The Patriot Post® · Demagoguery Exacerbated by Extended Voting

Jonah Goldberg: “In Colorado, NARAL Pro-Choice America ran an ad insisting that a vote for the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate would lead to a ban on women’s birth control and, as a result, a critical condom shortage. If you hadn’t been paying attention, you might not have known that the Republican candidate, Rep. Cory Gardner, actually favored making birth control available over the counter. That’s forgivable ignorance. But, if you think a single senator from a single state can ban birth control (never mind that he doesn’t want to), then you are so staggeringly clueless about how our political system works, you shouldn’t vote at all. Indeed, any self-esteem boost you might get from pulling a lever in a polling booth would be like a pebble in the ocean of shame you should feel for being so ignorant. Now, it’s entirely true that the practice of inflating the stakes of an election was old when Periclean Athens was young, but making it so much easier to vote – over such a long period – exacerbates the problem by giving campaigns a whole month for rolling, targeted demagoguery. ‘Vote first, ask questions later’ is not a mantra of good citizenship. It’s a marketing strategy designed to reward politicians for voters’ ignorance.”