This article in the New York Times got my blood boiling and my heart pumping today.

There is a new book out that answers a riddle the elites have been asking for 7 years now. Why did the American people elect George Bush President?

Answer? They’re as dumb as posts and irrational to boot:

Now Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.

In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.

The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random. When that’s the case, the thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes about economic policy — and probably other policy issues too.

Caplan’s idiotic notions regarding the irrationality and ignorance of voters is so far off the mark as to why people vote the way they do it is beyond belief. The elites ensconced in ivory towers in academia don’t have a clue about people like you and me. We may as well be from another planet as far as their understanding as to what motivates us to vote for one candidate or another. Trying to qualify our reasons is an exercise in brainless futility.

Voting is the ultimate exercise of personal freedom. To social scientists trying to examine the reasons for why people make the political choices they do, it becomes necessary to ignore the competing interests and yearnings of the voter and settle on seeing this tug of war between altruism and selfishness as “irrationality.”

People want to vote for the “right” candidate. They are as earnest in their “ignorance” in choosing the best person for the job as any lickspittle professor with advanced degrees up the wazoo. But they are moved in mysterious ways - likability of the candidate, thematic presentations of a candidate’s program, and always fear of the consequences of voting for the other guy.

And so far, the American electorate has done pretty well. In the nuclear age, when the choice of President could literally have meant life and death, the people have chosen like, well…college professors with advanced degrees out of the wazoo. A Truman as opposed to an isolationist Dewey. An Eisenhower twice as opposed to a cerebral and statist Stevenson. A Kennedy as opposed to a Nixon. (Picture Nixon during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Would a young Nixon have backed down so expertly?) Perhaps the Johnson-Goldwater race was more about a martyred President so chalk that one up to irrationality. But Nixon - putting aside his dark proclivities - in ‘68 was the answer to lawlessness in the streets and the Viet Nam quagmire while Humphrey promised more of the same - disaster.

Carter/Ford was a toss up - the people lost. Carter/Reagan was a no brainer. Ditto Reagan/Mondale. Ditto Dukakis/Bush. I would even say that Clinton circa 1992 was a better choice than a fatally damaged Bush who broke his promise not to raise taxes. And were the American people really going to elect Bob Dole President?

This brings us to 2000 and the idea that the American people made a mistake:

Of all the people who deserve some blame for the debacle in Iraq, don’t forget the American public. Today, about two-thirds of Americans oppose the war. But back in March 2003, when United States troops stormed into Iraq, nearly three out of four Americans supported the invasion. Doves say that the public was suckered into war by a deceitful White House, and hawks say that the press has since led the public to lose its nerve — but the two sides implicitly agree that the public has been dangerously unsure, or easily propagandized, or ignorant.

In 2003, Bush had the credibility to lay out a case for war that the public found logical and thus supported. It is not the voter’s fault that Bush and his Administration mucked it up. And if you’re trying to blame the voters for electing Bush in the first place, one might want to ask what the alternative was.

Al Gore was part of an Administration that virtually enabled al-Qaeda to attack America whenever it chose. It is difficult to know what Gore would have done after 9/11 but I think it more than possible that he would have lobbed a few cruise missiles at Afghanistan trying to take out Bin Laden and gone the United Nations route.; sanctions, resolutions, and words of solidarity couched in the usual apologetic tones of “So sorry we can’t do anymore.” Regime change would have been off the table. And Bin Laden would not only have been free and on the loose, but hugely emboldened and the biggest hero in the Arab world since Saladin.

No Iraq War but instead of hiding in a cave somewhere, Bin Laden would still be operating openly. To be fair, it’s pretty clear that if a Gore Administration listened to people like Richard Clark, a serious effort would have gotten underway to attack the terrorist group financially and via law enforcement by rolling up their cells. But smashing their infrastructure and destroying their safe haven in Afghanistan would probably not have occurred.

Would we have been better off? No one knows which makes this whole idea of voter irrationality an elitist fantasy. People like Caplan prefer to see their carefully thought out political choices as superior to the emotional, inspired, and intrinsically personal choice made by the rest of us.

There may be another reason Caplan sees the rest of us as idiots. Ann Althouse:

I’m picking up a bit of the old: if only people thought clearly, they’d agree with me. I’m never surprised when a professor discovers that democracy is defective because Americans aren’t more left-wing. But unlike Althaus, Caplan thinks voters are incompetent because they aren’t libertarian enough.

Voters are moved by so many different stimuli that it is silly to think that because they don’t agree with you that there is something wrong with them. I believe it shows the professor’s ignorance of not only politics, but human behavior as well to expect voters to make choices based on his “learned” criteria. People choose a candidate for many reasons - some good, some bad. But given the track record of the American voter over 219 years, they get it right a helluva more than they get it wrong.

Said Rick Moran @ 5:53 am | Permalink   

1. Incredibly Stupid Statement of the Day, 05/29/07

   Ultimate exercise in personal freedom?” Making love with someone similarly inclined would certainly make my short list. Taking my money to any store I choose and buying whatever I want there would too. Voting? Um, no. Hell no, not even if I get to di…

   Trackback by Kn@ppster — 5/29/2007 @ 4:22 pm

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2. I actually agree to a point that American votors are sheep. Unable to critically think about important issues. I particularly think this when my candidate loses

   Comment by Richard Nixon — 5/30/2007 @ 6:19 am

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3. Watch the Platforms, Not the Winner

   I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The well-educated have relatively reasonably beliefs about policy. Puzzle: If you…

   Trackback by EconLog — 6/19/2007 @ 8:04 pm

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