Just how stupid are we? Facing the truth about Donald Trump’s America
History News Network HISTORY NEWS NETWORK
29 FEB 2016 AT 10:06 ET
rawstory.com
Recently, Fox revived “The X Files” and in the latest show there was a lesson for people who follow politics. The episode featured a horror-movie scene in which billions of people come down with life-threatening illnesses traceable – ready conspiracy nuts! – to an evil vaccine. This a laughable storyline. Fox would have been within its rights to refuse to broadcast the show on the grounds of implausibility. But in modern-day America there’s a ready appetite for anti-science thinking of this sort. The lesson for political junkies is that ignorance runs rampant through our society.
Years ago I wouldn’t have been bothered by a TV series that exploits our darkest emotions anymore than I worried about the tabloids being sold at check-out counters with crazy headlines like the one featured above: “ABRAHAM LINCOLN WAS A WOMAN! Shocking pix found in White House basement.” It was just entertainment, right?
But after what we’ve seen in this campaign cycle who can now rest easy? There’s every reason to worry that millions of people take sheer nonsense seriously. Their ignorance is making them sitting ducks for politicians like Donald “ I love the poorly educated” Trump. Election 2016 is turning into a civics teacher’s case study from hell.
From the moment he rode down the escalator at Trump Tower at the launch of his improbable presidential campaign back in June, Trump has been offering simplistic solutions to complicated problems. To wit, to take just two examples: To stop Mexicans from crossing the border he’d build a wall. To prevent terrorist attacks on the United States he’d stop all Muslims from coming here.
Each proposal has been eviscerated in the media based on the critiques of experts who have pointed out that his proposed solutions barely withstand cursory analysis. His wall wouldn’t be beautiful and the Mexican government won’t pay for it. Muslims can’t be excluded without wrecking havoc with our alliances in the Middle East, making us less, not more, safe.
But his voters haven’t cared. Nor have they worried when the media have caught him in one lie after another. Politifact has called him out for lying more than any of the other candidates, but to little effect. This has prompted some to think that Trump is the Teflon candidate and it appears he can get away with saying anything. As he himself remarked, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Eight years ago I wrote a book to draw attention to the problem of gross public ignorance. It carried an attention-getting title: Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter. The book is filled with statistics like these:
? A majority of Americans don’t know which party is in control of Congress.
? A majority can’t name the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
? A majority don’t know we have three branches of government.
The reaction I often got when I presented these statistics at lectures was that people don’t need to know a lot of facts. The posted comments on an interview
I did on CNN when the book came out – an interview that has drawn more than a million views – indicate that a lot of people hold facts in low regard. My rebuttal is that the ignorance of basic facts like these reflects a level of inattentiveness that is unhealthy in a society that purports to be free and democratic. That inattentiveness can be dangerous was shown in 2003 when a majority of Americans told pollsters
they believed the United States should invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein had attacked America on 9-11. The explanation, of course, was that the Bush administration had irresponsibly dropped hints that Saddam was responsible for 9-11, leading low-information voters to draw the inference that this was the reason we were attacking Iraq. But, seriously, they couldn’t see through the smokescreen? People, we have a problem when a majority of Americans can’t get the basic facts right about the most important event of our time.
Alas, though my book made the Amazon bestseller list I didn’t convince the mainstream media that ignorance is a threat to our democracy. Then, Donald Trump came along.
Now suddenly mainstream media pundits have discovered how ignorant millions of voters are. See this and this and this and this. More importantly, the concern with low-information voters has become widespread. Many are now wondering what country they’re living in. They cannot believe a politician can make all the false claims Trump has – like saying that thousands of Muslims danced on the roofs of apartment buildings in Jersey City as they watched the Twin Towers collapse on 9-11 – and get away with it.
This is, however, no time to moan. We’ve gotten a profound lesson about the limits of American democracy at a relatively cheap price. Ordinarily countries facing a hard truth like this (think Germany) have to sustain a period of deprivation and disaster over an extended period before seeing the light. Thus far we’ve only had to put up with Donald Trump for the past seven months. Trump may still wreck the GOP but with a little luck we won’t be calling him Mr. President. (I do shudder to think what might happen if terrorists strike. We could be one 9-11 away from a Trump presidency.) |
