Here are two different approaches for politicians dealing with public ignorance. According to E

Here are two different approaches for politicians dealing with public ignorance. According to Edward Crankshaw, English politicians try to work with voters’ prejudice and idiocy and try to bend it towards the good.In England, the great parliamentary leaders have taken the imbecilities of their flock for granted … and with a mixture of more or less contempt and more or less tolerance they have, half-consciously at the most, adapted themselves to the human material they had to work with, seeking to draw the latent good sense out of it by example, by precept, by flattery, by cajolery, resorting, as a rule, to bamboozlement and calculated maneuver only as a last resort: in their general attitude there has, again as a rule, been a strong element of protectiveness: flock is the right word. I think this is largely true in American politics, too. Politicians in both parties bend over backwards rather than confront the crazy elements in their political base. Meanwhile, in Bismarck’s Germany, not so much Bismarck … had none of this approach. Too conscious of his vast superiority to the rank and file, it never occurred to him that he had a duty to lead and to educate. He saw himself not as a shepherd but as the master of a pack to be restrained with the whip, to be trained with ‘rewards’, to be conditioned, to be exploited when the occasion arose through appeals to base instinct. And, indeed, this element in his nature was all to accurately expressed in a remark uttered during his utterly detached and cold-blooded machinations in the Schleswig-Holstein question: needing to invoke with all his might an outburst of nationalistic feeling in the Parliament he despised, he said to the Prussian Commissioner in Schleswig: “We must let the whole pack howl!” They howled. Edward Crankshaw. The Fall of the House of Habsburg.  -- source link

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