Well … yes, people are stupid. Half of them are below average intelligence! And sometimes even smart people do stupid things – viz Orwell’s observation that “some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe in them”.
On the other hand, there’s that John Stuart Mill quote, about all stupid people being conservatives. (Probably the only Mill that most Lefties know – certainly they don’t know or don’t believe in his attitude to Free Speech, and if they knew his typically Victorian attitude to the peoples Britain was colonizing, their eyes would fall out.)
But Mill was right, in a way he didn’t mean. Consider France. Its intelligentsia have been on the Left since forever … for many decades, most of them were sympathyzers of the Soviet Union. But fortunately, the French peasantry – not known for deep intellectual understanding – kept these people out of power.
Put it this way: if politics were a puzzle, like solving a second-order partial differential equation, yes, it would be a pity that so few people – about a sixth of the general population, as I recall – are in the second or higher standard deviation for IQ (115 or above).
But poltiics is about perceived material interests. That French peasant may not have known anywhere near as much as Jean-Paul Sartre, but he knew that he didn’t want to be herded on to a collective farm, even if a lot of clever people told him it would result in a great increase in the production of foodstuffs, because Planning … Rationality … Elimination of Wasteful Competition.
So also for our people. Yes, it can be disheartening, trying to get people to do the smart thing, the thing that you can clearly see is in their own interests. It’s not always clear to them. Or they feel that the effort is not worth it. (And, given the Tweedle-Dee-Tweedle-Dum nature of our political parties until the TrumpEruption, they weren’t so wrong.)
But reality is on our side. Ben Franklin’s observtion that ‘Experience keeps a dear school, but a fool – [your average voter] – will learn in no other’, has to be supplemented by the observation that we cannot avoid experience.
Our people are going to school in the school of experience, and the Left seem almost determined to administer a harsh punishment to them.
We must not despair. Rather, we must prepare. (Sorry to sound like Jesse Jackson!) And organize. In your particular county, in this particular episode, the Good Guys lost. But they’re going to win, eventually.
If this were not true, if there were no human progress, despite our species’ stupidity, we wouid still be wandering about picking up dead birds off the ground to eat and sleeping in caves.
In the well-worn words of a great scientist, e pur, si muove.
Yes, yes.