“Low Information Voter”: The New Form of Intimidation

If you try to argue against things like socialized medicine/Obamacare, climate change, progressive taxation or government involvement in the economy, you already know you’re subject to being called a racist.

With Obama in power for the last 8 years, this charge was supposed to intimidate you. Presumably, because Obama is half-black, to oppose anything he stands for makes you a racist. After all, how else could you disagree with him about anything he supports, since it’s beyond questioning?

Racism, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with your positions on taxes, health care or anything else. The charge is just a way to escape authentic intellectual debate. It makes sense that progressives would do this. They have no moral or economic defense for their policies, not rationally speaking. During Obama’s time in office, real unemployment and underemployment have risen. This affects blacks — disproportionately dependent on the government handout state, thanks to progressive welfare state policies over the decades — more than other persons, as a group, because government policies have kept blacks down in a slump by hooking many of them on freebies for generations at a time. Instead of owning the problem they created, progressives have to escape debate. The way they do this? By calling people who disagree with them “racists,” or other names.

With Obama’s upcoming, Constitutionally-required exit from office early next year, progressives are in search of another tactic of intimidation to shut down debates they do not wish to have, and never could win on rational terms. That tactic takes the form of the phrase, “Low information voter.”

The moment you’re charged with being a “low information voter,” you’re helpless and paralyzed, unless you see the tactic for what it is. You find yourself having to defend the position, “I don’t have enough data to back up my point.” Progressives are full of data to support everything they do, like their proposals to convert Obamacare into universal, single-payer socialized medicine, to keep raising taxes higher, to increasing the federal debt way beyond the doubling Obama has already done, and so on.

However, it’s the underlying premise progressives do not want to confront. The underlying premise is what business, morally, Constitutionally and economically, does government have being involved in all these activities, in the first place?

Government makes health care more expensive for everyone, demoralizing doctors and patients in the process. If government got out of health care, supply and demand and free markets would lower the price, and create the incentives and basis required for innovation. Doctors and hospitals would primarily work to satisfy patients and customers in the marketplace, rather than primarily serve and obey the government. Ditto for education, another government mess. Ditto for charity, which should also be privatized and run by voluntarily willing foundations and individuals, not government mandates and bureaucracy.

As for defense, that’s the one area of legitimate government involvement supported by the Constitution. Without a strong defense, even the precious progressive status quo welfare state is doomed. Not only will their leader not defend us, he won’t even call our prime enemy — Islamic terrorism — by its real name. Instead of explaining why Obama and Hillary Clinton, the leading progressives, will not defend us, and why Islamic-based terrorism has become more dominant in America than ever, under their watch, they accuse people who seek to throw them out of office of being “low information” voters.

What information are so-called low information voters missing? The country is more divided than at any time since the 1960s. Race relations are at the worst we have seen since that time. Millions of Americans are underemployed, unemployed or have given up on employment in a stagnant economy, when you define employment as a 30-plus hour per week job. More and more are dependent on government handouts, and the entitlement programs of Medicare and Social Security are fiscally unsustainable, by the government’s own figures. Progressives have no answer, other than more borrowing, more spending, more economically destructive Federal Reserve policies, and — of course — more taxation. In the meantime, government regulation and micromanaging strangle what’s left of freedom and innovation in the economy, while outside savages — known as Islamic terrorists — prey upon our weakening moral certainty beat down by Obama’s repeated and emotionally abusive claims that America is not exceptional, not special, not important and never has been. To add insult to injury, we hand billions of dollars to one of the leading governments of these religious barbarians (Iran) so they may build nuclear weapons to use against our lone ally in the Middle East, and possibly against us, eventually.

What’s low information about calling things as they are? This charge of “low information,” like all the others spewed out by progressives, is an acknowledgement of their own weakness and defeat, intellectually. They may be good at holding on to power; but when you consider the actual information about the consequences of what they’re doing to us, there’s nothing low about it. The overwhelming evidence of Obama’s progressive policies is in our faces, growing more intense by the day, as you read the horrible headlines about police shootings, growing deficits and debt, unprecedented government regulation and favoritism to politically correct groups, terrorist invasions and general demoralization and division in our once great society. Remember that “progressive” does not necessarily mean good; it just means expanding. Cancer is progressive, too.

It’s more than name-calling. The idea of “low information voter” serves a purpose, too. When a majority rejects their policies, as British citizens did when recently withdrawing from the totally corrupt and socialist European Union, advocates of statism called those voters, “low information voters.” They call for a new election, so people can now have the “right” information and subsequently make the “right” decision this time. It’s an attempt to use name-calling as a way to denigrate the positions of any who dare to disagree with big, expansive and unending government, to intimidate (and ultimately force) individuals into doing their bidding. Eventually, you can expect that name-calling to turn into calls for restraining freedom of speech, along with the freedom to own weapons of self-defense. It’s already happening, in America, and if Obama gets his third term under Hillary, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Governments run by socialists or progressives want their citizens weak, ignorant and humble. That’s the only way they can keep running over them. In reality, it’s the people who vote for and support all this destructive government socialism who are low information voters; not the ones who still possess the resolve and courage to oppose it.

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