George Will has an interesting, if wrong and dangerous, editorial in the November 22nd issue of Newsweek, entitled Validation By Defeat.

A small but significant, because articulate, sliver of the Democratic Party seems to relish interpreting the party's defeat as validation. This preening faction reasons as follows: the re-election of George W. Bush proves that 51 percent of the electorate are homophobic, gun-obsessed, economically suicidal, antiscience, theocratic dunces. Therefore to be rejected by them is to have one's intellectual and moral superiority affirmed.

His argument is that Democrats will continue to lose because they misunderstand an intelligent public that chooses to vote how it votes based on an intelligent decision-making process. He is wrong. I don't think most Americans are dumb. While there certainly are "homophobic, gun-obsessed, economically suicidal, antiscience, theocratic dunces" out there, they do not make up 51% of the people who voted. I do think that many of the people who voted for Bush are misinformed. It would be one thing if this was just my gut feeling. But George Will ignores the poll performed just before the election that showed that the majority of Bush supporters believed things that were simply not true. I'm not talking about debatable things like religious beliefs. I mean the fact that a majority of Bush supporters believe he supports the Kyoto protocol. I mean the fact that a majority of Bush supporters believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, despite even Bush's muted admission that it wasn't so. I mean the fact that a majority of Bush supporters believe that world opinion supported the US invasion of Iraq. 74% of his supporters believed that he supports environmental and labor standards in trade agreements--something Bush and the Republicans are completely opposed to. Again, I do not think that 51% of Americans are misinformed. I have some friends who are quite intelligent and just as informed as I consider myself to be, and they supported Bush. My Dad (and probably his whole family) supported Bush; I certainly don't think they are dumb and they are also well informed. Their belief systems are just different from mine; they see the facts and they reach different conclusions. But I think that there are a lot of Bush supporters who don't think much differently than me, and a significant number who would have supported Kerry if they knew all of the facts. Even if just 6% of Bush people were misinformed to the extent that they would switch their votes if they had been told the truth (a sliver of them being in Ohio), then all of these people saying what the Democrats did wrong would be trying to figure out what the Republicans did wrong. (George Lakoff, whose book Don't think of an elephant!" I have mentioned here before, says the problem goes deeper--it's not just a problem of being misinformed, it's a problem of the right wing being more successful at creating terminology and frames that goes to a person's emotions instead of his or her intellect. He is not arguing that people are dumb, just that people can react to politics on both an emotional as well as an intellectual level.) George even stretches his argument to conveniently support Bush's partial privatization of Social Security:

However, some Democrats may oppose Bush's plan on the ground that it presupposes more intelligence than the average American possesses—that the average American cannot be trusted to invest competently. So part of the "pro choice" party believes that the average American should not be trusted to make choices about providing for his or her retirement.

Bull. This has nothing to do with whether people can make the right choices; there are no calls that I am aware of to get rid of 401(k) plans. Democrats realize that it is just a fact that a lot of people can lose their money in the stock market. It's not a question of intelligence, it is just a fact of life. (Ask all of those people at Enron whose 401(k)'s plummeted.) It is easy to say callously "if people invest their money wrong, and become homeless when they get old because of it, then it is their own damn fault." It's also short-sited. People who lose their money and become homeless do have some social cost. And, ultimately, it is just not the moral (dare I say "Christian?") thing to do. Will tries to hedge by saying that only a small portion of the Democratic party really thinks people are dumb. But then he goes on to say how it spells doom for the Democrats. This will only be the case if people like Will keep trying to hold up a tiny minority as the "heart" of the Democratic party, or somehow representative of it.