Is it the commoners who are misinformed?

Can the little people be trusted to sort the wheat from the chaff? Judging by progressives' growing obsession with ‘misinformation’, it would appear not.

Photo by Luther.M.E. Bottrill on Unsplash

Video summary

Who led the resistance [to social justice dogma] when it was hardest? Single-issue feminists. Rightwing free speech zealots. Political casuals with a radar for humbug… The eternal mistake is to conflate liberalism, a set of specific beliefs, involving trade-offs and hard choices, with what we might call liberality: an openness of spirit, a generalised niceness. You can only build a society on the first of these things… I write all this as someone who wants milquetoast liberals in charge almost all the time. But in a crunch moment? When core freedoms are on the line? We’re too flaky. You need cranks and single-issue fanatics. You need people who take abstract ideas to their conclusion. In order to recognise and fight extremism, it helps, I think, to possess at least a trace element of it.
Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, 5/10/24

Professor Davis, one of the Voice to parliament architects, in a lecture at the University of NSW called for misinformation legislation to protect a future referendum from an onslaught of lies and distortions, following the defeat of the Yes campaign in October last year.

Mr Craven said during the campaign he engaged in private conversations trying to have leading Yes advocates to engage in meaningful discussions rather than characterising opposing arguments as misinformation. “Large swathes of the Yes campaign were obsessed with the idea of misinformation and disinformation and would characterise any contrary argument as misinformation or disinformation,” he said. “So arguments on the no case were not simply wrong or to be argued against, they fell into this category of misinformation or disinformation which meant they should be effectively banned from the referendum.”
Ellie Dudley, The Australian, 13/10/24

The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.
Maximilien Robespierre

In much the same way Anglosphere societies are belatedly beginning to acknowledge they succumbed to mass hysteria during Covidtide, some of the braver souls on the Left are starting to recognise that their camp succumbed to a Savonarolaesque illiberalism during what will presumably come to be known as the ‘Peak Woke’ era.

The US may be past the Reign of Terror phase of its racial reckoning. But Australia, which lags American cultural trends, sure isn’t, as evidenced by the likes of Professor Davis.

The bloody-minded intransigence of working-class and lower-middle-class voters has been a source of considerable angst for those in Professor Davis’ tribe since the one-two sucker punch of Trump and Brexit eight years ago.

What prompted the professor’s call for enlightened censorship to stamp out thoughtcrime among the easily misled commoners was six in ten Australians voting against altering the Constitution to establish an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice.

As was the case with Hillary Clinton’s defeat, Brexit, and recent failed referenda in Ireland and Chile, the cosmic injustice here isn’t that the peasants voted the wrong way despite clear instructions from the nobles. Given their childlike inability to understand complex political issues, one can’t expect too much from the benighted masses. What appals the likes of Professor Davis is that sinister forces cynically bamboozled the simpleton voters, bombarding them with mis/dis/mal-information that led them astray.

Cope through the ages     
Whatever age you must reach before you’ve seen it all, I’ve now reached it. For example, I experienced censorious, sanctimonious, humourless wokery three decades ago, back when it was called political correctness.

Likewise, I’ve seen various iterations of what the young people now call cope, the most common being claims of false consciousness. (Though moral panic has also gotten a good workout in the past few decades.)

In much the same way contemporary progressives fret endlessly over various species of fake news, old-school Leftists used to despair over the false consciousness of the workers, especially once it became evident they weren’t much interested in facilitating a dictatorship of the proletariat.

The predecessors of Professor Davis would regularly lament the failure of dumb proles to recognise their class interest during the 20^th century. This wasn’t due to a specific piece of misinformation – for instance, an ad on the side of a bus promising more NHS funding, or unhelpful social media posts authored by those mendacious Russkis – but rather due to an all-encompassing dominant ideology cunningly crafted by the ruling class.

Of course, it was simply unimaginable that workers might have given the matter some thought and concluded capitalist societies, with all their flaws, were superior to the alternative.

A Marxist perspective
Substack heavy hitter

Freddie deBoer

– a self-described Marxist, as it happens – recently argued Trump voters might just be perceiving their class interest correctly.

Or at least accurately identifying their real class enemy:

The amount of human devastation in the deindustrialized spaces in the United States has been unthinkable. Entire communities where the most common source of personal income is disability payments, fentanyl addiction rates in the double digits, 60+% unemployment rates among workers aged 18-25, collapsing municipal services…

Obama and his team of bloodless wonks steered policy in a way that benefited upper-middle-class professionals and the college educated again and again, and indeed, once the manufacturing output of a developed country declines, inequality between uneducated workers and educated workers starts spiking. So Obama’s indifference to the costs of deindustrialization – the right people win. Unsurprisingly, standing by in indifference accelerated the erosion of white working class support for Democrats. This should have caused every alarm bell to ring, since white working class support was crucial for Obama’s electoral victories. But his administration didn’t appear to notice, seemingly content to become more and more thoroughly a vehicle of wealthy urban liberals who supported faux-radical social and cultural politics while quietly preferring the economic conservatism that would benefit them.

The misinformer-in-chief cometh
What happens if Saint Kamala, Bringer of Joy, is defeated? Even with collapsing legacy media outlets further beclowning themselves by acting as shameless propagandists for an embarrassingly lightweight presidential candidate?  

Faux-radical wealthy urban liberals will undoubtedly credit Trump’s upcoming victory to misinformation. Expect to see a blizzard of op-eds arguing that the Bad Orange Man got across the line solely because of lurid tales of feline-devouring Haitian migrants.

But – humour me here for a moment – what if it isn’t the working and middle classes who are deluded?

Curiously, polls have long shown (overwhelmingly white) progressives obsess about racism far more than those most likely to be subjected to it. I was reminded of this by a recent

Adam Tooze

post containing polling done for the Financial Times by Echelon Insights.

Hispanics never had as many intersectional status points as African Americans. Indeed, come November 6, they are likely to be relegated to the ‘white-adjacent’ category, along with other racial minorities that have problematic value systems and political opinions. So, let’s ignore them, along with the Caucasian conservatives.

But if I understand the protocols of current-year progressivism correctly, the lived experience of African Americans trumps all other considerations. So, what happens when African Americans have a much sunnier view of America than their affluent ‘allies’?  

More misperceptions
The US is a foreign country and they do things differently there. But not, it seems, that much differently from the rest of the Anglosphere.

The aforementioned Professor Davis, currently a visiting professor of Australian studies at Harvard, recently argued the Voice referendum should have been delayed until more evil white people had died off, telling the AFR’s Tom McIlroy that:

You have a really dramatic change 10 years ahead from now, because all the Baby Boomers will be gone, and our multicultural brothers and sisters are going to overtake the Australian-born population. We are on the cusp. We thought we were on that wave, but we weren’t. We’re on the tail end of old, white Australia.

There’s just one problem with this argument, as Nyunggai Warren Mundine pointed out in another AFR article. Lots of Anglo-Celtic Australians, Boomer and otherwise, supported the Voice while plenty of “multicultural” ones didn’t:

Support for Yes was concentrated in the well-heeled suburbs close to Australia’s major capital cities and among university-educated, high-income voters. The No vote prevailed in the expanse of most multicultural suburbs around greater Sydney and Melbourne. Voters speaking a language other than English were more likely to vote No.

More to the point, the vast majority of electorates where at least two of the top three non-English languages are not European returned a No vote and most were a strong No (greater than 55 per cent). Electorates with a high prevalence of Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism among the top religions also overwhelmingly voted No and, again, more returned a strong No. These demographics are hardly correlated with white Australia.

Mundine points out that Yes campaigners didn’t even get the expected support from Indigenous Australians:

The No vote prevailed across remote and regional Australia and in the working-class suburbs – this is, in the areas where most Indigenous people – and most people who count Indigenous people among their friends, colleagues, family members and neighbours – live.

It is also a lie that support for the Voice was high in remote Indigenous communities. Available booth data indicates that more than 60 per cent of Indigenous voters in remote communities didn’t vote at all, and the percentage of eligible Indigenous voters who voted Yes was less than 30 per cent.

If you didn’t know any better, you might think it’s those faux-radical wealthy urban liberals who’ve been falling victim to misinformation in recent times.