They're Not Stupid, Stupid!

[sierra_le_oli]

The elections are over and hard on the heels of the question "why?" comes the answer, "because they're stupid." And I'm not buying it. Or, at least, I'm not buying the idea that Americans are dumber than anyone else

Comments

[furrfu]

(and it's your own fault for making me jump in...)

By and large, most people who voted for Bush (excluding for a moment the relatively small number of people who are rich enough to have immediate economic motives to vote for him) have a fairly limited worldview. The US media tends to ignore the existence of forrinia, and, well, the US is an enormous country, and thinking outside the box, certainly in the conservative states (the name itself implies it) isn't encouraged.

From their point of view, Bush is someone "they can trust", someone "with morals".

I don't think they're stupid as in "lacking intelligence". They're badly informed. And the conservative election campaign was very efficient at mobilising these people to "safeguard the american values".

It didn't help that Kerry had all the charisma of a dead dog.

As for the mandate: http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_10_31.html#001861

As for Kimberley's comment on rightwing parties elsewhere - I don't think the Republicans are as racist as Het Vlaams Blok. On the other hand, Het Vlaams Blok wouldn't go for the "make the rich richer and the poor poorer" approach that the Republicans like. I don't think it's a valid comparison.

In both cases people were voted in who any liberal-minded intellectual would baulk at, but for rather different reasons and on rather different agendas.

[sierra_le_oli]

With regard to the mandate, 57% of Americans voted and just over half of that number voted for Bush. That means 43% have silently consented to another four years of Bush. So, if I'm being cynical, I'd say it wasn't even close.

I'm sure that Americans have been badly informed. That doesn't mean I won't blame them for unquestioningly embracing the media's viewpoint just because it panders to their own prejudices.

The European political entities that I used as examples were meant to show that Europeans shouldn't get too smug about bad things happening in America because they're happening on this side of the pond too. In that sense, it's a valid comparison. (I picked those examples because they were racist, by the way, not because they were right-wing.)