America’s Elusive Intellect

By Sam Huntington

Woodrow Wilson

One always hears this question: Are Americans smart enough for Democracy?  A solid body of people think the answer is “no.”  Among them are Socrates, Aristotle, Woodrow Wilson, and Johnathan Gruber.

You remember Johnathan Gruber.  He’s the MIT professor who helped create Bobo Care.  He was called in front of Congress to explain several remarks he made on the cocktail circuit inside Washington, D.C., about the stupidity of the American voter.  Some of us are nicer about how we phrase such concepts as stupidity.  Rush Limbaugh used the expression “low information voter” to explain the overwhelming success of incompetent politicians and horrible foreign and domestic policies.

We should also fondly remember Jay Leno, host of The Tonight Show.  Mr. Leno quizzed college students about history, politics, and current events.  His revealed truth, aired on national television, was that Americans are not smart enough for much of anything.

If you ask a Democrat whether Republicans are smart enough to handle democracy, you’d get an identical response if you asked a Republican the same thing about Democrats.  Bipartisan disdain for the masses has been a constant for a few years.  Fact: the ordinary man lacks the education, experience, and intelligence to guide himself unscathed through democratic societies.  To be clear, this is a human condition.  Nothing improved after giving women the right to vote.

The problem is that we can’t get over who we are, and while most of us aren’t psychopaths, nearly all of us display negative personality traits — some more than others.  We are ignorant, of course, but worse than that, many of us are stupid.  We are also hurtful, manipulative, cruel, overly critical, inconsiderate, dishonest, selfish, and judgmental.  Some of us are even violent, rude, self-centered, and unreliable.  Lacking the innate intelligence of a frog or the acquired learning necessary for dispassionate judgment, Americans are driven by their passions and private short-term interests.

From the writings of the ancients, we learn that people have been unsuitable for responsible liberty for the past 2,500 years.  An Athenian once noted, “Among the common people are the greatest ignorance, ill-discipline, and depravity.”  Yep — that’s us.  The good news is that none of this is our fault.  We mostly focus on working for our dinner, which gets most of our attention.  Aristotle’s solution to this problem was nearly brilliant: refuse to allow any dummy to have the right of citizenship.  Socrates was even glib about it.  He wondered why any intelligent person should ask a tinker, cobbler, sailor, rich man, or poor man about an affair of state.  It is obviously beyond their depth —

None of this is new, by the way.  In 1787, Roger Sherman (Massachusetts) voiced that letting the people directly elect members of the House of Representatives was a terrible idea.  The parliamentary system was better suited to these Americans.  He argued that the people “should have as little to do as may be about the government” because they are too easily misled.

Mr. Sherman wasn’t alone. Eventually, the framers did allow Americans to elect members of the House of Representatives directly, but they did not allow them to elect their senators or president.  Eventually, Congress did allow for the popular election of senators, and we can see what has happened to us as a result.

A question remains: if the framers so distrusted “the people,” why were they given any say in government?  It was because the framers also did not trust the motivations of an aristocracy.  Human frailty is a human condition, not merely a poor man’s or rich man’s condition.  In any case, lacking faith in the masses, the framers dispersed power among the three branches of government so that each could check and balance the other.  For as Alexander Hamilton said, “Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few.  Give all power to the few, and they will oppress the many.  Both, therefore, ought to have power, that each may defend itself against the other.”

Well, it didn’t quite work out the way the framers intended.  The Progressive movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries promoted a form of rule by elites, dismissing the fear of concentrated power that motivated the founders.  The Progressives argued that government by experts was necessary because of industrial capitalism and new transportation and communication technologies.  The new “sciences” of psychology and sociology provided knowledge that could guide these technocrats in creating social and economic progress.  Leading that charge was Woodrow Wilson, who, in 1887, demanded an expansion and centralization of federal power to form a cadre of administrative elites who, armed with new scientific knowledge about human behavior, could address the novel “cares and responsibilities that will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience.”  Wilson later seizes the baton of progressivism from Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft.  Edith Wilson would later inherit from her dying husband.

Today, we have Woodrow Wilson’s dream come true: administrators who give a damn for the people as much as Democrats care for Republicans.  Today, government administrators herd the political apparatchiks as skillfully as cowboys on a cattle drive. 

Today, we have Wilson’s federal bureaucracies “of skilled, economical administration” comprising the “hundred who are wise” empowered to guide the “thousands” who are “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.”  Wilson had nothing but contempt for people who lacked specialized knowledge and so could not be trusted with the power to run their own lives.

Wilson’s views are reflected in modern progressivism — one of many poster boys is Dr. Jonathan Gruber.  The technocrats know what’s best.  You can verify this with Bobo Obama, who, on such issues as stem cell research and climate change, intended to “develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making” and to protect them from politics.

Let’s not forget the views of that other progressive, Hillary Rodham Clinton, who vociferously argues that public policy should be guided by “evidence-based decision-making” rather than by principle, fidelity to the Constitution, or virtue.

The critical question, however, is whether or not political decision-making requires technical knowledge more than the wisdom gleaned from experience, mores, and morals. 

The size of government today has worsened this “old problem” of citizen ignorance.  The complexity of the policies federal agencies enforce and manage has made Wilson’s ideas about the necessity for government by technocratic elites a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In 1960, economist F. A. Hayek made this point about the Social Security program, noting that “the ordinary economist or sociologist or lawyer is today nearly as ignorant [as the layman] of the details of that complex and ever-changing system.”  Hayek was correct.

Today, we must turn to the champions and managers for our enlightenment because they’ve become the experts.  If we were to write a letter to our Congressperson demanding an explanation for one thing or another, the representative would ultimately turn around and write a letter to the expert for their response before answering our letter.  The Congressman doesn’t know any more about it than we do.  It’s gotten worse since 1960.

Our acceptance that good government depends on technical knowledge requires that we agree that there is no basis for insisting that our people develop an awareness, knowledge, or understanding of how the government works, how policies are created, or the people’s rights under such a system.  We can sit back and let the experts deal with government — much like the citizens relaxed and let Benito Mussolini deal with post-World War I democracy.

I’m sorry; how did that work out again?

And just like the Italians between world wars, why bother voting?  The technocrats are going to do what they want, anyway. On the other hand, given the size of this country’s debt, maybe the technocrats are the best solution for Democracy.  What do Americans know about balancing a checkbook?

The problem, or so it seems, is that after so many decades of disengagement, we will never get Americans to care enough about their country to become interested in its government — which was always the progressive’s plan.