of anti-Japan hysteria, even when trade deficits with Canada and England were higher at the time.
In Just How Stupid Are We? Shenkman notes that voter stupidity and angry racism move together. Furthermore, politicians exploit it. “Bush’s assertion after the 9/11 attack that our enemies hated us because we are free was mindless,” Shenkman asserts, “but people believed it. His claim that oil had nothing to do with our invasion of Iraq was downright comical—but a majority of people believed it.” The public also believed in the link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. And the public that believed this attached their anger to human bodies, not abstract policies. Shenkman recalls that the first turning in public opinion against Bush happened because of the Dubai port “scandal,” when an American port would have been leased to an Arab government. People didn’t trust Arabs. People aren’t outraged by hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian causalities, either. In his recent endorsement of Obama, Colin Powell cited the infamous video of the woman at the McCain rally wondering if Obama was Arab. It was a dangerous signal from Caplan’s “us” more than four years after Abu Ghraib.
Both Shenkman and Caplan also agree that voters rely less on information and reason and more on passion and myth. “Like the adherents of traditional religion,” Caplan writes, “many people find comfort in their political worldview, and greet questions with pious hostility.” Shenkman traces the history of mass political participation with an eye toward these developments. When the “masses” got the vote in the 19th century, politicians had to dumb-down their tactics. They began using “fake imagery, slogans, songs, torchlight parades, and bombastic rhetoric.” Men were elected and came to power “on the back of a simplistic phrase designed to generate an emotional charge from the masses.” This is the connection between the real evangelicals who supported Bush and the “secular” evangelism of those who believe in Obama. Politics and religion trade on the fears of those that wish to be saved. Both Karl Rove and David Axelrod understand the need to create an emotional bond with people using a new public myth as a vehicle to power.
For Shenkman, the “limited capacity” of the general public has become so toxic because it has become a taboo subject. This limited capacity—this ignorance—might mean something different in light of Caplan’s thesis about how voters choose to be irrational. It suggests that the stupidity of racism might sometimes be indistinguishable from real stupidity. Shenkman believes the issue could be confronted by questioning the intelligence of the population. He suggests a sustained, popular critique of the entire sacred mythology surrounding the Constitution’s notion of “the people.” This critique is acceptable in private conservation, but not in public debate or in the media. It’s certainly not going to appear as a question in a debate, or in a post-debate wrap-up. The question about the people is always going to be: what do they think? But the question can never be: how intelligent are those that think it—and maybe even how racist? The fallacy of “our civic religion” is to treat all voters” opinions as equal. The reason the Constitution removes so much power from the people, Shenkman argues, is because the framers didn’t trust the people to make good decisions—they relied too much on their crazy emotions.
For Shenkman, the biggest myth broken in modern times was liberalism. The shocking right-wing rise of an evangelical Moral Majority and neo-liberal economic platform has angered liberals in the past three decades, and acutely so during the Bush term. What these movements displaced, however, was a progressive belief in a rights-based US society. Thus, the shock was about the conservative “reaction” to the Civil Rights Movement, “which laid bare the racist beliefs of thunderous majorities of white Southerners” (glancing at recent news reports, Ohio and Pennsylvania would have to count here as Southern, too). Furthermore, “one obvious factor in liberal decline was their embrace of the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movement.” In other words, a string of neo-conservative and neo-liberal governments replaced a couple decades of Civil Rights administrations that acknowledged—and tried to address—the grave historical “inequality” of slavery and its legacies. Instead, the neo-liberal, neo-con era decided to instead focus on how to maintain wealth at the individual level. Instead of introducing policies that might correct the genocidal facts of American race relations, government instead imagined a world of free individuals and perfect markets. In a sense, this ideology was an attempt to erase history.
The language of neoconservatism and neo-liberalism is fascinating because of what it does not assume. Caplan’s book on economics doesn’t have the word “race” in the index, which isn’t to say he’s at fault. By contrast, however, what Shenkman exposes here is that the pro-America and pro-patriot feelings of the Republican Party derive some of their power from different degrees of white racism and feelings of white superiority. Obama’s candidacy has forced journalists and citizens to rediscover this passionate emotion, founded on a myth of white America, that some felt was safely buried in the past. Lurking behind stories of Sean Bell, Rodney King, and Amadou Diallo, it has re-emerged hot and angry at McCain-Palin rallies. Nixon’s “silent majority” have found their voice again.
When pundits talk about the confusion of the Republican Party and the fracturing of its Reagan coalition among defense-hawks, the rich, and evangelicals, they should begin honestly assessing another crack among the white base: do they hate Arabs or blacks? Their conflation of Obama as a Muslim and an Arab and a terrorist seems to clearly indicate this confusion. This might end up being another of Bush’s unwelcome legacies for the Republican Party. Too much of the base seems to understand the war on terror as a conflict that resembles a clash of civilizations between Christians and Muslims. By doing this, Bush has tenuously shifted the zeal of white American racists away from their long support of the institutionalized persecution of African-Americans, onto the backs of Muslim Americans. When he over-sold the myth of the terrorist as an Islamic extremist, he neglected to stoke the old code-words involving race. These are the words the McCain campaign invokes when it uses phrases like “the real America” in Virginia, an echo of former GOP candidate George Allen’s rant in which he uses the word “macaca.” The problem now for the Republican party is that Bush might have confused moderately racist Republicans enough that, after eight years, they don’t know who to hate.
In his study Red State Blue State Rich State Poor State, Columbia statistics professor Andrew Gelman surveys how the intense electoral divisions in the 2000 and 2004 elections corroborates the way race and religion worked together among lower-income voters when they voted Republican. It’s not what you would expect: his findings dispel some of the easier assumptions of those elections, and how poor whites vote. First, he found that in blue states the rich disproportionately support Democrats, although nationally the rich overwhelmingly support Republicans. Although the rich are slightly more socially liberal than the poor, they basically vote for their own economic interests (even in blue states). Conversely, most poor people in red states vote Democrat. Indeed, a strong majority of the poor voting along class lines in the red states are black. In the red states that vote Republican, income is a very strong predictor of voter choice. That is, the more wealthy a red state voter, the more likely they’ll vote Republican. Gelman argues that wealth matters more in red states; they essentially vote along class lines.
Perhaps surprisingly, religion and social issues are more important for rich voters than poor voters: “It is richer Americans in richer parts of the country, more than the poor and rural, who are voting based on ‘Gods, guns, and gays.’” After the last few weeks, can’t we add African-Americans back to this list? Gelman uses the statistical language of trends between the polar opposites of rich and poor, but it’s worth considering whether the social issues voters use to vote Republican reveal a gray zone of the Republican middle class. This middle class is living in the suburbs of America’s racist heartland: the South and the Midwest (Pennsylvania to Kansas). It’s not a stretch to imagine that significant white Republican swing-voters in the suburbs are basing their decisions, in part, upon race.
After all, even when accounting for their recent diversification, the suburbs remain especially segregated in the south and more so in the Midwest. Many Americans live in de facto apartheid neighborhoods—the legacy of white flight, which was the legacy of Jim Crow segregation, which was the legacy of slavery. If race is the reality of how class is lived, as Stuart Hall has argued similarly elsewhere, then suggesting red states vote along class lines is also to suggest red states also vote along racial lines, at least in part. There has always been that fourth, unnamed party of white supremacists among the Reagan coalition, and among the American population.
If voters are stupid and ignorant, perhaps the question to ask is not: how do we educate them, or, how do politicians exploit their stupidity? Perhaps the questions to ask are not about democracy in general, but about the United States. How much longer can the quiet, racist passions of the suburbs determine elections? How long will they vote based on the myth of a white America? And how do you change the emotions of racism? How will they stop believing a myth when the myth is their nation?
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