Those greatly concerned about "misinformation" in politics are, I think, not actually very big fans of democracy. The heritage of the early American republic is of a rough-and-tumble knives out fight for democratic power. But that faded into a long period of voters mostly being irrelevant to the truly important policy considerations. The parties were not nearly so ideological, and voters were important insofar as they put a constraint on how much of an asshole or failure a particular representative could be (or how salacious their sex lives could become). But the real question of governing the country was held by a relatively small group of educated elites who were invested in the political conversation.
The much larger educated elite of today wants to continue this process of basically controlling the entire country. They do not *really* believe that some guy whose only education is how to be an electrician should wield any significant power. They pretend to, because they're supposed to, but they don't like true democracy.
Whether or not they are wrong to feel this way is a separate question, but they are not interested in truly popular governance despite their protests to the contrary.
I have a somewhat different take within this framework:
I think that the lack of ideological degrees of freedom our bifurcated system presents to the electrician renders his right to political participation functionally worthless. Regardless of whether I consider any one of his views "correct", he's literally only one degree of freedom away from being a subject of an authoritarian state, because even when he expresses his views at the ballot box, he can only express some subset of them, and it's not even a reasonably healthy approximation of them.
Furthermore, having a two-party system against the backdrop of the fact that culture and identity are the primary mechanisms for opinion formation, means that almost all of us end up getting pigeonholed into two rigid and arbitrary ideological coalitions LONG before we remotely have the CHANCE to develop whatever Rawlsian blank-slate views our personal predispositions would otherwise dictate.
It's fundamentally illegitimate. It's no wonder that many don't see much difference between now and when we were "less democratic". But to be clear, I'm not advocating for letting the Rawlsian "perfect" be the enemy of the good; I'm just saying that we're not much better off Rawlsianly than we'd be under a system with one less degree of ideological freedom, and we should probably, like, do something about that, rather than bitching at each other over disputes we have little effective control over anyways and accusing each other of not having started from blank enough slates (despite the fact that we're ALL victims of the pigeonholing).
TLDR: All that is a long way of saying that THIS particular intellectual elite (IE yours truly... no really, stop laughing!) doesn't specifically care about dissing on electricians' unfashionable views. Even if I were granted a wish to magically have my ideal political system, I wouldn't expect the electricians or mechanics or truck drivers or nurses to agree with me! I just think their views would be more Rawlsianly valid under said system, which would hopefully trigger my and my intellectual elite confreres' lizard brains into our current posture of condescending arrogance with somewhat less frequency.
IE, duh, we'd be less big of dicks to the electricians if we had more of a reason to respect their intellectual views. But the galaxy-brain moment is realizing that their views aren't disrespectable because they themselves are assholes, but because the entire system makes tribal assholes of us all.
From The Comments: Electricians And Assholes
From The Comments: Electricians And Assholes
From The Comments: Electricians And Assholes
I have a somewhat different take within this framework:
I think that the lack of ideological degrees of freedom our bifurcated system presents to the electrician renders his right to political participation functionally worthless. Regardless of whether I consider any one of his views "correct", he's literally only one degree of freedom away from being a subject of an authoritarian state, because even when he expresses his views at the ballot box, he can only express some subset of them, and it's not even a reasonably healthy approximation of them.
Furthermore, having a two-party system against the backdrop of the fact that culture and identity are the primary mechanisms for opinion formation, means that almost all of us end up getting pigeonholed into two rigid and arbitrary ideological coalitions LONG before we remotely have the CHANCE to develop whatever Rawlsian blank-slate views our personal predispositions would otherwise dictate.
It's fundamentally illegitimate. It's no wonder that many don't see much difference between now and when we were "less democratic". But to be clear, I'm not advocating for letting the Rawlsian "perfect" be the enemy of the good; I'm just saying that we're not much better off Rawlsianly than we'd be under a system with one less degree of ideological freedom, and we should probably, like, do something about that, rather than bitching at each other over disputes we have little effective control over anyways and accusing each other of not having started from blank enough slates (despite the fact that we're ALL victims of the pigeonholing).
TLDR: All that is a long way of saying that THIS particular intellectual elite (IE yours truly... no really, stop laughing!) doesn't specifically care about dissing on electricians' unfashionable views. Even if I were granted a wish to magically have my ideal political system, I wouldn't expect the electricians or mechanics or truck drivers or nurses to agree with me! I just think their views would be more Rawlsianly valid under said system, which would hopefully trigger my and my intellectual elite confreres' lizard brains into our current posture of condescending arrogance with somewhat less frequency.
IE, duh, we'd be less big of dicks to the electricians if we had more of a reason to respect their intellectual views. But the galaxy-brain moment is realizing that their views aren't disrespectable because they themselves are assholes, but because the entire system makes tribal assholes of us all.