Midterms and Nitwits: Are “Stupid” Voters the Problem?

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1816. There’s a thing about “never,” too:

It includes yesterday.

It’s not news to anyone that the Republicans took a shellacking last night in the midterms. The Democrats not only seized both the House and Senate, and flipped four governorships, but they greatly outperformed the polls. While we can wonder how that happened, something is for sure: Tuesday was not American voters’ finest hour.

A sampling:

• In Texas — which has “gone blue” in accordance with my long-standing predictions — Americans elected to the Senate James Talarico, a left-wing radical who’d fit seamlessly into Berkeley’s sociology department.
• Michiganders made a senator of Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, who’d fit right in at a Pakistani madrassa.
• In Maine, residents elected to the Senate a man once endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Troy Jackson. Jackson is a logger, by the way — which is wonderful — only, now he’ll be taking his ax to America’s institutions.
• Voters also elected at least six DSA members/endorsed candidates to office. They’ll be joining the more than 250 such officials already in power.

Can these be characterized as intelligent, informed voting decisions?

Some would call them “stupid.”

Idiocracy Cometh?

One man who did, on Election Day, is The Federalist’s M.D. Kittle. In a piece not-so-subtly titled “Stupid Voters Are The Biggest Threat To America,” he wrote:

The republic Benjamin Franklin wondered if we could keep is in trouble. Big trouble.

It’s been trending that way for a while, but this Election Day could put a bullet in the old girl’s stomach.

The polls don’t necessarily worry me. They have been little more than psyops aimed at depressing conservative turnout in the Trump era. Who could forget this gem from the Des Moines Register in early November 2024: “Kamala Harris leapfrogs Donald Trump to take lead near Election Day”. The president won Iowa by 13 percentage points, swept all seven swing states and grabbed the popular vote on the way to GOP control of the White House and Congress.

What worries me are voters. Sadly, many of them are stupid. And angry. Dean Vernon Wormer of National Lampoon’s Animal House advised, “Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.” The same applies for the furious and the dumb. For a constitutional republic, it’s a lethal cocktail.

If you question Kittle’s thesis, just consider this from the Stupid File: Many voters are upset about gas prices.

Yet Arizona residents defeated Proposition 141 (tweet below), which would’ve prohibited the government from instituting a mileage tax.

Some would call this incongruent.

Others would say it’s dumb.

Now, some are implicating vote fraud in yesterday’s GOP losses — and, yes, the Democrats have cheating down to a science. (Few have written more about that than I have.) But “that dog don’t hunt.”

For starters, electoral fraudsters can’t hold sway unless people empower them enough first. Second, none of that changes the unmistakable cultural, moral, and spiritual decay bedeviling our civilization.

As to this, Kittle laments the fruits of the above — that Americans are glomming on to socialism.

These people actually believe it will make their lives more affordable.

Of course, we’ve seen socialism fail repeatedly, from Robert Owen’s New Harmony commune to the Soviets, Cubans, Venezuelans, North Koreans, and beyond. Yet 43 percent of Americans — and a majority of young Americans — now view socialism positively.

Kittle quotes Hillsdale College Professor Charles Steele as remarking that this is a civilizational bellwether. If most Americans think “socialism is the right path,” he said, “well, the American experiment is over in a sense.”

Anatomy of an Idiocy

Explaining this ignorance, Kittle implicates the usual suspect: (mis)education. It is true, too, that American children have for generations been indoctrinated with left-wing propaganda in schools. They’ve usually heard about the evils of Nazism (though I did meet a 14-year-old who didn’t know who Hitler was). But they seldom know about socialism’s brutal history of destroying human bodies, souls, and economies.

For example, I’ve interacted with more than one young person who was shocked — shocked — to learn that communists murdered 60-100 million people during the 20th century. And I had to tell them about it for a simple reason: Their schools never did.

This said, is education, or lack thereof, really the entire problem?

Back in elementary school, we (and I think I speak for most or all of my classmates) feared communism/socialism. Yet something just occurred to me about that:

I don’t ever remember being taught about it in class. The focus was the three R’s and basic history.

The difference is that our parents, culture, and moral foundation were different. That the socialists were the bad guys (e.g., the USSR) — and they were — was still largely embedded in the culture. And it’s what is assumed that’s learned best.

Regarding the moral-foundation point, it’s most significant. Socialism offended our sense of virtue as nails across a blackboard offend the ear. This, again, gets at that deeper issue.

When New Data Runs Into Bad Programming

That is, is the matter here simply one of a lack of information? Imagine I’m taking a drug, blissfully unaware it’s destroying my body. If lacking knowledge is the only problem, all you need do is inform me and show adequate proof. I’ll stop taking the substance. What, however, if I’m addicted? What if I have a strong physical, emotional, or psychological vested interest in using the drug?

(Note: I knew a person who, when told cigarettes were bad for him, insisted that they “can’t prove that.” He knew better in his heart — but his heart was also hooked.)

Likewise, and as Soviet defector Yuri Bezmenov once pointed out, left-wing Americans are “demoralized” — they are “programmed,” he said. “Exposure to true information does not matter anymore.”

“The facts tell nothing” to a demoralized person, Bezmenov added.

I explained this in-depth in February in “Yes, Leftists are “Evil.” Here’s How They Got That Way — and Why You’ll Never Change Them.”

The bottom line is that ignorance can be dispelled with teaching. Stupidity can perhaps be managed with patient, loving guidance. Terminator-citizens programmed to kill the nation, however, can’t be talked out of their dark aims. Twigs fatally bent when little grow up misshapen — and will stop at nothing to twist civilization into their own mutated image.

For those interested, Bezmenov’s commentary follows.