At least part of the premise of representative democracy is that a majority is probably right about most things. They’re probably right because, hopefully, they have some passing familiarity with the most basic facts, or can learn them rather easily when it becomes necessary in a given case. We know the majority can sometimes become overwhelmed by transitory passions and we deal with that by having civil rights protections, a separation of powers, a bicameral legislature, and an independent judiciary. All told, it works fairly well, and better than any other extant alternative. Our particular system has strengths and weaknesses compared to other representative systems, but it still works on the same basic premises as all “free” societies. However, our civil protections are clearly weakening, and out electorate may simply be too uneducated and disengaged to make our system work properly. We rightly complain constantly about how powerful, mostly corporate, interests have too much power in our system, and that’s true. If we can’t fairly ascertain the opinion of the majority, or if that opinion is shaped by a debate-landscape completely dominated by one side, then we’ve lost the premise. The majority in Congress has no relationship to the majority of the citizenry. But the other side of the coin is that we’re a nation of morons whose opinion on anything is almost by definition uninformed crap. For example, how many Americans can find Libya on a map? How many know exactly what Planned Parenthood does? Who understands how the Social Security Trust Fund works or knows who is lying about it and who is telling the truth?
It’s not like the majority used to be so much more enlightened. But there has to be a cost to the performance of a representative government when the people who are being represented are functionally operating with a sixth-grade knowledge of public policy and world affairs. That’s why a commitment to public education and civics is an essential component in an open, representative system.
They used to talk about “virtue” in revolutionary days. No one knows when they meant these days. But who can talk about civic responsibility and virtue when our debate is about birth certificates, death panels, and whether biology and plate tectonics should be taught in schools or if that violates people’s right to be uniformed jackasses and pass along their ignorance to their children?
