(Even if this sounds like "old news" it's a great read because Lance Dehaven Smith has just published a book and it really goes beyond Florida, getting into what our political system has become with comparisons to ancient Greece. This is an interview and "LdHS" is the author of the book)
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RinR: One of the reasons, you argue, that the most popular candidate ended up losing the election is because so many Americans favored partisan rhetoric over an unbiased search for truth during the recounts in 2000. How do you explain this?LdHS: As far as I can tell, it’s the way societies work. One of the things we’ve learned with public opinion research, the most fundamental finding of public opinion research of the past 50 years is that the masses follow the elites.
Most people don’t have time to learn about all these things, and they look to a particular person that they trust. It may not be the president, it may be Jesse Jackson, you know, it could be Rush Limbaugh, it could be somebody who’s not in government, but they look at that person and defer to that person. It’s a normal thing. I don’t see that changing. It really is a matter of elites being willing to be committed to democracy and the rule of law and the rule of reason.
RinR: And this can be a problem because?LdHS: Unfortunately, the history of democracy is that leadership philosophy is eroded as the competition between elites becomes more intense. That’s what happened with Athenian democracy; that’s what happened in the Roman Republic. So you look at our system today; you see our elites doing it, and you know we’re in big trouble. It’s in my lifetime that this has happened, that elites have begun to put winning ahead everything else, ahead of truth and country.
When Watergate was prosecuted, there were Republicans in Congress that were after Nixon. They thought what he was doing was unconscionable, and today that’s not the case. Today, Democrats stick with Democrats, and Republicans stick with Republicans. They don’t care what their party leaders have done. Just in my lifetime, I’ve seen this civic culture go from something that’s respectful of democracy to something that is manipulative of it. The problem is if you let this go uncorrected, the Democrats are going to do something worse later, and then the Republicans. It’s just an arms race almost, and it will just tend to degenerate.
RinR: How does the 2000 election fit into that view?LdHS: I think my book is at times rather blunt about the illegalities I think that were committed and the political motives that ran rampant.
I wish I could say, “Well, we’ll leave it alone; we won’t look at it because it would shake people’s confidence in our society.” But I’m afraid the elite discourse—unless it’s corrected, unless elites start recognizing that they have a responsibility to maintain a democracy among themselves—we’re going to have a big problem.
Much more of this long and fascinating interview at:
http://www.research.fsu.edu/researchr/winter2005/features/battlefield.html