Should You Vote? 20/20 Thinks You Might Be Too Stupid

By Robert Struckman, 10-14-08

Last week, a faux reporter on the comedian Jon Stewart’s Daily Show produced a hilarious report on undecided, swing voters. The point of the segment was to lampoon the stupid bloc, the “swingest of swing” voters, who hold the outcome of every election in their idiotic hands.

The Daily Show segment seemed funny until I saw this piece by reporter John Stossel on 20/20, which actually makes the argument that uninformed young voters are too ignorant to make decisions about America’s leadership and should avoid the polls on Election Day.

Stossel reaches his conclusion by going to a rock concert and asking newly registered voters fill-in-the-blank questions, standard high school civics class fare. How many members are in the U.S. Senate? What’s Roe V. Wade?

Some know the answers, he intones ominously, but most do not.

Then he makes the tremendous and illogical leap that if these young voters can’t identify a photo of a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, they “don’t know anything” and aren’t knowledgeable enough to vote. He even gets a so-called expert, conservative author Bryan Caplan who wrote The Myth of the Rational Voter, to characterize politics as so “complicated” that important national decisions should be left “in wiser hands.”

Where do you start on something like this? Has Caplan ever heard of “democracy?” Oh, and the geniuses on Wall Street and K Street have sure done a great job, right? Maybe we should leave everything in their hands?

Underlying Stossel’s ridiculous report is the offensive, Puritanical notion that he and Caplan somehow know best what qualifies someone to vote. It’s the idea that there’s a pool of information out there that, once obtained, leads every logical voter to the same “correct” conclusion. Is that what politics is?

It seems Stossel and Caplan (whose book was applauded by the right-wing thinktank, the Cato Institute) are actually arguing that the interests of regular people should stay out of the way of the interests of America’s elite, who obviously know best.

Maybe each of Stossel’s young voters actually knows about their own economic realities, maybe about the job market, student loans, the price of gasoline and airline tickets. Maybe that’s the knowledge voters use—along with notions of what government should do— to make decisions. And maybe that’s just as it should be.

Like all voters, I’m not always happy with election outcomes. But isn’t that the point with democracy?

Now. For some levity.... You gotta see this from the Daily Show.

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