Much has been said recently about low information voters. Presumably they are people with only a vague idea of how government works and limited exposure to reliable news sources regarding domestic and world affairs. That may be true, but I suspect it can be too easily construed to mean that low information voters are not well educated nor very intelligent.
My experience with acquaintances throughout the country, who fit the definition of low information voters, is that they are very well informed about the world that envelops their immediate vicinity and are skilled at surviving in it. The role of government and public policy beyond the immediacy of local matters is a vague and distant thing to them. As far as they can tell whether they are well informed or not doesn’t make much difference in what will happen to affect their lives. Exceptions that can grab their attention are inflation, high cost of loans, food, housing, and threats to personal and national security. Their attention may be driven more by emotion than reason and is generally defensive rather than proactive. In other words, what they want done is to stop conditions threatening them from getting worse than they already are. Their concern has real validity that can make them vulnerable to manipulation by skilled operatives.
How many low information voters there actually are is unknown. A superficial review of various pollsters and scholars comes up with estimates between15% and 40% of the voting public. It’s a spread so wide as to be meaningless. I think the best that can be said is that there are a lot of them, but they’re not a plurality. What they have become is a scapegoat on whom the blame for Trump’s election has been cast.
In the last several decades we have witnessed radical right wing skilled operatives influencing low information voters into casting ballots against their own best interests. If anything has given right wing authoritarians the advantage, it’s that they’ve learned the art of community organizing and distorted it to serve ends detrimental to the good of those they have organized.
Community organizing has also been used by agents of a more just liberal democracy to affect social and political change bringing more justice and greater opportunity for ordinary people. They have tapped into the intelligence and expressive sophistication that is applied to matters other than the intricacies of public policy and governmental operations. By so doing they’ve mobilized so-called low information voters to act together for the well-being of their neighborhoods and communities against the forces of oppression and discrimination. Yet somehow they have forgotten the lessons learned and that has led to the accusation of condescending, liberal elitism.
The current cure all is putting greater emphasis on basic civics education. However needed it is not a solution. I’ve taught what amounts to basic 10th grade civics to adult MBA student business executives and blue-collar workers. In that experience, it wasn’t that they hadn’t been exposed to the subjects of government and public policy but that in the 10th grade they’d found the subject boring, with their curiosity and intellectual interest laying elsewhere. So while I believe a reinvigorated civics curriculum is absolutely necessary, I don’t expect it will solve the problem. Something much different is needed.
Recognizing and honoring the intelligence and sophistication that low information voters have in regard to the conditions of their lives is the first step needed for liberal democracy to counteract the brutal propaganda of right wing manipulation. The conversation has to be devoid of any sign of intellectual superiority or class condescension. The emphasis must be on working with people not working on behalf of them. It means learning about the successes and failures of the civil rights movement of the 1960s and applying the lessons well to the 21st century. It also means recognizing that history is somewhat chaotic. Marx and his successors were dead wrong when they thought history was on a predictable linear trajectory. Enlightenment philosophers were also wrong when they imagined a stable society of general prosperity could be had once reason had solved everything.
Advocates of liberal democracy need to be comfortable with the reality that individual decisions and public opinion are a tangled mess of the rational and irrational, well reasoned and deeply emotionally felt reality. Economic prosperity is not the highest measure of social prosperity and success. The highest standards of individual and public prosperity are moral and ethical values held at arm’s length from contemporary social norms. Finally, there must be a more clear definition of and commitment to the common good striving to make things better while accepting that the temporary condition of good enough is good enough.