I swore I wouldn’t do this, but I’m afraid Donald Trump will feature again today, albeit not centre stage.
The US election this year could not be stranger, could it? Commentators and wise heads are scrabbling madly to keep up with a campaign that will not stop throwing curve balls, defying anyone to predict what will happen next.
We all know that the current King of Curve Balls is Donald Trump, but analysing his appeal led me down an interesting avenue.
Mr Trump unashamedly appeals to the less educated, the dissatisfied, the angry anti-establishment voter. There’s a lot of them and there is a powerful argument for saying that their voice should be heard.
That’s what democracy is about after all – giving a voice to the many, not just the few.
I mean no disrespect in my reference to ‘the mob’ in my title. I’ve used it as a label for those who are not well educated, are on low incomes, are not individually powerful or influential. I’m talking about a very large group of people here. These people matter just as much as anyone else, so please don’t misunderstand me.
When we make choices, we base them on the information we have; our experience, knowledge and training, our ethical and moral codes, our mood, the influence of peers and advertising. All these things come together in our heads and lead us to choose A, B, C or whatever. It follows that if you have bad information, or misleading advertising to contend with, your choices will not be good ones, through no fault of your own.
If I imagine myself living in a small town, far from the big coastal cities of America, maybe I can consider how I would act. What choices would I make?
So here I am with a job in a car repair shop, I’ve never been outside the USA. I had a trip to LA once with the lads, but what I really know is the town I was born in and live in still. I know and love the people close to me. We’re a tight-knit group and we look out for each other. We hunt and fish in our spare time and drink in the local sports bar most nights. Sometimes ‘Fox News’ is on one of the TVs and that’s pretty much my only source of news. I’ve heard a lot about how the politics in Washington is broken. I know I haven’t had a pay rise in years and my brother lost his house last year. Normally I don’t pay a lot of attention to elections and I’ve never voted in one, but then there’s this guy on the TV and on all the posters and boy does he talk big! He’s telling me that these Muslims are coming here to kill me, that the Mexicans are swarming the country and that the politicians won’t do anything about it. It’s scaring me. He talks like my Grandad used to when someone trespassed on his ranch. We talk about this guy in the bar. Everyone thinks that it’s time we got a president who’ll sort it all out and I reckon Mr Trump sounds like the man for the job. He gets my vote!
It’s hard to fault my car mechanic’s reasoning. He’s basing his choices on what he knows.
So what is missing? What is that he does not know, but should?
The answer is a great many things. He has virtually no knowledge of most of America, let alone the rest of the world. He doesn’t know the difference between someone who worships Islam and an Islamic jihadist. He doesn’t understand the consequences of what Donald Trump is proposing. He can’t join the dots from what happens in congress and the senate to how that affects his life.
Why should he? Does he need that information and understanding in his daily life? No, he does not.
Should he be obliged to learn about these things in his spare time? No, he should not.
All we ask in a democracy is that you make a choice – good or bad. No-one said anything about passing an exam before making it.
My question then. Knowing that they will make uninformed choices, should we heed the mob? Unequivocally, yes.
Churchill said (he was quoting someone else) “…democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those others…”. It is a flawed system, but anything else means that the many lose their voice to the few.
It is up to those at the top, the very people who the ‘many’ elected, to make democracy work for the benefit of all. They have that responsibility. We cannot expect voters to challenge their own understanding of the world. It is the job of politicians and educators to tell the people what they need to know in order to make informed choices. It doesn’t matter if you’re left wing, right wing, reformer, establishment or whatever, you have that duty.
If you seek to win votes by misrepresenting the world to the electorate then you have betrayed the vital principles that underpin democracy.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and explaining how you would skin the cat is what a politician should be doing when seeking your vote. If they tell you it’s a cat when it’s a dog, or tell you they’ll skin it but secretly don’t, then they are a liar and a fraud. They would be a very a bad choice to make.
Which leaves us with the ultimate dilemma with our democratic system overseen by those we probably shouldn’t have voted for last time…
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
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