It was not Trump but the far more respectable President Obama who secured passage of his signature health reform law in large part by manipulating what Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber called “the stupidity of the American voter.”...
The problem is not that voters are stupid, or that accurate information is unavailable. Rather, for most voters, political ignorance is actually rational. No matter how well-informed you are, the probability that your vote will change the outcome of an election is tiny... [Most Americans] have an intuitive sense that there is little payoff to carefully studying political issues...
[E]ven when [Trump's] star fades, the political ignorance that fueled his rise will remain, ripe for exploitation by other candidates and interest groups. That, far more than his crude rhetoric, is the truly frightening reality revealed by The Donald.
October 5, 2015
"Exploitation of ignorance was a standard political tool long before Trump decided to run for president."
Writes lawprof Ilya Somin.
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The entire premise is flawed. Obama is not respectable.
He is trying to assert that a former community organizer two years out of the Illinois State Senate is more "respectable" than Trump.
Fish don't know they are in water. The incurious ones, anyway.
His point is that the American electorate is dominated by low information voters and emotional voters. Trump and Democrats seek to manipulate these voters through blatant appeals to emotionalism. Thus the whole war on women thing.
Missing choice:
Voting for Obama was stupid.
Funny how conservatives use the 'lumpenproletariat" analysis so often. I guess we are all Marxists now, 'cept we call them LIVs.
People who bother to stay informed do so for reasons beyond simply trying to affect the vote tally of a preferred candidate.
Knowing what is happening, who is involved, and why is important to many businesses and other non profit interests. It also teaches you how to spot the bullshit.
And there's the civic responsibility thing.
So the rationally ignorant are still ignorant, but we all choose what to tune into, or away from.
Baseball, for example. What a tremendous waste of time, but not my time, so what do I care if people follow closely or not.
The real lesson is that we should minimize the scope of government-decision-making and maximize the scope of private-decision-making. Although political ignorance is rational, ignorance about things that you have to do or decide for yourself would be irrational.
Oooh, lovely point, Godfather. Agree entirely and well put.
Somin doesn't like Trump. We get it.
Somin is a smart fellow, a Libertarian, a law Professor at George Mason.
But, he does take a kind of snooty, elitist posture for this article. Lower income blue collar workers do not like legal or illegal immigration for the simple reason that such an influx of workers will lower wages (supply of labor increases/wages go down).
It's simple economics, it's perfectly logical, and Trump is exactly aligned with their interests.
If you add the cultural aspect of the issue into the mix (Americans who do not want to surrender their heritage, drip by drip, to foreign multi-culturalism), you see that Trump is exactly aligned with this group as well.
This is why Trump is leading. Whether Trump can sustain this lead, though, I don't know.
I'm too informed to pick one of the poll answers I guess.
Maybe it is more like, "Well, if these other dofuses can't even deal with Trump, maybe we would be better off with him than any one of them."
Another "law prof" that doesn't know what a natural born Citizen is, being written about by a "law prof" who voted for an illegal POTUS TWICE.
Ilya is just another example of the idiocy within the Ivory Tower of Academia. Really? a "Con Law prof" born in Russia?
i continue to think somin is the low-info victim here because he simply does not understand why people vote the way they do!
You can fool some of the people all of the time.
None of the above. Somin is either a fool, a manipulator, or another blind man around the elephant.
Take this section:
"Polls also consistently show that Trump’s support comes disproportionately from those with relatively low levels of education. ... Education and political knowledge are not the same thing. Many college graduates know very little about politics, and some who lack college degrees know a lot. Nonetheless, the two are highly correlated."
How politically knowledgeable are people without a college degree? He doesn't say. How about those with a degree? He doesn't know. But he still reaches the conclusion that low-info voters favor Trump.
As a college graduate who supports Trump, I would cock a Spock-brow at that. (Would I vote for Trump? Good question. Against Hillary? God yes. Biden? Absolutely. Saunders? Who wouldn't?)
Exactly what political ignorance is Somin talking about? Trump became popular because he was the only candidate willing to say what the majority of the country thinks about immigration. If there was any political ignorance going on, it was the political ignorance of the political class who seem to think they can tell the majority of the country to go get bent on an issue as big as immigration.
And as far as Trump's "crude rhetoric" that so offends Somin's delicate ears, people gravitate to that because the political class and media has made polite rhetoric synonymous with lying. The country desperately wants to hear someone tell the truth and don't care if doing so is "crude".
The problem is not political ignorance on the part of the voters. The problem is arrogance and political ignorance among they political class and the media, which Somin is a part. They have lied to the voters so much and for so long they no longer have any credibility when they attack someone. It is not that Somin or Trump's critics both left and right are necessarily wrong in their criticism of him. It is that they have lied so much to the public that no one believes them or cares what they think. They say Trump is a phony and a racist. Yeah, well they also claimed Obama was a great leader and a centrist and Obamacare was going to make health insurance cheaper and that Mitt Romney was a radical conservative woman hater. So now when they go after Trump it doesn't work.
Somin and a lot of other media people on the right seem not to understand that just because they are on the right doesn't mean conservative voters don't still hate them and not trust them just as much as they do the leftwing media. None of the major media left or right has any credibility left. Somin and a lot of others need to man up and face that reality and understand why it happened instead of blaming the ignorant proles for not doing as they are told.
Sometimes the question is where the ignorance resides. Trump points out that (1) not all the "undocumented immigrants" are benign (the late Kate Steinle's family has reason to agree, not to mention women raped by undocumented immigrants) and (2) the undocumented immigrants are taking away the safety net for out of work working class men and women. This is factual, whatever the nattering class would like to believe.
We need a new word for that unique kind of political ignorance that afflicts those who consider themselves to be intelligent and informed voters, but yet consistently vote for charlatans and mountebanks. University professors, in particular, often suffer from this disability.
We need a new word for that unique kind of political ignorance that afflicts those who consider themselves to be intelligent and informed voters, but yet consistently vote for charlatans and mountebanks
We have a two word term: women voters.
Trump has offered to lead the USA back to its glory days when it was a world power with an industrial base and a private property owning middle class. That is simple as it gets, and either we want that or we don't.
The world capital flow guys see no boundaries and sincerely want no USA in existence that they cannot manipulate. They want a submissive province of
DePendent peasants policed by the UN.
"Education and political knowledge are not the same thing."
Yep..in many cases inversely proportional when you factor in the level of indoctrination/groupthink that has replaced sifting and winnowing.
Somin is a typical Libertarian. He thinks the best way to get voters to agree with him is by explaining to them how ignorant they are. Like most Libertarians he cannot grasp that logic and reason are value neutral and that other people might start with different assumptions than he does. People who disagree with him must be ignorant and irrational. It could never be that they have different values and reasonably disagree.
If he doesn't like it that Trump is appealing to people, he has only his own attitude to blame. If you refuse to understand and engage with people's concerns and opinions, someone else will. And you likely will not like that person very much.
The author wants to bring back poll taxes? Literacy exams?
In any case, I suspect voter ignorance may be a lesser problem than voter greed (as in, "an election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods").
Rush is making some gun argument that makes no sense, as far as casual listening is able to make out, in his second hour.
Missing from Somin's editorial is any assessment of the degree to which "reporting" in the mainstream media contributes to the ignorance of the voters.
Trump's strength, meaning his support, comes from taking no shit from the media narratives.
Fix the media narratives' control of the pubic debate, and unsolvable problems become solvable.
The author wants to bring back poll taxes? Literacy exams?
The solution is to repeal the 19th Amendment.
Bay Area Guy:
Don't like illegal immigration, yes. Legal, no. The problem is excessive immigration or rates that exceed assimilation and integration. Especially when immigration policies cause dislocation at the hospital, work, school, etc., and are compensatory. Most notably for the State-established pro-choice doctrine that has normalized or promoted elective abortion of over one million Americans ("Posterity") annually, as well as other orientations and behaviors that reduce the viability of Americans. The problem with illegal/unmeasured immigration is that, compounded with sponsoring progressive corruption, and other crimes against individuals and society.
Without the Least Informed stupid voters, Dear Leader would still be community organizing his slum lords.
We're not stupid, we simply don't have the luxury of being fully informed on every issue. There are lots of issues, lots of information on every issue, and, even under Obama, most of us have jobs. Practical reality forces us to rely on experts, gut feeling, or symbolism that takes the place of information.
It may be inconvenient, but its not irrational. Only the stupid would assume it means people are stupid.
You all seem to be missing the point that it's rational to be politically ignorant. Suppose you live in Texas. First off, as just one voter, it's extremely unlikely that your vote will make any difference to which presidential candidate wins your state. Secondly, in any scenario where the election is close in Texas, the Democrats have surely won nationally, because Texas is a very Republican state.
You can make the same argument for blue states. If New York is in play, the Republicans have almost certainly already won nationally.
So, if you're a rational individual allocating your limited time and attention, does it make sense to spend any of it informing yourself about politics? No. The fact that everyone commenting at this site is interested in politics shows that we're not really all that rational. Our interest in politics is mostly tribal. We want to see "our guys" win and the other guys lose.
Somin is NOT saying the politically uninformed are stupid, it's just the opposite. A rational person doesn't waste his time thinking about politics.
"the far more respectable President Obama"
Lost me right there.
If forced to choose between Trump and the likes of Somin, I'll go with Trump.
The basis for his support is not "ignorance," but agreement with him on two main issues, that illegal immigration and MSM BS need to be stopped. Other than that, I doubt Trump supporters are any more ignorant than LIV O voters in '08 and '12.
Ilya Somin has been saying this for years (his points about political ignorance). The term "Low Information Voter" which was popularized by Rush Limbaugh sort of encapsulates this concept. These are people who are not necessarily stupid or irrational, they are making a choice to not invest effort into truly informing themselves. As rational beings with finite amounts of time and energy they've made this choice either consciously or unconsciously. They have what could colloquially be called "a life". You can call them idiots or simple minded lumpenproles or whatever, but that's not entirely fair or accurate. But unfortunately they are exploitable, whether by liberal media culture or demagogues like Trump.
the far more respectable President Obama
I'm going to send all my personal information to the respectable Dr. Jones Steve:
"I am Dr.Jones Steve, the director debt reconciliation committee all over the world under the UN in Switzerland.
Today from our central system computer data base, we found out you have an unpaid fund, report reaching from our African regional office in Nigeria that one man Mr SAMI AHMED ABBAS ZAMKAH from Saudi Arabia came to our sub office in Nigeria asking for a change of ownership of your fund in his name that your dead it is true or not?"
Wow. 4 choices and none of them is right.
The reason we (collectively) are so stupid is because some many of us (particularly) are so lazy and superficial.
I would vote for Trump in a heartbeat. I don't see how he can be any worse than a "community organizer" who could not hold a job for any significant period in his life and had zero to show for as his accomplishment. I have a PhD in a technical field, make a decent enough living and have never had to depend financially or emotionally on anybody since my 20s, have been making rational choices since at least high school.
"They have what could colloquially be called "a life"." Assumes facts not in evidence, counsellor, neither in Starbucks nor WalMart.
The same people who can't tell you who their Congressman is, let alone how he voted, or the name of their kids' teachers, because they blow off the meetings when Americn Idol is on, can instantly name their favorite NASCAR or NBZ athlete, tell you which celebutante has a sex tape out, and what Caitlyn had for breakfast. That kind of willful ignorance has to be practiced assiduously.
pm217 It's not that he's any worse; it's that he's not any different.
In what way is Barack Obama more respectable than Donald Trump?
Please show your work.
If it weren't for exploitation of ignorance (as well as envy), "liberal" politcians (and by "liberal" I mean of course "tax-happy, coercion-addicted, power-tripping State fellator") would have to find honest jobs.
Oh, I think he is plenty different. If you listen carefully to what he says without the media smokescreen, you see him articulating a middle of the road approach and trying to focus on problem solving without catering to either party talking points. That is what his supporters find refreshing. He is a man without a party. Much of the country is without a party after the reigns of Bush and Obama.
As for Trump (beyond my personal dislike of the guy) I think the real problem with him is that he is truly unelectable in the current environment. While he has a very strong base of support, his aggressive and abrasive style seems to have lead to a hard plateau that he will never get past. I don't believe he will ever be able to get a significant number of new converts, and in fact there are a lot of people who wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances. Being a bully and a jerk will only get you so far even if you may have some good points. He may get the nomination, but he would most likely hand the presidency over to the Dems since so many people find him unappealing.
I don't think the problem is necessarily "low information" voters as most such people don't vote at all. The bigger problem is voters who know just enough to be dangerous--they cherrypick what they read and hear, and listen to and read things through the slant of their own bias (we're all guilty of this to at least some extent, which is why it is important to be aware of this and to welcome even ideas you think you will disagree with). When you talk to the "slanted voters" you'll find they actually consume quite a lot of news, even from suprising sources (e.g., leftists who watch some Fox, rightists who watch some MSNBC) but everything they see and hear magically buttresses what they already believe. Inconvenient data are simply denied, ignored, or spun away.
"As for Trump (beyond my personal dislike of the guy) I think the real problem with him is that he is truly unelectable in the current environment. While he has a very strong base of support, his aggressive and abrasive style seems to have lead to a hard plateau that he will never get past. I don't believe he will ever be able to get a significant number of new converts, and in fact there are a lot of people who wouldn't vote for him under any circumstances. Being a bully and a jerk will only get you so far even if you may have some good points. He may get the nomination, but he would most likely hand the presidency over to the Dems since so many people find him unappealing."
I think that's absolutely right--he does have a path to the nomination, even if he has a 30% ceiling (so long as his competitors keep jockeying for second place). But despite his laughable assertion that he'll win "the blacks" and that "Hispanics love him" (which if you believe that, you're as gullible as investors in his properties) his nomination would pretty much assure a third term for the Democrats, no matter who they nominate.
Ironically, LIV is more desirable because it is uniformly predictable. While HIV is fraught with danger because of selective, opportunistic interests.
Say this, Obama has fewer bankruptcies (except for the One Big One) and hasn't evicted as many widows as Trump (until he's done playing with the housing market again) so...um... shit, they're twins.
Blogger Sebastian said...
"the far more respectable President Obama"
Lost me right there.
If forced to choose between Trump and the likes of Somin, I'll go with Trump.
The basis for his support is not "ignorance," but agreement with him on two main issues, that illegal immigration and MSM BS need to be stopped. Other than that, I doubt Trump supporters are any more ignorant than LIV O voters in '08 and '12
This was true until he introduced his tax plan. A lot to like in his tax plan, especially since he is lowering the rate for everyone.
I realize many conservatives took issue with it, because they think everyone ought to have "Skin in the game", but I'm of the belief we really shouldn't even have Federal Income Tax. So if we can get rid of it for the lowest income, maybe, eventually, we can get rid of it for the higher incomes as well.
Regardless, I think people are a bit more savvy on Trumps positions that his opponents give them credit for.
As a Californian, I've pretty much decided that voting is a huge waste of time. The Dem candidate will win the state's electoral votes, regardless of how unqualified or crooked he or she is, and the Republican won't even bother here. Plus, if a ballot prop I actually vote for wins, some judge will just overturn it because it hurt the feelings of the losers who opposed it. Really, what's the point? We're ruled by incompetents and fascists.
"I realize many conservatives took issue with it, because they think everyone ought to have "Skin in the game", but I'm of the belief we really shouldn't even have Federal Income Tax. So if we can get rid of it for the lowest income, maybe, eventually, we can get rid of it for the higher incomes as well."
If proponents of such tax plans at the same time showed what they would replace the income tax with (sales tax, VAT) or otherwise showed how they would cut spending (and getting rid of "waste, fraud and abuse" or promising that the tax cuts would create so much new wealth that tax revenues would be higher than ever before are not serious proposals) then I'd take it more seriously. In the meantime, all that ever happens is the GOP cuts rates a bit, or the Dems raise rates a bit, and no major tax reform ever takes place because Congress loves more than anything else to control people's behavior through the tax code.
Can someone please boot "Mick" and his constant use of "" off this island.
1 Trump has nothing to do with your pet peave issue of natural citizenship.
2 Of course AA is a "law prof". Your use of "law prof" is childish.
3 Why can't someone born in Europe be a Constitutional Law Professor? And
4 Please for the love of God take your tired act somewhere else...
Signed,
Everyone who ever read your crappy crap crap.
Somin presents as simple fact many things that I would hope any well-informed person knows to be rather more complicated, or, at the very least, open to debate. Why, it's almost as if Mr. Somin and the Gannett Company are trying to appeal to...low information voters.
I've been reading Somin over at Volokh for quite some time, and I think that several commenters here have been misled by the brief excerpt in this blog post. In fact, judging by the little mini-quiz in which none of the suggested answers reflects what Somin is saying, I fear our hostess may also have missed the point (perhaps intentionally?). When Rush Limbaugh refers to "low information voters" that's intended as a criticism. When Somin refers to "rational political ignorance" that's intended as an explanation -- the word "rational" is the tell.
Contrast politics with NASCAR or the NHL or MLB. Why can people who can tell you the ERA of every pitcher on the Orioles since 1980 not tell you who their congressman is, or how he/she voted on Obamacare? It's because they enjoy baseball and don't enjoy politics. Following baseball is a recreation, a hobby, it's fun! For them, following politics isn't fun.
That's hard for us -- who read and comment on this blog -- to grasp. We wouldn't be here if we didn't find politics interesting, if we didn't enjoy learning what's going on, if we didn't get a charge out of identifying the errors of those who disagree with us, and pointing them out. But we are a distinct minority. We may know why Trump is a dunce or the long-awaited savior of America, but we won't be listened to anymore than the guy up in the bleachers who keeps yelling to take the pitcher out in the top of the 8th and put in a closer. Imagine that for a lot of people, politics is as interesting as soccer or cricket is to you.
We live in a democracy (it was supposed to be a republic, but there you are). If we want the right leaders to be elected, we need to persuade politically ignorant people to vote for them. We didn't in 2012 and got Obama again.
Low education correlates with support for Trump far more than political ideology, or any other demographic variable. Education and political knowledge are not the same thing. Many college graduates know very little about politics, and some who lack college degrees know a lot. Nonetheless, the two are highly correlated.
Some Trump supporters will say this information must be wrong because they support Trump and they are not poorly educated. And so they strengthen Somin's point through their demonstrated failure to comprehend correlation.
The Godfather @10/5/15, 4:16 PM:
GF, if that was all Somin wanted to say, he would've just written a version of what you wrote. He wanders around that point in the second half of his article. (A point I think pretty straightforward, not "hard to grasp".) But read the whole article again. Somin is an open-borders ideologue. The "rational ignorance" theme is rather clumsily tacked on to what is a not-at-all subtle propaganda piece against support for immigration control/restriction.
Never take a pundits tender concern for ignorant voters' "vulnerability" to demagogues at face value.
The intellectual elite HATE the "common folks".
They're being taught, though, that there are WAY more common folks than "elite". And we don't really need them all that much. The elite need the common folks far more than we'll ever need them.
"We're ruled by incompetents and fascists."
This.
(i would've added an exclamation point, but what difference at this point does it make?)
The idea that the best interests of the nation are not served by democratic processes is behind all of the 20th century totalitarian states.
There is a BBC television series called "Worricker." The hero is a British intelligence agent who is on the run from the British government because he exposed the sitting government's lies in the war on terror. The theme of the program is that the unelected men and women of the British intelligence service are actually more representative of the British nation -- its history and culture -- than the slimy politicians the people have elected to office. It's fascism nicely wrapped up in a liberal package.
yes, it was an overheated round of Blair derangement syndrome, with Ralph Fiennes as the Blair stand in, of course one premise was the UK would not use information to prevent an attack, because it was derived from 'aggressive interrogation'
"The best summary of what Professor Whoever is saying is:"
e. e demagogue's gonna demagogue.
Here's a thought: Just because less educated support a position more than more educated people doesn't mean its wrong or "Demagoguery" - it could be that more educated people benefit from something. IOW, its a class issue.
I'm sure plenty of well-to-do lawyers love immigration because it drives down labor costs and doesn't hurt them, since law firms aren't hiring 'cheap but smart' Chinese lawyers to replace them. If they did, I'm sure they wouldn't be so in love with Open borders.
>Lower income blue collar workers do not like legal or illegal immigration
IIRC, steel and other manufacturing industries promoted immigration to the US back in the gilded age precisely in order to keep wages low and avoid unionization. That seems largely forgotten these days.
Lol. There's too much material here. I could go on all night.
Let me fix myself a drink.
"The problem is not political ignorance on the part of the voters... "
No counter needed.
Funny how conservatives use the 'lumpenproletariat" analysis so often. I guess we are all Marxists now, 'cept we call them LIVs.
10/5/15, 11:15 AM
Well, whats that saying? I don't think "lumpen proletariat" -- or "Marxists" for that matter -- mean what you think they mean, but whatever.
It's nice to think, I like to think, that someone who has no experience solving societal level problems can solve societal level problems. But it's also a bit dangerous to hire a born-rich, bullshit t.v. reality star demagogue for the job, just because he speaks the outrageous truth that the PC shitheads try to suppress. On the other hand, what the hell, right? Embrace the decline. Where's my Trump phone?
"If it weren't for exploitation of ignorance (as well as envy), "liberal" politcians (and by "liberal" I mean of course "tax-happy, coercion-addicted, power-tripping State fellator") would have to find honest jobs."
So would half the fuckin' country that works for the govt.
Hello, Professor.
Ignorant voters? Low information voters? I read alot. I'm successful. I'm ignorant on a whole host of issues.
Dont political parties fill that void? Conservatives are supposed to want a smaller constitutional gvt. Health insurance? I dont know. But, conservatives understand that the federal govt has no jurisdiction to involve itself. I want everyone to be insured, its just that the federal govt isnt the place to get that insurance and I expect those that represent me to know something simple like that.
But moving on, The premise that Trump somehow cant, or shouldn't be President, but what we have experienced the last 8 years is laugh out loud stupid. Painting with a broad brush, our foreign policy has created power vacuums that are now being filled by Putin.
Our economy is in the midst of a stagnate recovery we haven't seen since the depression. Obama care is a failure with coops created to service it going broke monthly and premiums rising drastically.
Any Republican will do better. Who ever comes thru the primary will do better. It professional politicians cant out communicate Trump, then Trumps the man.
I'm just getting' started, y'all. Strap yerselfs in.
"I read alot. I'm successful. I'm ignorant..."
Bless yer heart.
Who needs a drink? It's a party!
"Can someone please boot "Mick" and his constant use of "" off this island?...
2 Of course AA is a "law prof". "
Go ahead and try. Hell, boot them both off, if you can.
"As a Californian, I've pretty much decided that voting is a huge waste of time."
Hablas espanol?
"Never take a pundits tender concern..."
You can stop right there.
Ok, you're in luck. It's getting old for me too.
Carry on.
Bartender!
Somin is right of course, we only have to look back at the last 2 Presidential elections, Debbie Wasserman Schulz and Alan Grayson's congressional wins, the list goes on. Not to mention the whole global warming/ hockey stick/ climate change BS, calls for "sensible, common sense gun laws" each time there is a shooting, #blacklivesmatter, and so on.
@Anglelyne (5:10 pm): I'm not defending or supporting Somin's position on immigration. I don't agree with "open borders". That's one of the libertarian ideas that make me a conservative rather than a libertarian (another example, from my college days, is that the government shouldn't build lighthouses, because the companies that insure ships will do that in order to reduce their losses). But I do believe that we need to unlearn the progressive lesson that unlimited state power is no threat so long as the "people" elect the government. Rational political ignorance is a powerful reason why the progressives were/are wrong.
So is more than a century of experience.
rcocean wrote:
I'm sure plenty of well-to-do lawyers love immigration because it drives down labor costs and doesn't hurt them, since law firms aren't hiring 'cheap but smart' Chinese lawyers to replace them. If they did, I'm sure they wouldn't be so in love with Open borders.
Erwin Chemerinsky is the liberal lawyer foil on Hugh Hewitt's radio program. A few years ago, Hugh asked Chemerinsky why he was so strongly in favor in favor of amnesty of illegals. What would be so bad about simply deporting all of the illegals?
Chemerinsky stammered for minute -- he didn't have a ready answer -- and then blurted out that the economy would collapse because who would take care of our children?
I literally laughed out loud. Rich lawyer mo-fo. Maybe your f'n wife could take care of your kids?
Chemerinsky went on to become the dean of the UCI law school. Some conservative Californians opposed his appointment. He was a confessed Democrat partisan. One of the differences between Left and Right is that many on the right (including Hewitt) supported Chemerinsky's appointment because he was a good lawyer. It is unimaginable that anyone on the Left would have gone to bat for a conservative lawyer appointed to the same position.
"Chamerinsky stammered for minute -- he didn't have a ready answer -- and then blurted out that the economy would collapse because who would take care of our children?
I literally laughed out loud. Rich lawyer mo-fo. "
Rich lawyer mofos is the shit, ain't it? Thank god for lawyer school, eh?
Hi, Professor.
I'm ba-ack.
"...because who should take care of our Holden?"
I vote for Trump!
I'm pretty sure he's got the answer.
"...because who should take care of our Holden?"
Lol. You figure out the internet auto correctly thing yerself!
Somin is a typical Libertarian. He thinks the best way to get voters to agree with him is by explaining to them how ignorant they are. Like most Libertarians he cannot grasp that logic and reason are value neutral and that other people might start with different assumptions than he does."
Oh god, I'm gonna be up all night.
I hate you, Althouse.
Not that I disagree.
I have to drink more... I mean think more.
Godfather @10/5/15, 10:12 PM:
Ha, I think we're getting into some weird po-mo hall-of-mirrors interpretation thing here, GF. I wasn't arguing that you were agreeing with Somin about immigration. (This or that particular issue isn't really relevant to my point.) And I thought what you wrote about "rational ignorance" was just fine. My only point was that Somin's editorial didn't really have much to do with its purported topic.
The idea that the best interests of the nation are not served by democratic processes is behind all of the 20th century totalitarian states.
It's also behind our Constitution. We have a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. The Founders had reasons for their design. In fact, you could make the case that the biggest departure from that design, the 17'th Amendment (direct election of the Senate), is responsible for the huge expansion of the federal government, as the States no longer have any way to check it.
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