How can democracy exist when most people ignore the philosophical principles behind politics?

Question

Politics can be seen as "applied philosophy," which means they depend on a philosophical basis. Yet most people reduce politics to issues, without paying any attention to the patterns and goals behind and in front of such issues.

How can a democracy work when the average citizen fails to see politics for what it really is, the real-world interface of some basic philosophies? And, what can be done to educate people so that they don't vote only based on issues but learn to see the "big picture"?

There are no "real" democracies in the world.

From the electoral point of view, the USA is a democracy, though: all people have the right to vote, and all votes are equal.

From the political point of view, it is a republic. That's why the definition of what the USA is is not "a republic" but "a representative republic with a strong democratic tradition." Got it?

Interesting how a question like this:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index;_ylt=Aqw3E046oCFa2gm16LNhDxfY7BR.?qid=20070120130251AAAryzX

gets a dozen answers while any serious question about politics is ignored. I guess that shows the level of current political discourse in the USA.

What's next? People voting based on the size of the candidates' schlong?

Answer 1

Ah, but your question requires a thoughtful answer, which most of us, particularly when it comes to politics, are not capable of.

I once posted a question asking how we expected to govern ourselves when we couldn't rationally debate any question without shouting at one another. Someone told me that I was delusional if I expected rational debate on Yahoo answers and they were probably right. The format just doesn't provide for the back and forth necessary to really answer the deep questions.

All that aside, however, your point is a good one... Many of the founding fathers, Jefferson in particular, expressed this very concern. Jefferson stressed again and again that a democracy needed a particular environment to thrive. The bill of rights addresses a great many of these requirements, but one about which Jefferson wrote a great volume that was never addressed is the need for an educated electorate. The anxiety of the founders about the ignorance of the electorate can be discerned in a number of features of our government, primarily that it is a representative and not a direct democracy and specifically, though perhaps more subtly, in the electoral college. So a republican (little r) democracy was established as an antidote to the ignorance of direct democracy (or mob rule, as de Tocqueville describes it.) (What I'm afraid our founding fathers did not foresee, which is an entirely different topic, is the rise of materialism, hyper-capitalism and consumer culture, that would eventually infect even those "gentlemen of high standing," on which our republic was meant to depend.)

I fear, however, that the problem may be even worse than you describe. Recent studies have shown that party loyalty has even less to do with "the issues" than it does with identity, i.e. people vote with people who they perceive as being like them and that in fact they choose sides on "the issues" and rationalize those choices based on what everyone around them is doing and saying rather than any deeply held beliefs (which may explain the recent Christian stampede to the right...or I suppose any stampede for which our history offers numerous examples...I believe the Republicans-big R- understood or at least perceived this behavior well before any of the studies ever demonstrated it.) We've know for a long time that people can convince themselves of anything if they want to bad enough, so this, perhaps, should come as no surprise.

In some ways I think people voting strictly on "the issues" would be a major advancement over where we are today and that your comment about voting based on certain anatomical qualities is probably not far from the truth. (I have heard college educated otherwise intelligent people say that they voted for George W. Bush because he seemed like the kind of guy they could drink a beer with...I know they were probably just repeating something they heard on TV, but in any case, appearance and personality overwhelmed any concern about ideology or issues...and this statement was probably the outcome of the identity preferences noted previously...even some of our major media outlets succumbed to his charms...go back and read some of the articles that came out at the beginning of the 2000 primaries as Bush was anointed the Republican candidate.) There is a clannish/tribal element to human biology that doubt can be overcome...so I'm not sure even education would work (though it would be nice if our schools could teach people to think critically rather than believe based on the "respectability", personality or sheer volume level of the authority promoting those beliefs.)

We can find hope, I think, that democracies and bi-cameral representative democracies with multi-branched checks and balances governments in particular offer some benefits that are seldom stated (perhaps because they're so cynical about human nature): They are glacially slow and stable (repeat after me...gridlock is gooooood...) and at the same time readily adaptable, they offer course corrections whenever anything veers too far from the sane and rational (though I know many liberals would passionately debate me on this one), in effect they average out the stupidity, they prevent any one incompetent person who finds their self in a leadership position from doing too much damage for too long (yes I believe highly educated people can be stupid...including people who somehow manage to attain leadership positions) and they provide a reliable outlet for built-up tensions that blow apart many other societies.

That is not to say that democracies are always wise or do the right thing or the moral thing or adapt the best policies or never hurt people or guarantee that a society will be the most advanced or powerful etc., but they do muddle through.

The rest, the liberal, the conservative, the reactionary, the socialist, the libertarian, the progressive (abortion, taxes, capital punishment, stem cell research, flag burning, immigration, terrorism, environmental protection, medicare, the deficit, social security and even wars) are just details which in the very very long run mean nothing. (Fascism, Communism, Monarchy and any other form of rule based on authoritarianism or totalitarianism is however mortally dangerous.) The only truly important goal is to maintain our democracy and the environment necessary to maintain that democracy.

Answer 2

The rules are laid down in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Read them when you're not doing anything.

Answer 3

First we are not nor have we ever been a Democracy. We are a REPUBLIC do you know the difference?

Answer 4

i have something called the 10% rule.....no matter what happens 10% of the people are too stupid to know what's going on.....you probably saw a few of those 10% people and really freaked out and said.....holy crap.....something is wrong.....nothing is really wrong, it's just some people have parents who are crackheads, moms who are sluts, dads who are drunks, poverty homes, no moral background, etc etc