Thoughts on the state of the union

35% of the public is so completely disengaged that they don’t even vote in presidential elections, even though doing so is now exponentially easier than it was even eight years ago.

Of the other 65%, three quarters of them pay only occasional attention to politics, and vote on the basis of long standing tribal customs, plus something that somebody told them they saw on Facebook or a TikTok video. These are the Ariana Grande Theory of Politics voters, and their name is legion.

Perhaps one in seven American adults could be considered reasonably well informed voters, who make decisions on the basis of some judgment regarding what is actually happening politically in the country. It’s not surprising that Trump has a 47% approval rating despite being the worst president in American history by a mile, just as it’s not surprising that he got re-elected. These things aren’t surprising because the American public is largely made up of, at least when it comes to politics, a bunch of clueless morons. There are countless ways to demonstrate this, but consider that Donald Trump said he would bring down inflation by imposing McKinley era-style tariffs, and millions of people said to themselves, “that sounds like a good plan.” These voters don’t know what tariff is or who McKinley was, but they do know that eggs cost a lot right now, and it would be good if they cost less.

BTW one claim that has basically no evidence for it other than vibes is that Trump won because the American public wouldn’t vote for a black woman for president. Every single national poll between Harris and Trump had a better result for Harris than any comparable poll had for Biden, when the matchup was still between Biden and Trump. I would bet a lot of money, and not just in LoomCoin, that the Democrats would have gotten wiped out down ballot if Biden had remained on the ticket, despite the the ineffable charms of whiteness and maleness. (Of course some people wouldn’t vote for Harris because of her race and sex, but some people voted for her because of these things, and there’s no evidence that one group was significantly larger than the other).

It’s extremely unfortunate that a lot of people are going to take the lesson away from the last three presidential elections that Democrats “need” to nominate a white male, or at least a man. In contemporary American politics women candidates do not do worse than men all other things being equal — this has been studied very extensively — and there’s really no reason to think that Clinton’s and Harris’s gender was the decisive factor in those two (very close) elections.

In any event, I suppose this whole situation could pose some sort of problem for the whole theory and practice of democratic governance, but since we seem to be getting rid of democracy fairly rapidly that problem is becoming academic in the worst sense.