COMM 386: Let's take the high road (for a change)

ASSIGNED READING ALERT! The link below may be hazardous to your preconceived notions. In class Friday I will hand out a three-page handout [duh! I guess that's what you always do with handouts] ... I'll distribute a three-page hard copy printout of an article on Newsweek's website that discusses some of the questions we are asking ourselves this semester: In it Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine, says we "want desperately to believe that the American voters, whatever mistakes they may make, are at bottom rational and competent." Ehrenhalt's essay is thoughtful and nuanced, and I can't do it justice with a paraphrase. But he comes close to his main point when he says:

An electorate, in other words, is something like a jury. It's a panel of ordinary people, limited in their knowledge and training, who combine to produce a judgment of greater wisdom than any of them could make alone. The crowd, in some mysterious way, is wiser than the individual. The average voter may be no genius, but the electorate as a group is no fool. So the theory goes. It is a theory that allows candidates, scholars and journalists to get through the day without having to question the fundamental tenets of American government.

But, he adds immediately:

I don't contend that the theory is groundless. There is something in the wisdom of crowds. What seems to me inescapable is that the past few years have not been kind to those who accept the rational voter idea as an article of faith.

Ehrenhalt cites the false assumptions behind the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, but he also cites cites misleading campaign rhetoric from both camps in this year's election. He concludes, we can have an informed electorate that "won't require candidates to give stump speeches berating the voters as fools. But it will require some painful thinking about what a "rational voter" really is and how we might go about making more of them."

Ehrenhalt's essay is not comfortable reading, but I think it's vitally important for us to read it and discuss it.