Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Alan Smithee, in an earlier post, made a good point. He reported on a poll:

The survey also asked respondents how they would vote if "a third party candidate ran in 2008 and promised to build a barrier along the Mexican border and make enforcement of immigration law his top priority." ... With that option, support fell sharply for both major parties. The Democrats still come out on top with support from 31% of Americans. The third party candidate moved into a virtual tie at 30% while the GOP fell to 21%.

This is what you always run into if you want to embrace the Jacksonian energies of the public. Public attitudes are a very mixed bag. Always have been -- the Jacksonian moment itself was a melange of things we would now consider quite wonderful and things we would consider quite appalling; same goes for the populist moment.

Part of the problem is that the folks have been simmering all their lives long in our toxic cultural broth of American self-congratulation and macho chest-thumping. They really haven't heard any opposing ideas that have any vigor -- just the "play nice" nanny-ism of the liberals. And even if that weren't so, there's no place in the world where immigration, in particular, doesn't make people anxious and bring out a mean streak in the citizenry.

You can think of all these attitudes and impulses swirling around in the public mind as if they were chemicals in solution; which ones precipitate out, or better, crystallize, can change depending on what you do with the solution. In particular, the answer you get depends crucially on the question you ask. The poll that Alan cites asked about a border wall, not about raising the minimum wage or protecting domestic jobs. Given a choice between a border wall and something that they believed would directly affect their economic well-being, would people be quite so carried away by chauvinism?

Making intelligent choices takes practice, and you're apt to make a few unintelligent ones before you get the hang of it. The American public hasn't had many opportunities to make real choices -- that's the whole point of this empty charade we call an electoral system, to deprive people of meaningful choice. Even more to the point, the public hasn't been confronted with the necessity to make a real choice, which is even more important. The public hasn't been given a clear-cut "if you want X, you can't have Y," where X and Y are both important to them. Both the Orthrian parties promise the public a cake that can be had and eaten at the same time. So people aren't accustomed to making, on the political plane, the kind of difficult adult decisions that they make all the time in daily life. This is why, on the political plane, Americans often seem very infantile and even stupid, whereas in their work and home life they are as grown-up and smart as any other nation (except when they're driving a car, but that's a special case of induced psychosis).

Personally, I wouldn't at all mind seeing a rabid bar-the-doors party taking some wind out of the Republicans' sails, as long as there was an equally rabid protect-your-job, protect-your-wages party doing the same to the Democrats. People could then decide -- would then have to decide -- what they really wanted. It could get a little hair-raising -- people are quite capable of making bad, foolish choices -- but all in all, I do think that given a real choice between their real interests on the one hand, and the Theater of Cruelty on the other, people would more often than not eschew the theater, though not without regret for its pulse-pounding excitements.

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