Hoist a frosty beer in honor of the low-information voter

by: Eric B.

Mon Sep 03, 2012 at 11:54:15 AM EDT

Skubick's latest online piece uses a metaphor pretty familiar to anyone who's followed climate politics: If your car needs repairing, you take it to a mechanic and not a climate scientist; if your heart goes south, you go to a cardiologist and not a car mechanic. Expertise, built off years of study and experience, is important, and the people who possess it are better positioned to provide informed insights into their particular field. If you want to understand climate change, why do so many people ignore what the actual climate scientists (and other related disciplines) have to say and instead rely on people who know fuck all about atmospheric physics (i.e. Henry Payne). Skubick, however, takes it in a different direction.

If you are a schlub about repairing your car, you logically would go to your favorite mechanic for help. Finding an expert is the only sensible thing to do.

So when it comes to governmental issues, why do common folks willfully ignore and even berate the "experts" when it comes to knotty issues that frankly the common folks don't understand?

Not only do they ignore the advice of those on the inside, it gets even worse. When those experts declare this or that, the public says, "Well if they are for it, there must be something wrong with it and therefore, I'm against it."

The United States has a long and storied love affair with anti-intellectualism. It's why it was really the last of the developed country to embrace evolution (in some corners, that hasn't happened yet, matter of fact). That goes with science, and it also goes with government. How many times has someone with clearly no idea what he or she is talking about droned on about how something offered by some high muckity-muck just simply violates common sense. What is common sense? It is neither, but is instead offered up at ease so the speaker can dispense with the heavy lifting of reading and research as a way to simply leap to a conclusion that someone knows in their heart of hearts is just simply true. For instance, Magic Frank got his nickname whining about the declaration of carbon dioxide as a pollutant on the grounds that it is merely one molecule of carbon and two of oxygen and that both of them are important to life. It ceases to be sensible, however, if you understand the physical properties of carbon dioxide and how those fit into the conversation at hand, which is its heat-trapping qualities in a conversation about the atmosphere's rising mean temperature.

This goes with government, as well. The common man, and by common man let's just understand it to be some standard issue "conservative," since conservatives like the idea of a two-thirds majority to pass a tax hike (one of Skubick's points) and generally are more supportive of our current, failed term limits scheme (the other, and term limits was first promoted from conservatives), just intuitively knows that he best knows that government is "too big" and intuitively knows that you can boot career politicians from office by making them look for new jobs every so often (the career arc of one Bill Schuette tends to suggest that this is rubbish, but the people who like him best would prefer not to talk about it, so they won't). That he or she doesn't always possess knowledge of the big picture is unimportant. Knowledge to this person is relative, and an expert is only that because it's what he calls himself. A climate scientist knows no better than a car mechanic what effect added carbon dioxide has on the atmosphere, likewise someone who has spent 12 years in the state Legislature has no superior notion of how government works.

I don't think the mainstream pundit class fully appreciates this. Many of them are priests and priestesses of High Broderism, that both parties should come together, negotiate like adults, and compromise. They don't fully appreciate that one of the parties largely represents a voter base that isn't interested in being represented except in the sense that an elected official does what he or she is ordered to do by people who don't believe in expertise. The result is punditry that bemoans the unwillingness of one party to negotiate and compromise with people who might be forgiven for believing that you could also round off Pi without hindering bridge construction projects and that antibiotics are no more efficacious at handling outbreaks of disease than are blood-lettings and sweat lodges.

Skubick is right. The lack of appreciation for expertise is a bad thing for self-governance. Healthy skepticism has been distorted into the profane idea that a disciplined pursuit of knowledge yields no better fruit than sitting around, shouting at your Tee Vee. It has produced an electorate of instant experts, who are by design no better at distinguishing hogwash from reliable information and are thus not capable of making informed decisions. Let us, however, be honest about where this problem chiefly lies. It is the root of one party's ideology. We have, today, one political party where the worship of misinformed common sense has replaced an appreciation for policy based on rigorously-arrived at facts.