The problem with democracy

I see that several polls have been taken in recent days to try to gauge the amount of public support the Wisconsin Republicans have for their proposal to strip public workers of their union bargaining rights. Predictably, the union-supported polls show strong union support, and the Republican polls show strong support for the proposed legislation. Of course any good pollster can adjust the questions to get any desired result, as I am sure happened here.

But it does raise the general question of how valid public opinion is in a democracy. A healthy democracy depends upon an informed electorate. Otherwise democracy is just a form of mob rule. And just how informed is the American electorate? People certainly "think" they understand the issues, but since most of what they think they know has probably come from biased news and simplified "sound bites", and since most people only listen to news commentators they agree with, one wonders how informed the general public really is.

One way to judge this is to look at public reaction to obvious impending problems, like the debt crisis. It seems to me any rational, informed person would look at the current debt situation and conclude that drastic and immediate steps need to be taken to avert disaster. Is that the opinion of the general public? It doesn't seem so. Oh, there is a general unease at least among Tea Party conservatives about the issue. But no one seems to be reacting with the urgency the debt issue appears to require. Even Republican politicians are only proposing cosmetic cuts.

Or one could look at the two current wars in which we are engaged. It does seem to me an informed public who understood history, the economic cost of these wars, the political cost we are paying around the world, the strain on the military and their families, and the casualties we are taking, would conclude that an immediate exit was highly desirable. But I don't see that. The public seems content to trust Washington's repeated rosy view of how things are going - the same rosy view we have been given for almost a decade now under two administrations.

So I wonder if it really matters what the public thinks about the proposed legislation in Wisconsin. No one on either side seems to be making a closely-reasoned argument for their position. All I see are people on both sides trying to score cheap political points, as if this were simply a high school debate and the state wasn't billion of dollars in the red. It does make one wonder if the Democracy we seem to be so determined to spread around the world is really such a great system.