Psychos For Bush?
and
Should Psychotic People Be Urged to Vote?
Well, here.
To the list of obvious questions that need to be asked in this case (among which is, of course, "is this true?"), let me add:
Did Clinton get the psycho vote, too?
That is, do the psychotic always support the president, or do they tend to support only the more authoritarian presidents? The researchers tell us that as people get more psychotic, they tend to support Bush more...but that doesn't tell us whether or not the same thing happens with every president.
Anyway, I'm trying to avoid pointing out how all this would explain a lot, because that would be wrong because it's not even been peer-reviewed yet and anyway that would just be a cheap shot, in part because I'd just scoff at this as a bunch of half-baked crap if it didn't happen to point in the direction of a conclusion that I already accept and that makes me feel all vindicated 'n' stuff.
[HT--as with so much of the really weird sh*t--Canis Major]
[And before anybody tries to get cute: why, yes, I do know the difference between 'most psychotic people like Bush' and 'most people who like Bush are psychotic'.]
(Exceptitreallywouldexplainalotwouldn'tit?)
(PresentcompanyexcludedTomthismeansyou.)
and
Should Psychotic People Be Urged to Vote?
Well, here.
To the list of obvious questions that need to be asked in this case (among which is, of course, "is this true?"), let me add:
Did Clinton get the psycho vote, too?
That is, do the psychotic always support the president, or do they tend to support only the more authoritarian presidents? The researchers tell us that as people get more psychotic, they tend to support Bush more...but that doesn't tell us whether or not the same thing happens with every president.
Anyway, I'm trying to avoid pointing out how all this would explain a lot, because that would be wrong because it's not even been peer-reviewed yet and anyway that would just be a cheap shot, in part because I'd just scoff at this as a bunch of half-baked crap if it didn't happen to point in the direction of a conclusion that I already accept and that makes me feel all vindicated 'n' stuff.
[HT--as with so much of the really weird sh*t--Canis Major]
[And before anybody tries to get cute: why, yes, I do know the difference between 'most psychotic people like Bush' and 'most people who like Bush are psychotic'.]
(Exceptitreallywouldexplainalotwouldn'tit?)
(PresentcompanyexcludedTomthismeansyou.)
posted by Winston Smith at
4:47 PM
7 Comments:
If this is the Chris Lohse I knew in college, I wouldn't trust this at all. Of course, the social work student Lohse would have to be starting a second career for his age to be close enough to mine.
Then again, one story I read quoted its Lohse as claiming to be a Ronald Reagan fanatic. In social work? Maybe this is just a prank.
This actually raises interesting questions -- for me, so much the "why do psychopaths vote for Bush" thing, if true, but the "should psychopaths vote/be encouraged to vote?" angle. I am currently hip-deep in studying for a voting rights exam, though, so maybe it's unsurprising that that's the question to which I glom.
Preliminarily, it would be almost certainly impossible legally to exclude even people with very deep mental difficulties from voting. Felons can be banned because of language in the 14th Amendment disenfranchising those who participated "in rebellion, or other crime." And the trend in the 20th century has been away from the proposition that the state may restrict suffrage in order to improve the "quality" of decisions reached by the electorate. Of course, age restrictions on the franchise remain constitutional -- but be have a second amendment ratifying this differential treatment, and expanding the rationale of the age restriction, even to mentally ill people "who have the mind of a six-year-old" or what have you, is unlikely to work due both to the innate fuzziness of such determinations and the high difficulty of administering the standard.
But in the U.S. there has been a practice of restricting suffrage in order to get better decision-making. This was one of the original reasons land-owning or tax-payment was a necessary requirement for the vote, back at the founding; such people were more likely to be educated and better informed, and have a stake in the community sufficient to encourage them to act for the general good. Contrarily, it's not that women, the indigent, and minors were restricted from voting because there was a fear that they were incapable of strong decision-making; rather, the rationale was primarily that they could not make *independent* judgments, and would simply be tools of their husbands/parents/the rich (vote-buying was very very easy in the days before the secret ballot). The exclusion of blacks need hardly be explained, of course.
Modern felon disenfranchisement, while not legally on point, does provide an interesting set of parallels two. There are basically two sets of justifications for excluding them from the polls: first, some argue that disenfranchisement is justified because they have such a vested interest in particular policies that don't serve the public good (e.g., weaker enforcement of criminal laws, lower prison sentences, etc.) Second, it's possible to argue that by engaging in criminal behavior, they've broken the social compact, and have lost the right to determine its character and composition. I don't find either of these particularly persuasive as to paroled and former felons, but it's hard to see how they apply to the mentally ill. Psychological problems are hardly a moral transgression that should go to one's citizenship, and while psychopaths will presumably have idiosyncratic policy preferences, these will hardly be so suborned to outside influences as to render them invalid -- I don't see how one can logically distinguish the case of a person who has similarly idiosyncratic policy preferences due to religious belief, and I think such religious motivations for voting very much need to be respected (leaving aside the question of when religious motivations can legitimately be used to justify the political decisions of government officials, which I think is a deep, interesting question).
Aliens can't currently vote in most (perhaps all?) states, but again, I think the rationale is not so much quality as fear that they will have ulterior motives that are not aligned with those of the American polity.
The final analogy I can think of is perhaps the most revealing: illiterates. Many states used literacy tests for a very long time, and in fact the Supreme Court upheld the practice, so long as they were administered in a non-discriminatory manner (they were banned nationwide by the Voting Rights Act, as amended in 1970, I believe). And in the wake of the 2000 election, in which many of the undervotes/overvotes were cast by the less educated, there was some commentary to the effect that those who were too stupid to cast a ballot correctly deserved not to have their vote counted (I'm paraphrasing Rehnquist's concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore and a law review article by Judge Richard Posner).
But as to literacy tests, much of the justification was that people who can't read will have a hard time understanding public issues and will be less intelligent; again, psychopaths aren't "less intelligent" per se, they just have what society at large considers to be a flawed moral compass. Maybe other mentally disabled people whose impairments do go to intelligence generally would fall under this logic. But the racist history of the literacy test should surely give us pause. And as to the latter argument, it's hard to generalize from these expressions of pique at the unique circumstances of the 2000 election to larger principles of electorate quality.
That was long-winded and ultimately fairly vague. But I think the overarching principle is that as a society we've almost completely repudiated the idea that the state can dispense suffrage as a privilege to those who can be trusted to make intelligent decisions, both because this conception is in tension with the project of democratic self-governance and because it's a doctrine that very easily lends itself to abuse, in that it permits the political marginalization of socially and economically marginalized groups.
Theories of participatory democracy might also fruitfully be brought to bear -- Meiklejohn probably doesn't do very much for you, since he does focus on public debate as a means for reaching decisions, but other thinkers have emphasized that there's a legitimizing value in simply being able to take part in the machinery of democracy, on which logic one's ability rationally to take part in public discourse and decision-making is besides the point.
Bloody typical. Leave a 1000 word comment, and not notice the typo in the first damn line. "Not so much the 'why do psychopaths vote for Bush' thing," that should be.
Miiiiike...
What have I told you about bringing actual *facts* into our little discussions?
Being psycho doesn't make you a bad person.
It's just a different lifestyle.
And we prefer the terms 'differently sane' or 'differently non-psychopathic'
Actually, the nuts I have contact with seem to like "mentally interesting" vs "neurotypical," the latter often abbreviated NT.
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