Of Course Voters Are Wrong

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

 

If I may, I’d like to piggy back off Dan’s excellent post, “We Don’t Have to Pretend the Voters Are Always Right.” Dan writes:

 

Second, it’s outrageously hypocritical for Trump supporters in particular to play this game. If you listen to Trump or other prominent MAGA spokespeople — politicians, pundits, etc. — you will hear from them a steady stream of invective against all manner of other Republican politicians. Ron DeSantis? Nikki Haley? Mitch McConnell? George W. Bush? Mitt Romney? John McCain? You will hear specific complaints that the party went in the wrong direction and personally betrayed them by nominating Romney, McCain, the Bushes, and Bob Dole. But guess what: All of those people won their primaries, too. You can’t have it both ways: If the people who nominated Trump are beyond criticism, then the nomination of all those other people is also beyond criticism.

 

And that’s before we get to general elections! Unless one believes that some higher power breathes unparalleled wisdom into anyone who registers as a Republican the very moment that he signs his name on the line — or, by contrast, that some higher power sucks all wisdom out of anyone who has registered as a Democrat or as an independent or as anything else — then, by the logic of one’s personal preferences, one is pretty much obliged to conclude that the country is full of voters who make “bad” political decisions. Like many people, I believe that elections are superior to the alternative, but this does not force me to conclude that there is something magical or impeccable about voters in any given realm. Voters picked Woodrow Wilson over William Howard Taft, and then reelected Wilson in 1916. Voters ratified Prohibition. Voters elected Jimmy Carter. Voters selected Bill Clinton over George H. W. Bush. Voters chose Barack Obama — twice. Thanks to voters, Kamala Harris is the vice president of the United States. As a result of voters, Elizabeth Warren, Mazie Hirono, Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durbin, Ed Markey, Bob Menendez, and Chuck Schumer are duly elected members of the Senate. Of course voters get it wrong.

 

It matters, though, what one means by “wrong.” When I say that voters made the “wrong” choice in, say, selecting Barack Obama to be president, I do not mean that those voters are stupid or lesser, or that they ought to have been prevented from making that call, or that my own predilections ought to have prevailed come what may. I mean that, in my estimation, their calculations were off. Some of this is objective: One might argue, for example, that James Buchanan made the Civil War much worse than it would otherwise have been. Some of it is subjective: I like lower taxes, so I dislike politicians who want to raise taxes. None of it is personal. Many of my friends voted for Obama. So did the doctor who delivered both of my children. Ought they to conclude that I have contempt for them?

 

Obviously not. Back in 2016, when, to my horror, Donald Trump was winning the Republican nomination, I was often told that to criticize the choices that his voters had made was to “attack” those voters or “hate” those voters or “look down on” those voters. But this was absurd. First, this rule never seemed to apply the other way around; by definition, my choices for the nomination were being rejected, but nobody ever seemed to care about that. Second, if that rule were taken to its logical conclusion, nobody would ever be able to disagree with anyone else about electoral politics ever again. There is a line in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible that neatly sums up the trap: “Is every defense an attack upon the court?” If one is unable to argue for a candidate who is not Donald Trump without being accused of attacking Donald Trump’s current set of voters, then one is unable to engage in political persuasion at all. In other contexts, this is bloody obvious: Nobody told Ronald Reagan in 1980 that he was “insulting” those who had voted for Jimmy Carter by attacking Carter as a failure. The idea is silly in the extreme.

 

To function, liberal societies require people to accept disagreement without retreating into tribal indignation. Sometimes, this can be a burden. By design, the United States is home to a bunch of different religious groups whose core tenets are not only incompatible with one another, but make claims about the other’s holdings that are profoundly offensive to the devout. One would hope that most political convictions are held less deeply than their religious counterparts — especially when those convictions intersect with mediocrities such as Joe Biden and Donald Trump — but, irrespective of their strength, it is incumbent upon a free people to treat them in precisely the same way. Throughout their lives, Americans ought to expect to proselytize and be subject to proselytization, to have their choices endorsed and their choices rejected, and to bear witness both to the joy of raising icons and the pain of iconoclasm — and, ideally, to do all of these things without making the whole process about themselves. Sorry guys, you’re just not that special.