Is America Too Dumb For Democracy?

Why we shouldn't give up on what we no longer deserve

Editor’s Note: Have a question you’ve been sitting on that you haven’t asked Matt? Matt’s asking you why. Yeah, that’s right. Matt reserves the right to ask questions, too. How does it feel to have the tables turned? Give up your foolish pride, and Ask Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com.

Dear Matt,
Are we “evolved” enough to hold a democracy together? Can we rule ourselves with reason and equanimity? Or, are we too brutish and naive to expect something like democracy to work?
B. Mays

I know cynicism is the easy answer. And as a professional cynic, I confess to generally liking easy answers. So I could bludgeon you with all the boilerplate quotes all the other columnists cite to look erudite and history-steeped, when they, like you, just happen to have Google, too. And so, though I am tempted to quote Ben Franklin responding to the question of whether we have a republic or a monarchy (“A republic, if you can keep it”), or Winston Churchill, who gets credit for saying, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter” (even if he never actually did), I will not do so. Though I just did so. Consider me a white-liar in search of larger truths.

But here is an unvarnished truth pulled from my mental library, even if I’m lying again, and just picked it off of Goodreads.com. The science-fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, once wrote: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

That is not a blanket defense of so-called intellectuals on my part. They’re often just as idiotic as the idiots they have contempt for. Many, in fact, are merely idiots with better credentials, as anyone who has attended a liberal arts class in the last forty years can likely attest. (During college, I once sat through a film class where we kicked around whether “Rosebud” in Citizen Kane symbolized a clitoris, or just a sled.) So supposedly smart people can be very dumb, as well. Which shouldn’t let unapologetically dumb people — which describes most of the people serving in our current administration, including our head honcho — off the hook. Dumbness without pretension is still dumbness, too. Dumbness that makes the dumb people root for fellow dumb people over “smart” dumb people, isn’t doing anyone any favors. They’re just making us all dumber, then congratulating themselves for it. (As Trump himself has said in a rare moment of honesty, “Smart people don’t like me.”)

And that, I fear, is why our democracy, while not lost, is in a perilous state.