Perhaps when voting is merely a symbol, everyone can vote about nothing.

Brendan O'Neill asks "Is Democracy Dying."

//The most curious thing about the era we live in is that the democratic franchise is expanding while the content of democracy is shrinking. So the right to vote is spreading while the issues we are asked to vote on are becoming narrower and narrower. In fact, we live in an era of frantic enfranchisement - the political class wants to give the vote to pretty much everyone. There’s a serious discussion going on in the Labour Party about whether to give the vote to 16-year-olds, which, to my mind, would utterly infantilise the democratic process. Of course, 16-year-olds had the vote in the Scottish referendum, which I think is a sign of things to come. Some want to give the vote to prisoners. Some Brussels bureaucrats are obsessed with giving the vote to prisoners. Some leftists also think it would be a great idea to let prisoners vote. These people really should brush up on the arguments of the Chartists, those great democrats, who recognised that allowing prisoners to vote would make a mockery of democracy.//

We are in the best of hands.

We are governed by mediocrities.

I scored 97% on this incredibly easy civics test.  I blew the final question - actually I knew that I picked the wrong answer but it seemed better than the alternative "right" answer - and, so, scored 32 out of 33 answers.

This isn't to blow my own horn inasmuch as the questions seemed obvious; everyone should score similarly.

On the other hand, apparently not.  According to the results page:

Of the 2,508 People surveyed, 164 say they have held an elected government office at least once in their life. Their average score on the civic literacy test is 44%, compared to 49% for those who have not held an elected office. Officeholders are less likely than other respondents to correctly answer 29 of the 33 test questions. This table shows the “knowledge gap” for each question: the difference between the percentage of common citizens who answered correctly and the percentage of officeholders who answered correctly.

And:
 

In each of the following areas, for example, officeholders do more poorly than non-officeholders:

• Seventy-nine percent of those who have been elected to government office do not know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the U.S.
• Thirty percent do not know that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are the inalienable rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence.
• Twenty-seven percent cannot name even one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.
• Forty-three percent do not know what the Electoral College does. One in five thinks it either “trains those aspiring for higher political office” or “was established to supervise the first televised presidential debates.”
• Fifty-four percent do not know the Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war. Thirty-nine percent think that power belongs to the president, and 10% think it belongs to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• Only 32% can properly define the free enterprise system, and only 41% can identify business profit as “revenue minus expenses.”

On some questions, Americans who have held elected office do better than Americans who have not. They are a little more likely, for example, to recognize the language of the Gettysburg Address (23% to 21%) and to know that the question of whether slavery should be allowed to expand into new territories was the main issue in the Lincoln–Douglas debates (25% to 20%).

Officeholders and non-officeholders find it equally difficult to identify the three branches of government. Only 49% of each group can name the legislative, executive, and judicial.

The nasty secret is that when Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachman and other politicians garble some obvious bit of American history, they are not exceptional.  They are simply betraying the fact that politicians lack the rudimentary knowledge they were exposed to in high school.

We only hear about it, however, when it's Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman.

Jefferson or Franklin or Whoever would probably have given a face palm at learning that ABC had to define "perspicacious" for its viewers.

Mediaite has caught a pop-up graphic on ABC pointing to the dumbing down of American democracy:

This is either unintentionally hilarious or merely bizarre, but either way it seemed worthy of some attention. On This Week, during an extremely sophisticated and insightful debate on the importance of the Constitution, Christiane Amanpour apparently attempted to keep the conversation at an elevated level of intelligence by showcasing an SAT-worthy word in the middle of her statement. Amanpour casually said “perspicacious,” yet dropping such a big word apparently served as a bat signal for the ABC graphics department to go into emergency action!


Amanpour’s guest mentioned Benjamin Franklin wrote that he wouldn’t mind being preserved in a “vat of Madeira wine” in order to see if the Constitution held up 200 years later. Amanpour responded, “he was amazingly perspicacious when this Constitution was signed.” Some viewers might want to roll their eyes in response to Amanpour’s use of such “elite” language, while others might appreciate that she doesn’t dumb down her thoughts for television. Either way, what was truly peculiar was the on-screen graphic. Were producers worried that the word would fly so far over their audience’s head that they needed to intervene as a public service? And if so, why not define “vat” and “Madeira wine” while you’re at it? Or is This Week now like Pop-Up Video with explanatory details and interesting facts popping up to complement what’s happening on screen?

Genital Mutilation and Democracy....

...and Asians and wheat prices.

Spengler has written a polymathic essay on Egypt.

First, there is the issue of female genital mutilation which is practiced in Egypt to a horrific extent:

Nine out of ten Egyptian women suffer genital mutilation. US President Barack Obama said Jan. 29, "The right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny … are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere." Does Obama think that genital mutilation is a human rights violation? To expect Egypt to leap from the intimate violence of traditional society to the full rights of a modern democracy seems whimsical.


In fact, the vast majority of Egyptians has practiced civil disobedience against the Mubarak regime for years. The Mubarak government announced a "complete" ban on genital mutilation in 2007, the second time it has done so - without success, for the Egyptian population ignored the enlightened pronouncements of its government. Do Western liberals cheer at this quiet revolt against Mubarak's authority?

Well, no.  This is the kind of conundrum that induces a quiet cheer for the Cromwells and Francos of history who put a lid on the fanatics who would make democracy a living hell.

Then there is the food problem.  In a nutshell, Asian wealth is stripping food from Egyptian stores:

In this case, Asian demand has priced food staples out of the Arab budget. As prosperous Asians consume more protein, global demand for grain increases sharply (seven pounds of grain produce one pound of beef). Asians are rich enough, moreover, to pay a much higher price for food whenever prices spike due to temporary supply disruptions, as at the moment.


Egyptians, Jordanians, Tunisians and Yemenis are not. Episodes of privation and even hunger will become more common. The miserable economic performance of all the Arab states, chronicled in the United Nations' Arab Development Reports, has left a large number of Arabs so far behind that they cannot buffer their budget against food price fluctuations.

Earlier this year, after drought prompted Russia to ban wheat exports, Egypt's agriculture minister pledged to raise food production over the next ten years to 75% of consumption, against only 56% in 2009. Local yields are only 18 bushels per acre, compared to 30 to 60 for non-irrigated wheat in the United States, and up 100 bushels for irrigated land.

This suggests that American policy might be better served by putting more cropland into production, particularly here in the Central Valley, rather than taking it out of production as we have been doing.

Do you trust the Government?

In 1958, 73% of Americans said "yes."  Now, that number is down to 22%.

For a democracy - based on the consent of the governed - that is a very bad thing.