from OpenLeft:
Republican Intellectuals: Voters are Polluting our Democracy by: tremayne
Mon Oct 06, 2008 at 22:14
It is becoming increasingly apparent, even to conservative bloggers, that Barack Obama is going to win. This is quite a shock to their senses. Black radical, extreme ultra liberal terrorist-loving Obama is going to take over the White House and bring his antichrist friends with him. Even more appalling, voters are just going along with this selling out of America like the ignorant masses they are.
That's right. Since attacks and smears against Obama have so far failed to do the job, conservatives are now taking their frustration to its logical conclusion: blaming our system of representative government. Basically their argument is this: Too many damn voters! Honestly, this is the argument and it's being advanced not by fringe lunatics like Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbaugh but people you think would know better. Details follow.
Yesterday, Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute endorsed this view:
When enough people vote badly–from ignorance or bias, for example–the result is often bad policy. The quality of policy matters to the public good. Higher-quality democratic decisions, and better policy, can be secured if bad voters choose to abstain. Because the personal cost of not voting badly is so low, a public-spirited person shouldn’t do it. And it seems that a lot of people are quite likely to vote badly. So there are many people who, if they care about the common good, ought to choose not to vote.
I'll let you figure out what "voting badly" means in the context of the current election. But Wilkinson doesn't just agree with the view, advanced by Jason Brennan of Brown, he goes it one further: Voter registration efforts are immoral! The logic, as he says, is straightforward. I could paraphrase it to make it sound even more ridiculous but, like Sarah Palin's recent performances, the original is just as good bad:
Here’s how I explain the intensity of media propaganda about voter participation in cynical political economy terms. There are more Americans inclined to vote Democrat than Republican. But the poorer and younger Democratic-leaning voters are also least likely to show up at the polls. Therefore, promoting the idea that it is a civic/moral imperative to vote disproportionately benefits the Democratic party by getting higher levels of participation from the poorer and younger voters, at whom much of the marketing blitz is focused. And, of course, the American media establishment overwhelmingly favors the Democratic Party. However, higher levels of voting from these groups pretty much ensures greater electoral pollution.
Now this is deeply disturbing for a whole bunch of reasons you already know but I'll cover in a moment. You might console yourself that Wilkinson's pseudo-intellectual bullshit has a limited distribution but unfortunately he and Brennan discuss their deep concerns about the purity of American political discourse on Bloggingheads.TV which increases the scope of this nonsense. ..........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=8886