"Sovereign omnicompetent" we're not

It was the American Journalist Walter Lippman in his book Public Opinion, who looked beyond the ideal citizen of political theory. The putative ideal citizen is informed on all matters, able to make rational political choices, like a "sovereign omnicompetent". Instead, we are busy, rushed, hassled and don't know enough. Therefore, we rely on shorthand to help us reach political decisons. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman showed us the heuristics we rely on to make up our minds.

I came across Lippman, in Nicholas Carr's The Myth of the Informed Citizen, an extract from his book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart. Carr explains, "We see the world in “stereotyped shapes” derived from “our moral codes and our social philosophies and our political agitations” as well as the cultural symbols supplied by art, literature, and entertainment."

Carr says that the real person is, "time-strapped and distracted, biased, susceptible to resentment and sentimentality, bombarded with messages and images, overstretched, wavering between confusion and overconfidence."

Lippmann clarifies:

My sympathies are with him, for I believe that he has been saddled with an impossible task and that he is asked to practice an unattainable ideal. I find it so myself for, although public business is my main interest and I give most of my time to watching it, I cannot find time to do what is expected of me in the theory of democracy; that is, to know what is going on and to have an opinion worth expressing on every question which confronts a self-governing community. And I have not happened to meet anybody, from a President of the United States to a professor of political science, who came anywhere near to embodying the accepted ideal of the sovereign and omnicompetent citizen.

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