Boorish Thinking

After each election closes, commentaries are either very interesting or very boring. Some of them simply put you to sleep; some comments surprise you with their forward thinking, while others just want to shock you. But there still are, however, analyses and columns born from the sheer boorish thinking of their authors who claim they were right all the time, and if the election results showed them not to be, then it’s the fault of the stupid voters.

These authors are disgruntled by the results of the vote; they are saddened to have been proven wrong in their pre-elections analyses; they are irritated that the mapping of voting results does not comply in detail with their own interests. Thus, in the aftermath of elections, a good number of commentators are keen on scolding the voters.
Just hinting or in straightforward language, they say that the electorate is immature, does not know what it wants, or is opportunistic.
I do not want to comment here on the claim the voters are immature or undecided.
But I do want to reply to the idea that the voters are opportunistic.

First of all, being opportunistic is a trait innate to us, to those of us who claim to be opinion leaders. The yo-yo like mentality comes natural, first of all, to us, the commentators, and second to the voters. If that will not be a pleonasm, I would say that our kind changes opinion sooner than underwear, or that we are scoundrels with a variable geometry.

The voters of a country are not born opportunistic, but they may turn to be so. And next to politicians, no one does a better job at promoting opportunism than the media outlets.
It is truly embarrassing to witness opinion leaders shocked and dismayed at the results prompted by the ideas they have circulated.

Before he became president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson said words that could make happy to this day any journalist: "If it were for me to decide if we should have government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I will not hesitate to go for the latter."
Not many journalists, however, are happy to be reminded other words of Jefferson’s, stated after he spent six years in the White House: "Nothing one reads today in a newspaper can be trusted. Truth itself stirs suspicion simply because it travels by such a polluted vehicle as the media is."
Though he was disgruntled with the newspapering of his day, Jefferson never betrayed his commitment to the freedom of the press. In a letter he sent to a friend, he wrote: "I deplore the putrefaction the newspapers arrived at, as I do the baseness, blatancy and the spirit inclined towards perpetuating the untruth of those who write at these newspapers … These dejections soon poison the public’s taste. Nevertheless, this is an evil with no cure, since our freedom relies on the freedom of the press, and the latter cannot be limited without stifling it."

The devotion of people like Thomas Jefferson to the freedom of the press made this one the fourth power in the state. It is another matter though, how media outlets all over the world use that power. Freedom of the press puts the highest obligation on journalists to preserve it.

And the voters are not any stupider than the electoral offer that has been presented to them.
Sometimes they are so much better than it.
But this is something our boorish thinking may not forgive, may it not?