Gouverneur Morris is named in The Bob Zadek Show once, in the episode “Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance?” The reference is brief and occurs in the course of a discussion between host Bob Zadek and guest Ilya Somin about the founders’ attitude toward popular participation in government. The excerpts do not supply a biography of Morris, describe any office he held, or report any position he took in his own words. What they establish is narrower: that Somin grouped Morris with James Madison and unnamed others among the founders who believed the public was often ignorant about politics and irrational in evaluating the information it did know.
The founders’ skepticism of democracy
The episode opens with Bob Zadek describing his reading of Richard Beeman’s book Plain Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution, which he says tells the story of how the Constitution was negotiated and written. Zadek draws from it the observation that the founders had little enthusiasm for democracy, and he lays out the structural argument for that claim: after ratification in 1788, the only direct voter participation in the federal system was the election of members of the House of Representatives. Senators were elected by the state houses, judges were not elected, and the President was chosen by electors rather than by voters directly. Zadek characterizes the founders as “pretty careful to limit the direct voter participation because they were uncomfortable with the process and with the ability of everyday people to make important decisions with the ballot.” Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance? (2013)
Somin agrees with the general picture while qualifying it. He says there were different views among the founders, that most were very worried about voter ignorance, and that they wanted some political participation as a check on the power of elites and the wealthy even as they limited popular participation in the government they set up. He adds that many founders were concerned about what they saw as ignorance-driven excesses in state governments in the 1770s and 1780s, which he identifies as one of the primary reasons they wanted to establish the Constitution. It is at this point that Morris enters the conversation, in Somin’s list of founders who believed the public was often ignorant about politics and also irrational in the way it evaluated the information it did know.
Zadek then raises James Wilson, saying Wilson was unenthusiastic at the prospect of widespread democracy, and restates the point that to the founders democracy was not an end in itself but a check, a control device, a way to ensure that those in government knew there would be retribution at the polls if they misbehaved. Somin responds that some founders probably did value popular participation as an end in itself, naming Jefferson, but that this did not prevent them from being suspicious of it as well, and that for at least some of them its main point was to check the bad behavior of government officials and other political elites.
Morris in the episode’s argument
Morris functions in the episode as a supporting name rather than a subject. Somin invokes him in a single sentence, paired with Madison, to illustrate that the founders’ concern about public ignorance was not incidental but a premise of the constitutional design. The excerpts record no quotation from Morris, no account of his contributions at the convention, and no disagreement among the speakers about what he thought. Zadek does not return to him, and no caller or later segment of the excerpted material mentions him again.
The surrounding discussion is about voter ignorance as a general phenomenon rather than about any individual founder. Somin argues that ignorance affects almost every major policy issue, citing survey data showing that the public greatly overestimates the share of the federal budget spent on foreign aid and underestimates spending on entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security. He cites a Kaiser Foundation poll from April finding that 42 percent of the public did not realize that Obamacare was still the law, and a later poll finding that 79 percent had heard nothing or very little about the Obamacare exchanges. He also cites a 2006 poll finding that only 42 percent of the public could name the three branches of the federal government. None of this material concerns Morris; it establishes the theme in which his name appears.
Across episodes
Only one episode in the excerpts mentions Gouverneur Morris, so the excerpts show no development in how the show treats him. The topic of the founders’ skepticism toward democracy is touched on in that single episode, “Is America Doomed by Voter Ignorance?”, and the excerpts contain no earlier or later treatment to compare against.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Morris’s role at the Constitutional Convention, any office he held, any speech or writing of his, or the state he represented. They do not say when he was born or died, and they do not describe his relationship to Madison, Wilson, or Jefferson beyond Somin’s grouping of him with Madison as a founder worried about public ignorance. The episode’s discussion of the founders’ reservations is conducted at the level of general characterization, and the excerpts break off mid-sentence in a later segment, so no further claim about Morris can be drawn from them.