Democracy, Truck Rallies and Spectator Readers

NOTE: What follows is a caricature. A lot of great articles have been published in The Spectator. Benjamin Franklin certainly thought so.

I remember watching a TV program back in the good old days of George W Bush, in the bad early days after 9/11. A middle class white British reporter was interviewing middle-aged, white, overweight, tattooed Americans at a truck rally. Baseball caps were de rigueur. The subject of politics was broached. The general consensus was that the guys in Washington were ‘smart’ and it was best to leave them to get on with ‘it’.

Democracy, as in delegating power and thought on "smart" people in Washington, seemed to work for them. 

Let the guys in Washington get on with the boring stuff, leaving us boys back home doing what is important, i.e., attending truck rallies. 

Yeah, right.

After more than a decade of hindsight, it now looks like a snapshot of bygone innocence. House prices were rising, Irak had been ass-kicked, things were tickety-boo and, even if some people were smarter than others, everyone could honestly tell themselves that they were smart too. Life was a bed of rosy peach down and truck rallies.

Then 2008 happens, and pop goes the weasel. Splat. 

The only guys still floating are the 'elite', the guys who still 'look' smart, such as experts and politicians, and the guys who have a degree of financial insulation. Or both.

Down at the truck rally, things ain't so good. 

The wife is bitchin’ that if we can’t afford the mortgage, then we can’t afford to go down the truck rally either. With everyone trying to deny that they feel a tad foolish.

It’s pitchfork o’clock, in other words.

Down with the Leaders, say the Followers. Problem is, who’s gonna do the thinkin’? 

Thinkin’ is kinda boring, so folks gotta get someone new to do it for ‘em, someone they actually ‘GET’ what they say. 

The end result? EVALUATING what Leaders think is substituted by 'GETTING' what they say. A difficult problem gets substituted by an easy one. It's called human nature.

As in:

We’re gonna build a wall and them Mexicans are gonna pay for it. 

Your man can ‘get’ that, because it is exactly what he wants to hear: 

Someone else is to blame. Two plus two means it must be true, even if, to work, it needs to be five, especially if you are a Mexican. 

One might call this kind of reasoning the ‘get bias’: you are biased towards believing what you cognitively ‘get’.

Democracy In Action

Democracy, in practice, really does involve a delegation of authority and responsibility. Followers delegate the act of thinking on Leaders. The problem is that, for this to work, Followers must correctly evaluate their Leaders’ capacity to think straight. When they don’t, it doesn’t.

At this point, you might think I am an anti-American intent on lampooning the average US truck rally attendee. It is, I agree, a pretty easy target to hit, but think again. 

In Britain we are not doing much better. For example, we have gone from delegating our thinking on people who read The Economist to people who read The Spectator. To make matters worse, we have delegated our thinking on people who write for The Spectator, such as our national clown Boris.

This is not a good sign.

If you ask a Spectator reader why they don’t read The Economist, the stock answer is that The Economist is a bit too ‘serious’. 

This is not a good sign either.

If you then ask the average Spectator reader for a second reason why they don’t read The Economist they are likely to be stretched, not just because they can't think of a second reason, but more likely because they have never read The Economist. After a while, they end up answering a different, easier question, namely, why they voted for Brexit. There will be mutterings about ‘sovereignty’ and ‘immigration’. Finally, after a bit of prodding, they will blurt out that they don’t like ‘liberals’.

Interesting. Are they in favour, for example, of slavery? Or despotic monarchs? Or any of the other evils that liberals and liberal democracies have successfully rid us of in the last century and a half?

No, they say, with varying degrees of indignation and discomfort. What they don’t like, they say, is political correctness. 

Aha. So political correctness and liberal ideas are one and the same thing, right?

Yes, they say with the self-righteous air of one who was lost but now is found, of course they are.

Well, sorry, but they ain’t. 

They are two very different things and when you say that, the Spectator reader will give you a shifty look.

Not too dissimilar, in fact, to the look of many a US truck rally attendee in the post-2008 era.

So, having established, at the very least, a tenuous intellectual common ground between your average truck rally attendee from across the pond and your average Spectator reading Brit, what should you do with this information?

Well, given that Spectator readers are, in most other aspects of their lives, intelligent and sentient beings and include many a barrister, the sort of person who goes on to become a judge (IE, someone who can both get you out of as well as in to jail), I would strongly suggest praying.

I am an atheist, but what the heck? Nothing better comes to mind.