Politically active Americans, seated, in athletic wear

I like democracy the way Tila Tequila likes MySpace: generally and in principle, but almost never when it appears in individual manifestations. Winston Churchill, who is fortunately dead and unable to see himself name-checked immediately after Tila Tequila, remarked that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Now that the internet has threatened to turn our mediated discourse into a 24-hour conversation with the average voter, we are better equipped than ever to answer the fundamental question of American democracy: are we fucking stupid or what? The results of the most recent Newsweek/Daily Beast poll may surprise you. As usual, “surprise” means “grimly confirm.”

First of all, the image of pollster Douglas Schoen that appears on the left side of your screen is just a picture, and it will do no good to punch it. Remember that as you read that 37% of Americans support Obama’s recent health care reforms and 56% oppose them—yet only 41% support repealing them, whereas 44% oppose repeal. That a strong majority of those polled are against Obamacare yet also do not want to see it repealed is just the beginning of a fun strain of idiot hypocrisy running through the whole poll, by which Americans A) disapprove of any specific policy you ask them about, and also B) disapprove of the job Congress is doing by a 28-point margin, largely because C) they believe Republicans attack Obama’s policies without putting forward positive proposals. However, a plurality also doubts that the President has specific solutions to the country’s problems. Just to further thwart sense, most respondents would like to see Republicans control Congress in 2012.

So Americans are against everything they’ve heard about and want both parties to tell them more. This image of the US electorate as a sort of sick girlfriend who insists you make pancakes and then doesn’t eat them* is disheartening enough, but the real depression sets in when we get to theoretical 2012 elections. The most successful prospective challenger to President Obama in this poll is Mike Huckabee, which is irritating but reasonable. The second best prospect is Donald Trump. Seriously: in an election next year between Barack Obama and Donald Fucking Trump, the President wins by two points.

If you live in the United States and support representative democracy, as I do, you have to ask yourself: what would I do if I woke up in November to find that my fellow Americans had elected Donald Trump as President? The most logical answer, “explode in a column of fire and poop,” is disallowed. And I submit that the second most logical answer, “the American people would never do that,” requires a series of unpleasant assertions.

If we believe that Donald Trump would not actually stand a chance in a general election against Barack Obama, we are forced to argue that this poll does not reflect the will of the American people. Either a random sampling of 900 registered voters will turn up a terrifying number of mouth-fingering idiots, or the answers people give to polls do not express their actual beliefs and desires.

Neither of these scenarios is promising for American democracy. Perhaps the number of utter fucking ass-dwellers who will offer their opinions when someone calls them on the phone is enormous compared to the small portion of Americans who actually take the initiative to vote, and this vanguard of the motivated and informed guides the nation while their fellow citizens sit home and guard their televisions. That’s one way out, but it’s hardly a defense of democracy. The other rationalization—that a slate of up-down policy referenda and candidate names doesn’t accurately express what Americans want—isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the ballot, either.

So those of us who look at any contradictory, bafflingly stupid poll and say “that’s not America” are left with a troubling question: what is? The inquiry is complicated by the almost certain knowledge that, no matter how dumb the American people might be now, we have almost certainly been dumber in the past. It would be hard to argue that the average capacity for/interest in critical thinking was higher in, say, 1835. The country has certainly made some bonehead decisions since then, but we have gotten a long pretty well with what has been essentially the same electorate.*

Perhaps, then, our stupidity looms so terrifyingly large not because it has grown but because we have moved closer to it. Back in 1835, we could not call a random sampling of households and listen to them babble nonsensically about how the National Bank is a conspiracy of Episcopalians, whereas now we have the Hill.com comments section. In the same way that nobody was afraid of cancer during the Spanish-American war, this vast new outpouring of stupidity has been tumescing inside us all along. If you’ll excuse me, I have to go irradiate myself.

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