It's a well known trope and its written on pieces of paper in restaurants throughout America. You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it good/quality. Choose two of three. I'm going to make my own version of that to the internet conscienceness.
You can let the stupid vote.
You can have a constitutional right to lie.
You can have a democracy.
Choose two of three.
This isn't that hard when you think about it, but let's look at it.
The argument for a constitutional right to lie is freedom of speech means you can lie. Some, with a better understanding, argue that profiting from a lie is fraud and is already legislated, but Fox News has a Supreme Court decision that basically gives them the constitutional right to lie. Note, I challenge you to find a founding father that said lying is cool. We're not talking Parody here...or fiction, or even benignly unknowingly making a mistake but bald face lying for profit. So even if our pathetic justice system, which is busy depriving individuals of their liberty because of drugs (and spend billions of dollars on such) spend almost no time at all enforcing existing fraud legislation on corporations and the media, because Fox can, per the Robert's court, basically just say its entertainment. Of course, a regular network, that does a fictional work like War of the Worlds puts up every commercial break, "This is a work of fiction. It's entertainment." Fox news doesn't do that. Why? Because it is political propaganda deliberately designed to exploit the stupid.
I find this particularly ironic given an ideology that claims moral superiority. Is not honesty a Christian value? Is not Honesty a basic family value we teach our children? Yet these people willingly lie to themselves and reject any inconvient truth, attack science, etc. They want their cake, to eat it, and to not gain any weight. So far, their own dishonesty has been their greatest weakness, and thankfully even the stupid who aren't caught up by their lies can see through their scams eventually...especially when it affects them personally.
Fox news might be the number one network, but no one but conservatives, independents that are actually conservatives and liberals making fun of it actually watch it. But really, I'm not talking about that more in this entry...because I've already talked about it and so have lots of people.
Understanding reality is like interest. Those who understand interest earn it. Those that don't pay it. Those that understand reality watch something besides Fox. Those that don't, watch Fox.
End of story.
More importantly, can one BLAME Fox? They've rigged the game so that they can profit from a lie. No one checks them on it...aside from fact checkers, but then they discredit fact checkers as having their own political agenda such that even intelligent indepents are leery of trusting them entirely, allowing smidgens of the Reagan reality to slip through the defenses of anyone who isn't firmly fixed on liberal sources of information, because everything else requires a constant judgement call on every single item, and its impossible to call what is true and what is a lie every single time. Moderates by their very nature, indeed I believe by their biology are going to take news from more than one source, and if one of those sources is a lie factory, then that means that they're being affected by lies.
The problem is that Democracy DEPENDS on voters making informed decisions. And you can't do that based on the inability to discern truth. Conservative ideology, it seems, depends on lies. You can argue to the contrary, but any intelligent independent or liberal can see it as plain as day. They suppress the vote, suppress the truth. That's a sign of weakness, which is odd because I think without the lies some of their basic ideas; or the ideas they say they care about are important and eternal and an excellent check on liberal excess.
But as someone that lived a lie and was lied to for the bulk of my life, my tolerance of dishonesty is low. But it isn't just personal.
A democracy is about making a CHOICE of who to vote for. Republicans, and Republicists...supporters of Republics, like to argue that the value of a Republic is that by choosing virtuous leaders you can temper the will of the mob. Well, that's a nice theory, but it only evens out and smooths the random impulses of the mob. A strange fad that infects half the population to spend a trillion dollars on pet rocks for a day is a bad idea, and a process of representation can delay it.
But an entire paradigm built on nothing but lies is going to create a sustained lie that will produce elected representatives that are more than willing to reflect the lies believed by their stupider minions. For democracy, or a democratic republic to work, voters must be able to make informed choices.
Which means you EITHER:
a) Improve the quality of the voter by ensuring that the stupid cannot vote. Property ownership is not a proper threshold...there are many many dumb property owners, and they have no real qualifications that improve society. More importantly, the definition of society has moved on since the original constitution was created to give more people the right to vote than rich white male land owners.
It IS possible to create a test to allow for intelligence. There are perils of this-sure. There are perils in holding an election. There are perils in having a military. I will argue in a future post how this can be done. Let us for now simply posit that by hook or by crook one solution to the conundrum of a functioning democracy is to improve the quality of the voter.
b) Remove lying reducing the barrier for the less intelligent or less able voter to be able to make a better choice. This is best accomplished by making Lying in anything short of fiction or parody a felony. Especially if it is done for profit. Already the law you say? Then we need to change our enforcement mechanisms to make it work...but given how hard it is to sue someone for liable or slander in this country I think we can say that there are no real consequences for lying, especially by the press, by politicians and by corporations.
That needs to change.
c) Don't have a democracy. There are many other forms of government, all called worse by Winston Churchill and they certainly do have flaws, but they pretty much all have the advantage that by reducing the size of the basket, you also reduce the amount of stupid. That's not always true, but it can be if designed right.
The real problem with these is a lack of accountability and most important of all; stability in the transition of power. Thus far, democracy does this better than all other forms of government, but that doesn't mean it has to be this way.
Personally, I favor a very low threshold test, something that even someone of an IQ of 90 can achieve, like maybe a 4th grade graduation test....but whatever it is...whatever we do...we cannot continue on our current course.
An ideology and civilization based on lies will have disconnects...some huge, like Climate Change, some small like an outbreak that becomes political anathema to the Reagan Reality to admit for some reason so they pretend that it doesn't exist...and it kills millions.
Disconnection from reality is a bad thing. Disconnection from reality in an era of weapons of Mass Destruction is a formula for disaster. Sarah Palin is stupid. And anyone who isn't a Reagan Reality inhabitant could see this, which is the main reason McCain lost and Palin isn't the current Republican candidate.
You don't let stupid be in charge of the nukes.
But if we don't change, it will happen eventually. You can only roll the dice so long without rolling snake eyes.
It. Will. Happen.
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