Knowledge Is Freedom

posted at 4:50 pm on October 20, 2009 by Doctor Zero

Today we learned the astonishing story of the Justice Department’s intervention in Kinston, North Carolina, where voters had decided to dispense with party affiliation for local candidates. The DOJ ruled that party affiliation was necessary because black voters could only select their “candidates of choice” if those candidates were clearly labeled as Democrats, and that Kinston’s white voters would only vote for a black candidate if they knew he was a Democrat.

To call this outrageous on several levels is like saying “The Exorcist” is a somewhat disturbing movie. The highly politicized Justice Department can be criticized for its meddling in local election laws, but it’s hard to argue with the fundamental accuracy of their assessment. I have no doubt that both white and black liberal voters in Kinston would have trouble picking out the Democrats to vote for, if they weren’t clearly identified with a letter “D” after their names.

What percentage of the voters in any district have carefully studied their candidates’ positions on all of the issues? For that matter, how many voters understand the issues well enough to evaluate those positions? How many voters make the effort to cut through the filter of a heavily biased media to gain a complete understanding? When the issues are inflated to the scale of immense federal programs, with wildly unpredictable results, such a full understanding might be virtually impossible, at least for someone with a day job.

Even gaining encyclopedic knowledge of the issues would not make voting a matter of simple logic and sound judgment. Politicians naturally tend to change their positions in response to shifts in public opinion… assuming, of course, they were honest about those positions to begin with. We often speak of electing a politician to do something, as though the voters were hiring an employee, but in reality the political class is working for tomorrow’s voters. They’re much more concerned with winning the support of those who can re-elect them… rather than the largely powerless bunch that elected them in the first place, and now have little influence outside of improbable recall threats.

If you’re lucky enough to have a candidate of absolute candor and loyalty - as honest as a penitent at the Pearly Gates and constant as the northern star - it’s still highly unlikely you’ll agree with all of their stands on the issues of the day. You’ll probably be choosing between someone who holds 60% of your beliefs, and someone who holds 30%. On the small scale of a town like Kinston, North Carolina, this type of compromise is manageable – you can forgive a city council candidate for their support of increased bridge tolls, if they promise to fund the new library your children desperately need. On a large scale, these compromises produce the cognitive dissonance that makes national politics seem insane. What if you’re passionately pro-life, and strongly opposed to socialized medicine, but only your pro-choice Congressional candidate agrees with you on the socialized medicine issue? The odds of your finding a candidate who represents most of your beliefs diminishes, as the ladder of political power is ascended.

The Department of Justice is probably correct about the political ignorance of Kinston’s voters, but their solution to the problem is horrendously wrong-headed. To follow the DOJ’s logic, even putting “D” or “R” beside the candidates’ names would not guarantee blacks and liberal whites would always choose the Democrat. Didn’t we learn in 2000 that crowded ballots confuse voters who scarcely bother to read them? Why doesn’t the Justice Department simply issue lists of Party-approved Democrat candidates to minority voters, and require only a thumb print to vote for the whole slate?

Voting is a civic duty that should be taken seriously, and exercised by informed citizens. The last thing we need is more mindless blocs of carefully tilled and harvested voters. What we need is decentralized power and less government control of our lives, allowing the electorate to cast meaningful votes on issues a working stiff has a fighting chance of understanding. Blind choice is not free choice.

Few of those casting ballots in the 2008 suspected their representatives would soon be attempting to pass a 1500-page health care bill that virtually no one on Earth has read in its entirety. A gigantic government can never be truly democratic (or, more precisely, republican) because the informed support and consent of the voters is impossible. Incomprehensible truth is as useless to free citizens as deliberate lies, and the two can be extremely difficult to tell apart. Few people make the effort to separate them. The Justice Department is only forcing Kinston to do what most of the country does anyway: check off all the Ds or Rs, then boast of how they voted against all the right people.

Knowledge is freedom. The command of a titanic government you don’t understand, diluted only by the periodic exercise of a vote that reflects your hopes more than your will, is inevitably tyrannical.

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