Cookie Jar

One of the aspects of democracy that I often see people at odds with is the idea that representative government is not designed to produce policies in the best interests of the general public; it's designed to produce those policies that a majority of voters believe to be in their interests or at least will otherwise support.

When the populace tends to be disengaged (mainly because they are busy with things of more immediate importance to themselves), they tend to follow the lead of people that they understand (correctly or not) to have their interests at heart. This means that in order for politicians to retain their offices, they have to appeal to that smaller segment of the overall public. It's true that a politician can decide to ignore this more engaged group of voters and activists, and pursue different policies, but unless something turns out to be wildly popular, the next officeholder can always simply undo it. For all that the political class is perceived to hold the reins of power, persistent changes are more difficult to effect than is often given credit for.

I mention this because I was reading yet another litany of complaints about Texas Governor Greg Abbott. While Texas is often held up as an example (although sometimes, only one of many) of Republican partisanship run amok, I'm not sure that Governor Abbott is as much in control of things there as he is often painted. Whether it's Governor Abbott issuing an executive order that bans any entity within the state, government or private from requiring employees to be vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, or the legislature's "anyone can sue anyone else who helps women obtain abortion care after 6 weeks" law, the fact of the matter remains that these measures appeal to a certain constituency that the Governor and Republican state legislators feel they need to have support them if they are going to stay in office. And so even if they personally thought that these things were bad ideas, they push them. Because otherwise, they won't have the ability to enact any good ideas.

And I understand that I'm coming down on the side of "well, if the public decides that they want cookies for dinner, then they can have cookies for dinner." And that's because while democracy is a form of government, enlightenment is not. And while enlightenment may mean that people consistently make the "correct" choices on matters of justice or injustice and right or wrong, democracy operates, as one author put it, on sentiment. And so policymakers have to work within what they understand the current public sentiment to be. Columnists, pundits and journalists can claim that as members of "the élite," that politicians have a certain amount of power to dictate to people what their sentiments should be, but I suspect that if this power were as strong as it's made out to be, much of the world would look very different than it does.