Louis Gohmert and what it tells me about electorates

Over the years, I have been accused on more than one occasion of being an elitist.
One of the more amusing incidents was in 2004 when I was in a discussion on a discussion forum somewhere and I was called out as an elitist. I remarked that I was OK with that, but disappointed because the person making the comment had forgotten to prefix it with “latte-sipping”. I soon found out that my erstwhile opponent was totally irony-challenged, as he claimed to not understand my comment. In this view, I was being obtuse.
Those of you who have talked to me about politics know that I consider myself unelectable to any political office under any sort of current Western democratic process, especially in my adopted home in the USA.
I talk funny.
I use long sentences, and worse still, I tend to use Big Words.
I refuse to dissemble or pander.
I have a disturbing tendency to call bullshit out as bullshit.
I am intolerant of poor arguments.
How many strikes is that?
One of the truest but also sobering comments I read online recently was one from a statistician on a statistics forum. He reminded us “remember, by definition 50% of the population is of below-average intelligence”.
I am always reminded of this during every election season. Sometimes it is when I find myself watching or reading a prospective voter saying something that is some combination of poorly-argued, factually challenged or simply mind-bogglingly stupid.
And sometimes it is when I find myself listening to or reading a politician uttering something that is a combination of incorrect, stupid, poorly argued, or just plain weird.
In the case of Louis Gohmert, all of the above epithets apply.
The depressing reality about having to listen to Gohmert’s bloviations is not that that he talks like a complete idiot (which he is probably not, by the way). It is that he gets re-elected very 2 years in a landslide. Clearly, his verbal nonsense is appealing to a large number of people.
That, in a nutshell, is why my confidence and trust in electorates is limited.

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