We all know

House Speaker Mike Johnson wants new legislation to make sure illegal immigrants can't vote in U.S. elections—something that of course is already against the law.

"We all know intuitively that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections," Johnson said.

 

Johnson makes the fundamental mistake of combining two words that are utterly incompatible in this context: "know" and "intuitively."

 

Johnson also said that noncitizen voting poses a "clear and present danger to the integrity of our election system."

That is false on both counts. The danger is neither clear nor present. (By contrast, one danger to our election system that is both clear and present is a president who attempts to remain in office after losing an election. Johnson was very much involved in that attempt.)

Experts who have studied the question have long said that illegal immigrant voting in the U.S. is vanishingly rare. Which makes sense: If you're illegal, you want to fly below the radar and remain in the country. Keep your head down. Don't do anything to raise attention or get yourself in trouble. That, by the way, is a reason immigrants commit less crime overall than native born Americans. Thus can intuition help explain observed fact, but it's the fact that matters.

 

Indeed, election fraud of every sort is extremely rare, and not for want of looking. Which provides a useful contrast between "know" and "intuitively." Experts who know have done the actual work of finding out. Persons who just know operate from a collection of prejudices. They somehow think we should credit their fact-free intuition. It's that way with lots of things. It's how alternative realities are constructed and inhabited.

Voter fraud has been a Republican bogeyman almost forever. Early in the Trump administration Mike Pence chaired a commission to look for fraud—how else could Trump have lost the popular vote by 3 million? But the effort quickly folded, which is itself telling, and somewhat amusing. Meanwhile, the experts who have studied the matter extensively kept saying there is no meaningful fraud. Every time we make a serious effort to look for it, there's none to be found. (The Republican-controlled Arizona senate went looking in its 2020 election "audit" and ended up finding a few hundred additional votes on net for Biden, which is worth a few chortles.) Yet Mike Johnson knows intuitively the fraud is there.

Another thing Johnson knows intuitively is that burning fossil fuels doesn't cause the global warming we're experiencing right now. This has to be an intuitive belief, because if Johnson had bothered to learn anything factual about climate science, he'd not hold it.

"The climate is changing," Johnson acknowledges. "But the question is, is it being caused by natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history? Or is it changing because we drive SUVs? I don’t believe in the latter. I don’t think that’s the primary driver."

As I wrote here, the problem is that Johnson doesn't "think" at all. Johnson's "belief" is entirely uninformed by any learned facts. His handwave at "natural cycles over the span of the Earth’s history" is stupendously facile. Which is not to say that the cycles aren't real or important. They absolutely are. If Johnson would learn about what drives them, he'd gain an important understanding about the climate, and how humanity has taken absolute control over it.

But it seems Mike Johnson isn't wired to learn things. By now we've seen plenty of examples.

 

And his ways of knowing are all wrong. Early in his tenure he said that if you want to know what he thinks, you should read the Bible. Seriously? What does the Bible say about election fraud? About climate change? About any of Johnson's particular responsibilities to the nation as speaker of the House? He has a crucially important job to do, but, as an intellectual matter, he's exceedingly ill-equipped to do it.

But he does convey something real and frightening. The "we" in his "we all know" are actual multitudes, who with Johnson occupy their own reality different from the actual one. They have their own way of knowing that has nothing to do with learning demonstrable facts about the reality that is. And that should scare the bejesus out of the rest of us. It does me.

 

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.