What It Takes

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute administers a quiz each year to American college students to test how well they grasp basic civics. They do rather badly. I do not think the test is hard or obscure: I scored 32 of 33 correct myself, and I am neither an American nor trained in the field of political science.

But their test also keeps coming up with other fascinating results.

The latest round of testing, for example, discovered that elected officials actually score worse on their knowledge of how the US government works (44%) than do the general population (49%).

Surprising, isn't it? Why would we actually elect people to make our political decisions for us who know less about politics than we do? But I suspect the explanation is fairly simple. Unfortunately, it shows a flaw in democracy, which is, after all, as Churchiill observed, the worst possible way to choose a government—except for all the others.

Pop quiz: do you recall high school? Were the brightest kids the most popular? Would one of them stand a great chance of being elected class president? Not likely—more often, in most schools, they were shunned as “nerds.” The captain of the football team—there's your class president.

So it remains in the grown-up world.

The average person more or less instinctively dislikes anyone smarter than they are. “Hates” might really be the more accurate term. If you don't buy this from your personal experience with the phenomenon of “nerdiness,” consider the history of the Jews: a small, identifiable group with a significantly higher average IQ than the surrounding population. They haven't always been treated terribly well, have they? Has nothing to do with religion: they were hated consistently by Christians, pagans, and Muslims. Has nothing, really, to do with race; they are virtually the same race as the Arabs, who hate them; their suffering is simply that of the unusually intelligent generally. The Hakka Chinese have a quite similar history in Southeast Asia, for the same reason.

Because everyone hates anyone smarter than they are, they are never going to vote for them. Accordingly, to get the vote of a majority of the population, one has to be or at least appear less intelligent than an overall majority of the population.

Think of the most successful politicians, in an electoral sense, and you find a common theme: they almost always have a public image as a dunce. Ralph Klein, Jean Chretien, Ronald Reagan; the mainstream press thought it was doing Reagan harm by making him out to be a fool. They thought the same about George W. Bush, and they think the same about Sarah Palin. They cannot see that this image is helping them with the public. Similarly, British propaganda thought they were doing Hitler harm by referring to him as merely a “little corporal.” But the German people were reassured by this reminder that he was a perfectly ordinary man. Eisenhower beat Stevenson by seeming to be less intelligent; and Truman beat Dewey on the same premise. I doubt anyone would seriously claim FDR was brighter than Herbert Hoover—as someone said, Roosevelt had a “second-class mind, but a first-class personality.”

There are, it is true, exceptions: when a nation is in serious crisis, people can be persuaded to bend their principles just a little, in their desperation. Relatively smarter politicians can also sometimes slip into office on the strength of coming from some social subgroup that the majority just naturally assumes to be less intelligent than they are: Clinton from the Ozarks; Trudeau from Quebec, in his day (but never popular in Quebec, where his intelligence was resented); Napoleon from Corsica; Lloyd George from Wales; John Kennedy as an Irish Catholic; Thatcher, in her day, as a woman. The irony is that most people assume this is a disadvantage; just the reverse. Being black vaulted Obama into office years before he was ready. But will we ever see a Jewish president?

Reagan, too, I think, was smarter than people understood—able to pull off his affable fool persona because he was an experienced actor. Woodrow Wilson, too, was at least an intellectual—but he only had to take 33% of the vote to get in, because the opposition was divided between two strong parties. The relatively smart Clinton similarly benefitted from Perot's two campaigns. Churchill, too, was bright—and only thrust into office by a war. At that, he was helped by his plodding, almost comic demeanour, and could not survive in office past the peace.

It is troubling to think how much better we could do if we could come up with a system that put the best, rather than the sub-par, in command. But nobody has managed it yet.

Perhaps until then, the best thing to do is to limit the powers of government whenever possible.