Privileged Information

America has a dirty little secret, and it forms one of the pillars of our democracy: Many in our voting population – perhaps a majority - are so distracted or so ill-informed that they can often be persuaded to support candidates opposed to the voters’ own interests. Politicians wishing to exploit this large group need only aggregate lists of voters who rely on mysticism to guide their lives, stay in touch with the 60% of Americans who can’t find Iraq on a world map, maintain that dissent and disloyalty are synonymous, promote tax breaks for the rich as a means of helping the poor, and ferret out those who lay claim to political conviction but whose attention span seldom lasts through a complete news cycle.  By appealing to the misconceptions of this multitude in ways that evoke nostalgia, machismo, and unquestioning obedience to authority, exploitative politicians can persuade them to ignore evidence when it shows their representatives acting in politically abusive ways.

Pity the poor Democrats.  They not only don’t know about these political victims, they mistakenly believe that any voter can be persuaded, by reason, logic, facts, and evidence, to support his own self-interests. More reality-based political parties see in these folk a rich vein of political ore that can be mined time and time again to achieve electoral gains.

While marveling at the self-destructive nature of our policies in recent years, both foreign and domestic, the rest of the world seems to have discovered our dirty little secret before we became aware of it ourselves.