Are Most People to Dumb to Vote?

 by M. Richard Maxson

     Constitutionally speaking should everyone be allowed to vote? Is this what the founding fathers visualized? It wasn't like this at the beginning of our Republic. Only men who were supposedly intelligent had that privilege. Today the rules are different. The United States touts itself as a Democratic Republic where it's one person, one vote so we must ask ourselves  is democracy wasted on humanity?
      That’s the conclusion of a new study led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, which shows that the vast majority of voters are not only too stupid or ignorant to know that they are stupid or ignorant. They are also too stupid or ignorant to tell when the same is true of a candidate. People who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. Their political polarization blinds them to good ideas or candidates. As political analyst Thomas Sowell observed in his book,  Vision of the Anointed, "disagree with someone on the Right and he is likely to think you wrong, obtuse, foolish, a dope. Disagree with someone on the Left and he is likely to think you insensitive, selfish, a sell-out, possibly evil."
     This may impede the democratic process, because the assumption is that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can not recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. A growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to prove this notion. Dunning believes people's inability to assess their own knowledge is the cause of many of society's ills.
      It’s almost inevitable whenever any political group loses an election that they blame the stupidity, gullibility and/or lack of moral character on the part of their opponents for the loss. When George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, liberals infamously tried to say that stupid people preferred Bush by a 4-to-1 margin over Kerry.
     He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. The research shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments. " In the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise."
     As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea or a candidate really is."