people don't waste time on things they can't control. elective oligarchy puts government beyond the reach of ordinary people. they cannot learn what's going on, they cannot say what to do about it. so they turn to the sports pages. as they should.

it doesn't have to be that way. if america were a democracy, it's people would be citizens. the founding fathers were the elite, they intended that the elite should continue to rule and did a good job of preserving their power through the constitution. one consequence is the use of national power to extend and defend the power of american wealth in foreign lands. the rich get the money, the tax-cows and cannon fodder cop the return fire.

yes, americans really are dumb. they put up with this.

I commend "commendatore" for his argument that we need to get beyond the civics teachers' slogan that the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy. And his argument as a whole helps make a point I'd like to emphasize: the problem of the contemporary U.S. liberal is less lack of self-criticism than an overreliance on "rationality" without understanding. You'll find more rationality suggested as the solution to our problem in some of the letters here, but it's really no solution at all.

What is wrong with rationality? The question, in the American setting, is about procedural rationality, since that is the format especially beloved of American liberals--as long as the rules are fair and equally applied, everything is OK, no matter what the rules are about. This liberalism rarely gets around to the question whether you have enough experience about a subject matter to make a considered judgment.

The thing about human rationality is that the more abstractly and merely procedurally it works, the more monstrous its results can be, since it is just a game of manipulating symbols that stand for individuals, classes, and unknowns (I've taught both traditional syllogistic logic and modern symbolic/mathematical logic--my characterization of logic is a bit too simplified, but it will do). Most people are basically logical, and in the fields and practices they know best or love they rarely fail to catch on when others mischaracterize them or to see consequences when changes are proposed (this is the fundamental premiss of Dilbert!).

The tendency to overconcern with one's immediate self-interest used to be countered by liberal education, which introduced young adults to different fields of experience, different forms of expression, different cultures. But over the past generation our academic culture submitted too readily to critical studies that claimed all the old curricular choices were merely expressions of power. The result is that curricula came to be developed precisely according to power relationships within the university, and there is every sign that this will continue, with extra-academic forces (read "money and politics") playing an ever more powerful role.

If what the university has to offer is only skills (logic, grammar, mathematics, management techniques, etc.) and information acquired from courses selected a la carte (a poor substitute for the disciplines of learning), then education will serve only spin (how to formulate information to persuade the audience in front of you), the rhetoric of power.

It is as though, to use an image, doctors taught bits andd pieces of anatomy without worrying about how the different bones connect to one another and to muscles, etc., much less worrying about how the body works as a whole (physiology). Universities no longer have the will to compel students (now seen as consumers, who are always right) to study what doesn't immediately appeal.

One thing liberals have to stop doing is making and accepting critiques of what is not perfect as though it is evil, and then proffering ill-considered alternatives that are often worse than the original. The saying has many fathers: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or to paraphrase Camus: sometimes you have to fight half-truths in the name of truths, and sometimes quarter-truths in the name of half-truths.

As long as presidential candidates are chosen by delegates and as long as the president is chosen by the Electoral Collage, voting is a sham!

I'd love to see America become a true democracy where officials are elected directly by the voters and not selected by partisan hacks.

A civics test to qualify voters does smack of Jim Crow, but would a civics test for political candidates be out of the question? That would certainly have prevented the candidacy of George W. Bush. Nor would legislative electors be the solution, since lawmakers are not essentially brighter than the public -- and in many cases are the ones who are doing their level best to keep voters ignorant.

If American voters have been "dumbed down," the fault isn't theirs, but lies with pandering politicians and a fatuous mainstream media. When office-seekers play to the fears of voters while supporting policies which are not in the interests of the majority of the people and the media hypes mud-slinging, "gotchas" and the horse-race aspect of campaigns without informing voters about the candidates' positions on substantive issues, then the flaw is less the system itself than in the political and media leaders who operate within it.

Democracy works best by the informed consent of the people. The key word is "informed." When lies, deception and secrecy are used to keep the public misinformed, then the system -- and the policies which it produces -- has little chance of succeeding.

The main reason voters are malleable is ignorance. Irrationality is a consequence of ignorance: there is no point in applying logic when there are no facts immediately available to support a possible argument.

Why are voters ignorant? In many cases, it's just a family tradition.

Sounds like a great idea to me. Knee-jerk fear of Jim Crow style abuses is no reason to throw out a potentially great idea of keeping irrational, ignorant dumbasses out of the decision making process. IMHO, people like that forfieted their right to vote after the Iraq fiasco. The rest of us are going to be paying for their mistakes for a long time - we shouldn't ever be held hostage by their massive dumbassery again. I say make everyone take a civics test when they turn 18, if they don't pass, they can't register to vote. They can retake it, say once a year, until they pass. But they can't vote until they do. What's so bad about that?