[actsasbuffoon]

I’ve been waiting to see my countrymen vote in their own best interests for my entire life. I’d be shocked if they started doing it now.

We are astonishingly bad at understanding abstraction. We understand that if Kevin shows up at our house and punches us in the face, we should avoid Kevin. But once you put a layer of abstraction between Kevin and the broken nose, we suddenly become baffled about how this could happen, and then we vote for Kevin.

[tgma]

> I’ve been waiting to see my countrymen vote in their own best interests for my entire life

This is an extremely arrogant statement to think a single individual can know the best interests of an entire country and to know they were wrong in identifying their own. To quantify this, perhaps one close proxy is to see how many people really regretted their vote after the fact, which in the context of US does not appear to be that many (even those unsatisfied with the outcome post hoc would not necessarily have voted for the opponent if given a time machine.)

Perhaps it is not trivial to have visibility into the intricacies of other people's lives and their priorities. Even harder to generalize it to tens of millions of people in a country.

[walkabout]

Voter behavior and motivation (and knowledge of the issues, and of basic facts about their own government...) is well-studied and has been for decades. Political scientists studied it really heavily for quite a while because early results were fucking alarming (and proved to be accurate, and also not just a temporary aberration) if you're starting from a firm belief in liberal democracy and a broad franchise.

Voters, to a great extent, aren't motivated by what one might either expect or hope, nor 1/10th as well informed about the operation of their own government or the issues at stake as one might hope. It's a shit-show, so much so that it's practically miraculous that voting produces functioning governments ever, at all, and the whole thing's terribly fragile (after convincing themselves the data weren't wrong, the next step was a few decades of trying to figure out some mechanism by which this whole thing wasn't as worrisome as it seemed, which effort turned out to be based mostly on "copium", to use a modern term, and was eventually regarded as having more-or-less failed)

[Gud]

I mean, if you vote in a terrible human being to lead a country, you are bound to have problems. It’s not an arrogant thing to say.

[happytoexplain]

It's not arrogant. Trump culture, and the subset of conservative US culture it grew out of, explicitly positions itself to be described in these terms. You don't have to be a mean or arrogant person to acknowledge that reality, unlike with most "normal" political parties.

It's also an opinion that doesn't require omniscience to hold. I don't know why that's the bar you've set. Yeah - of course nobody can really know what's best.