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Poll Driven Action Is Really Contempt for Voters [1]

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Date: 2025-04-28

Their is only one divide in leftist politics these days: whether you should attack all of Trump’s illegal and/or immoral actions or whether you should be driven by polls and go after only those things that the public already disapproves of. The first group argues that you need to call out and make unsupportable the terrible things Trump is doing. The second group argues that you cannot change public opinion, and so, given the stakes, you need to fight only on good ground, as it were. The second group is demonstrably wrong, but what interests me is why they are so wrong and what it says about what our elites think about democracy.

First, it should be clear by now that attacking things can change narratives. Support for LGBTQ+ rights have been dropping since the neo-Fascist turn in GOP politics. Well, you say, that is because the right has a propaganda machine centered around Fox news that the left cannot match. Of course the right can change opinions. Except that Trump is massively underwater generally and underwater even on what the poll watchers tell us is his strongest issue: deportations. Pointing out that throwing people into a foreign torture jail without their day in court is bad, it turns out, leads to people not liking it. That the poll watchers, or popularists, as they tend to call themselves, could not see that is a searing indictment of how they view the world.

There are two reasons to oppose trying to make something that is popular unpopular. The first is that you support the popular thing that your partisans do not. Some people, even on the left, don’t want immigration or don’t like trans people, to pick two of the hotter topics today. I am not interested in those people — liars have been with us since Grog first learned to grunt. But people who fall under the second reason are much more interesting, and dangerous to me. Some people who don’t want to attack things that poll well simply do not believe in democracy, not in any meaningful sense.

That is a strong statement, but I think it fits, subconsciously or not. It is inconceivable to me that you would think that people would not be aghast at throwing people in a foreign jail without their day in court. Most people are not ghouls. I know that it is fun and easy to say that all GOP voters voted for this, but they really didn’t. They were told that they were going to throw out only the “bad guys”. Highlighting that that is not what is happening, and more, that they are being denied their day in court, something fundamental to pretty much everyone’s worldview in this country, would of course move the underlying numbers, if not necessarily the partisan numbers. Those stories of people defending “their” immigrants even though they voted for Trump are a harbinger of this kind of change — people have a hard time as a rule generalizing from their personal experience to the larger society, but that impulse toward protection and fairness can be harvested. That people seriously argues against this shows that they have a deep, deep contempt for other people.

If you honestly believe that poll numbers are immutable, then you believe that people are immutable, or at least their opinions are immutable. That means that you believe that first impressions are all that matter and that people as a whole are either fundamentally stupid or fundamentally evil. And believing either means that you do not think that democracy is a viable form of government.

You may pay attention to the forms of it, but fundamentally you see it as an obstacle. These people can never be trusted to make good decisions, so you need to lie about your policies and then, once in power, do what you want, not what you said. It is the strong form of the idea that government policy should be left to experts and experts only. Both are a flavor of not trusting in democracy.

I am not saying that some people are not terrible. Of course there are. St. Louis Blues fan exist, obviously. More seriously, there are people who revel in the pain they are causing to others. But there is ample evidence that they are not the majority of people. And, of course, experts should be listened to in their areas of expertise, but no one need to defer to them when deciding policy direction. Understanding the details of how something works does not mean you fully understand or appreciate how that thing interacts with the rest of society and its collective goals. And I am not saying that the decisions that come out of democracy are always correct. Of course they aren’t. Groups can be wrong just like individuals. But democracy is the one form of government that protects us form the whims of the rich and powerful.

Saying that public opinion cannot move is a form of saying that you do not think that the public can be trusted to make decisions. And that is a form of saying that democracy is not a useful form of government. And that is a form of saying that it is proper and right that people be subservient to the will of their betters. And that, my friend, is a sure road to oppression. You cannot ignore the will of people long term without the people objecting. And once you decide to ignore their objections, you then have decided to oppress the ones who get out of line, to one degree or another.

And this is not a brief for pure democracy. All societies need guardrails to defend the unpopular form the tyranny of the popular. The fact that the illegal and immoral kidnappings ICE is undertaking has moved public opinion demonstrates that this is understood, at least by most people in the country. At the end of the day, you have to believe that you can change opinions or you have to admit that you simply do not believe in democracy. Fortunately, its clear that opinions can be changed. The people who argue that the polls rule all are wrong, and wrong in a way that damages democracy. And, Lord knows, we have enough people damaging democracy on purpose to be generous to anyone doing the same, intentionally or not.

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