Dakota Beacon

Every four years, during the presidential campaign season, voters supposedly evaluate the candidates. But who evaluates the voters? Polls over the last twenty-five years confirm a disturbingly low level of cultural literacy among Americans. Young adults have less cultural literacy than that found among naturalized citizens.

Cultural illiteracy has been measured repeatedly. A 1990 Gallup survey for the National Endowment of the Humanities, a 1993 Department of Education survey, a 1999 American Council of Trustees and Alumni survey of liberal arts universities, and continuing surveys by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, among others, point to an increasingly high rate of cultural illiteracy.

An inordinate number of high school graduates and young millennials know precious little about American history and the roots of American culture compared to earlier generations. Moreover, although English is the American “lingua franca,” it is not the common bond found in years past. Many young people have a nominal ability in spoken and written English. In fact, they are generally not readers or writers. Literature, especially classical literature, they know little about. As for such mysterious subjects as economics -- forget it.

Americans were raised in the academy which made little distinction between “education,” “indoctrination” and “training.” Education, as understood, prepared young people for the workforce. This abstraction came from the former Soviet Union via the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Education for the purpose of producing functional, literate, and moral citizens faded into a forgotten concept. What was considered education placed US young people further behind other international age groups in math and science. This is where “The Myth of the Rational Voter” comes into play.

“The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies” by Bryan Caplan was published in 2007 by Princeton University Press. Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, was brought to the faculty by Professor Walter E. Williams when Williams was Chair of the Economics Department. Caplan’s book develops the central idea that voters are worse than ignorant. They are irrational -- and vote accordingly. Professional politicians at election time will advocate any policies that will gain them votes. These candidates are then re-elected by voters persuaded through false reasoning, mental biases, and emotional appeals.

It is little wonder that less-than-rational voters fall prey to establishment politicians. Without firm grounding in constitutional principles and American history, voters (many older ones) allow their elected officials to do just about anything without challenging the premise of their logic. Consequently, politicians and bureaucrats decide the kind of light bulbs we must use, the kind of cars we must drive, the amount of water used to flush toilets, and how many trillions of dollars of debt they can compel the public to pay. All of this is smoothly phrased as “what’s best for the country” or “this is what Americans want.” And voters follow like sheep.

Voters play into the hands of the political elite when they swallow such pablum as “free markets are evil”, “big business is bad”, and “big government is good”. No wonder protectionism, price controls, and other foolish economic policies are so easily accepted. When voters elect politicians who promote bad public policy, it is not surprising that cities and states across the nation are going bankrupt. With the national debt at $39 trillion, the federal government may do likewise.

Look around. Irrational adults are everywhere. And they vote. Traditionally, Americans freely elect those they choose to lead them. Long-serving professional politicians drift upward in successive elections to become the elite directing the lives of millions. Continued dependency upon government by each succeeding generation of young adults is very empowering to these politicians and their bureaucrat sycophants. In the aftermath of disastrous social and economic policies only “unintended consequences” are held accountable rather than the politicians who spawned them. In such disasters politicians whine, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

No complaints, please. In our democracy citizens have the freedom to speak with ballots even if the intellectual understanding behind the vote is missing. Two quotes summarize alternative views, and these views are not contradictory. H. L. Mencken once quipped, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Alternatively, Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”

Caplan concludes with his own observation. “In democracies the main alternative to majority rule is not dictatorship, but markets.” In markets, millions of people typically make rational choices, and the good choices significantly outweigh the bad ones. If Caplan is right that the rational voter is a myth, then he admits that a great deal of published research based on a rational voter is wrong. In any case, the best choice would be that ignorant people refrain from voting rather than voting and imperil the culture and the rest of us with foolish policies by incompetent elected officials.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).