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From Tomdispatch.com:
By Rick Shenkman, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 2, 2008
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it
expects what never was and never will be." -- Thomas Jefferson
Just how stupid are we? Pretty stupid, it would seem, when we come
across headlines like this: "Homer Simpson, Yes -- 1st Amendment
'Doh,' Survey Finds" (Associated Press 3/1/06).
"About 1 in 4 Americans can name more than one of the five
freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of
speech, religion, press, assembly and petition for redress of
grievances.) But more than half of Americans can name at
least two members of the fictional cartoon family, according
to a survey.
"The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum
found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five
Simpson family members, compared with just 1 in 1,000
people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms."
But what does it mean exactly to say that American voters are stupid?
About this there is unfortunately no consensus. Like Supreme Court
Justice Potter Stewart, who confessed not knowing how to define
pornography, we are apt simply to throw up our hands in frustration
and say: We know it when we see it. But unless we attempt a
definition of some sort, we risk incoherence, dooming our investigation
of stupidity from the outset. Stupidity cannot mean, as Humpty Dumpty
would have it, whatever we say it means.
Five defining characteristics of stupidity, it seems to me, are readily
apparent. First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about
important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government
functions and who's in charge. Second, is negligence: The
disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important
news events. Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara
Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe
regardless of the facts. Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of
public policies that are mutually contradictory, or contrary to the
country's long-term interests. Fifth, and finally, is a broad category
I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility
to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic
diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.
American Ignorance
Taking up the first of our definitions of stupidity, how ignorant are we?
Ask the political scientists and you will be told that there is damning,
hard evidence pointing incontrovertibly to the conclusion that millions
are embarrassingly ill-informed and that they do not care that they are.
There is enough evidence that one could almost conclude -- though
admittedly this is a stretch -- that we are living in an Age of Ignorance.
Surprised? My guess is most people would be. The general impression
seems to be that we are living in an age in which people are particularly
knowledgeable. Many students tell me that they are the most well-
informed generation in history.
 Why are we so deluded? The error can be
traced to our mistaking unprecedented
access to information with the actual
consumption of it. Our access is indeed
phenomenal. George Washington had to
wait two weeks to discover that he had been
elected president of the United States. That's
how long it took for the news to travel from
New York, where the Electoral College votes
were counted, to reach him at home in
Mount Vernon, Virginia. Americans living in
the interior regions had to wait even longer,
some up to two months. Now we can watch
developments as they occur halfway around
the world in real time. It is little wonder then
that students boast of their knowledge. Unlike
their parents, who were forced to rely mainly on newspapers and the
network news shows to find out what was happening in the world, they
can flip on CNN and Fox or consult the Internet.
But in fact only a small percentage of people take advantage of the
great new resources at hand. In 2005, the Pew Research Center
surveyed the news habits of some 3,000 Americans age 18 and older.
The researchers found that 59% on a regular basis get at least some
news from local TV, 47% from national TV news shows, and just 23%
from the Internet.
Anecdotal evidence suggested for years that Americans were not
particularly well-informed. As foreign visitors long ago observed,
Americans are vastly inferior in their knowledge of world geography
compared with Europeans. (The old joke is that "War is God's way
of teaching Americans geography.") But it was never clear until the
postwar period how ignorant Americans are. For it was only then that
social scientists began measuring in a systematic manner what
Americans actually know. The results were devastating.
The most comprehensive surveys, the National Election Studies
(NES), were carried out by the University of Michigan beginning in the
late 1940s. What these studies showed was that Americans fall into
three categories with regard to their political knowledge. A tiny
percentage know a lot about politics, up to 50%-60% know enough
to answer very simple questions, and the rest know next to nothing.
Contrary to expectations, by many measures the surveys showed
the level of ignorance remaining constant over time. In the 1990s,
political scientists Michael X. Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter
concluded that there was statistically little difference between the
knowledge of the parents of the Silent Generation of the 1950s,
the parents of the Baby Boomers of the 1960s, and American
parents today. (By some measures, Americans are dumber
today than their parents of a generation ago.)
Some of the numbers are hard to fathom in a country in which for
at least a century all children have been required by law to attend
grade school or be home-schooled. Even if people do not closely
follow the news, one would expect them to be able to answer basic
civics questions, but only a small minority can.
In 1986, only 30% knew that Roe v. Wade was the Supreme Court
decision that ruled abortion legal more than a decade earlier. In 1991,
Americans were asked how long the term of a United States senator
is. Just 25% correctly answered six years. How many senators are
there? A poll a few years ago found that only 20% know that there
are 100 senators, though the number has remained constant for the
last half century (and is easy to remember). Encouragingly, today
the number of Americans who can correctly identify and name the
three branches of government is up to 40%.
Polls over the past three decades measuring Americans' knowledge
of history show similarly dismal results. What happened in 1066?
Just 10% know it is the date of the Norman Conquest. Who said the
"world must be made safe for democracy"? Just 14% know it was
Woodrow Wilson. Which country dropped the nuclear bomb? Only
49% know it was their own country. Who was America's greatest
president? According to a Gallup poll in 2005, a majority answer
that it was a president from the last half century: 20% said Reagan,
15% Bill Clinton, 12% John Kennedy, 5% George W. Bush. Only
14% picked Lincoln and only 5%, Washington.
And the worst president? For years Americans would include in the
list Herbert Hoover. But no more. Most today do not know who
Herbert Hoover was, according to the University of Pennsylvania's
National Annenberg Election Survey in 2004. Just 43% could
correctly identify him.
The only history questions a majority of Americans can answer
correctly are the most basic ones. What happened at Pearl Harbor?
A great majority know: 84%. What was the Holocaust? Nearly 70%
know. (Thirty percent don't?) But it comes as something of a shock
that, in 1983, just 81% knew who Lee Harvey Oswald was and that,
in 1985, only 81% could identify Martin Luther King, Jr.
What Voters Don't Know
Who these poor souls were who didn't know who Martin Luther
King was we cannot be sure. Research suggests that they were
probably impoverished (the poor tend to know less on the whole
about politics and history than others) or simply unschooled,
categories which usually overlap. But even Americans in the
middle class who attend college exhibit profound ignorance. A
report in 2007 published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
found that on average 14,000 randomly selected college students
at 50 schools around the country scored under 55 (out of 100) on
a test that measured their knowledge of basic American civics.
Less than half knew that Yorktown was the last battle of the
American Revolution. Surprisingly, seniors often tested lower than
freshmen. (The explanation was apparently that many students by
their senior year had forgotten what they learned in high school.)
The optimists point to surveys indicating that about half the country
can describe some differences between the Republican and
Democratic Parties. But if they do not know the difference between
liberals and conservatives, as surveys indicate, how can they possibly
say in any meaningful way how the parties differ? And if they do not
know this, what else do they not know?
Plenty, it turns out. Even though they are awash in news, Americans
generally do not seem to absorb what it is that they are reading and
hearing and watching. Americans cannot even name the leaders of
their own government. Sandra Day O'Connor was the first woman
appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Fewer than half of
Americans could tell you her name during the length of her entire
tenure. William Rehnquist was chief justice of the Supreme Court.
Just 40% of Americans ever knew his name (and only 30% could tell
you that he was a conservative). Going into the First Gulf War, just
15% could identify Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, or Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense. In 2007, in the fifth
year of the Iraq War, only 21% could name the secretary of defense,
Robert Gates. Most Americans cannot name their own member of
Congress or their senators.
If the problem were simply that Americans are bad at names, one
would not have to worry too much. But they do not understand the
mechanics of government either. Only 34% know that it is the
Congress that declares war (which may explain why they are not
alarmed when presidents take us into wars without explicit
declarations of war from the legislature). Only 35% know that
Congress can override a presidential veto. Some 49% think the
president can suspend the Constitution. Some 60% believe that
he can appoint judges to the federal courts without the approval
of the Senate. Some 45% believe that revolutionary speech is
punishable under the Constitution.
On the basis of their comprehensive approach, Delli Carpini and
Keeter concluded that only 5% of Americans could correctly
answer three-fourths of the questions asked about economics,
only 11% of the questions about domestic issues, 14% of the
questions about foreign affairs, and 10% of the questions about
geography. The highest score? More Americans knew the correct
answers to history questions than any other (which will come as
a surprise to many history teachers). Still, only 25% knew the
correct answers to three-quarters of the history questions,
which were rudimentary.
In 2003, the Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad investigated
Americans' knowledge of world affairs. The task force concluded:
"America's ignorance of the outside world" is so great as to
constitute a threat to national security.
Young and Ignorant -- and Voting
At least, you may think to yourself, we are not getting any dumber.
But by some measures we are. Young people by many measures
know less today than young people forty years ago. And their news
habits are worse. Newspaper reading went out in the sixties along
with the Hula Hoop. Just 20% of young Americans between the
ages of 18 and 34 read a daily paper. And that isn't saying much.
There's no way of knowing what part of the paper they're reading. It
is likelier to encompass the comics and a quick glance at the front
page than dense stories about Somalia or the budget.
They aren't watching the cable news shows either. The average age
of CNN's audience is sixty. And they surely are not watching the
network news shows, which attract mainly the Depends generation.
Nor are they using the Internet in large numbers to surf for news.
Only 11% say that they regularly click on news web pages. (Yes,
many young people watch Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. A survey
in 2007 by the Pew Research Center found that 54% of the viewers
of The Daily Show score in the "high knowledge" news category --
about the same as the viewers of the O'Reilly Factor on Fox News.)
Compared with Americans generally -- and this isn't saying much,
given their low level of interest in the news -- young people are the
least informed of any age cohort save possibly for those confined to
nursing homes. In fact, the young are so indifferent to newspapers
that they single-handedly are responsible for the dismally low
newspaper readership rates that are bandied about.
In earlier generations -- in the 1950s, for example -- young people
read newspapers and digested the news at rates similar to those
of the general population. Nothing indicates that the current generation
of young people will suddenly begin following the news when they turn
35 or 40. Indeed, half a century of studies suggest that most people
who do not pick up the news habit in their twenties probably never will.
Young people today find the news irrelevant. Bored by politics, students
shun the rituals of civic life, voting in lower numbers than other Americans
(though a small up-tick in civic participation showed up in recent surveys).
U.S. Census data indicate that voters aged 18 to 24 turn out in low
numbers. In 1972, when 18 year olds got the vote, 52% cast a ballot. In
subsequent years, far fewer voted: in 1988, 40%; in 1992, 50%; in 1996,
35%; in 2000, 36%. In 2004, despite the most intense get-out-the-vote
effort ever focused on young people, just 47% took the time to cast a
ballot.
Since young people on the whole scarcely follow politics, one may want
to consider whether we even want them to vote. Asked in 2000 to
identify the presidential candidate who was the chief sponsor of Campaign
Finance Reform -- Sen. John McCain -- just 4% of people between the
ages of 18 and 24 could do so. As the primary season began in February,
fewer than half in the same age group knew that George W. Bush was
even a candidate. Only 12% knew that McCain was also a candidate
even though he was said to be especially appealing to young people.
One news subject in recent history, 9/11, did attract the interest of the
young. A poll by Pew at the end of 2001 found that 61% of adult Americans
under age 30 said that they were following the story closely. But few found
any other subjects in the news that year compelling. Anthrax attacks?
Just 32% indicated it was important enough to follow. The economy?
Again, just 32%. The capture of Kabul? Just 20%.
It would appear that young people today are doing very little reading of
any kind. In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts, consulting a vast
array of surveys, including the United States Census, found that just 43%
of young people ages 18 to 24 read literature. In 1982, the number was
60%. A majority do not read either newspapers, fiction, poetry, or drama.
Save for the possibility that they are reading the Bible or works of non-
fiction, for which solid statistics are unavailable, it would appear that this
generation is less well read than any other since statistics began to be
kept.
The studies demonstrating that young people know less today than
young people a generation ago do not get much publicity. What one
hears about are the pioneer steps the young are taking politically.
Headlines from the 2004 presidential election featured numerous
stories about young people who were following the campaign on blogs,
then a new phenomenon. Other stories focused on the help young
Deaniacs gave Howard Dean by arranging to raise funds through
innovative Internet appeals. Still other stories reported that the
Deaniacs were networking all over the country through the Internet
website meetup.com. One did not hear that we have raised another
Silent Generation. But have we not? The statistics about young
people today are fairly clear: As a group they do not vote in large
numbers, most do not read newspapers, and most do not follow
the news. (Barack Obama has recently inspired greater participation,
but at this stage it is too early to tell if the effect will be lasting.)
The Issues? Who knows?
Millions every year are now spent on the effort to answer the question:
What do the voters want? The honest answer would be that often they
themselves do not really know because they do not know enough to
say. Few, however, admit this.
In the election of 2004, one of the hot issues was gay marriage. But
gauging public opinion on the subject was difficult. Asked in one
national poll whether they supported a constitutional amendment
allowing only marriages between a man and a woman, a majority
said yes. But three questions later a majority also agreed that
"defining marriage was not an important enough issue to be worth
changing the Constitution." The New York Times wryly summed
up the results: Americans clearly favor amending the Constitution
but not changing it.
Does it matter if people are ignorant? There are many subjects
about which the ordinary voter need know nothing. The conscientious
citizen has no obligation to plow through the federal budget, for
example. One suspects there are not many politicians themselves
who have bothered to do so. Nor do voters have an obligation to read
the laws passed in their name. We do expect members of Congress
to read the bills they are asked to vote on, but we know from experience
that often they do not, having failed either to take the time to do so or
having been denied the opportunity to do so by their leaders, who for
one reason or another often rush bills through.
Reading the text of laws in any case is often unhelpful. The chair-
persons in charge of drafting them often include provisions only a
detective could untangle. The tax code is rife with clauses like this:
The Congress hereby appropriates X dollars for the purchase of 500
widgets that measure 3 inches by 4 inches by 2 inches from any
company incorporated on October 20, 1965 in Any City USA
situated in block 10 of district 3.
Of course, only one company fits the description. Upon investigation
it turns out to be owned by the chairperson's biggest contributor. That
is more than any citizens acting on their own could possibly divine. It
is not essential that the voter know every which way in which the tax
code is manipulated to benefit special interests. All that is required is
that the voter know that rigging of the tax code in favor of certain
interests is probably common. The media are perfectly capable of
communicating this message. Voters are perfectly capable of
absorbing it. Armed with this knowledge, the voter knows to be
wary of claims that the tax code treats one and all alike with fairness.
There are however innumerable subjects about which a general
knowledge is insufficient. In these cases ignorance of the details is
more than a minor problem. An appalling ignorance of Social Security,
to take one example, has left Americans unable to see how their
money has been spent, whether the system is viable, and what
measures are needed to shore it up.
How many know that the system is running a surplus? And that this
surplus -- some $150 billion a year -- is actually quite substantial,
even by Washington standards? And how many know that the system
has been in surplus since 1983?
Few, of course. Ignorance of the facts has led to a fundamentally
dishonest debate about Social Security.
During all the years the surpluses were building, the Democrats in
Congress pretended the money was theirs to be spent, as if it were
the same as all the other tax dollars collected by the government.
And spend it they did, whenever they had the chance, with no hint
that they were perhaps disbursing funds that actually should be
held in reserve for later use. (Social Security taxes had been
expressly raised in 1983 in order to build up the system's funds
when bankruptcy had loomed.) Not until the rest of the budget was
in surplus (in 1999) did it suddenly occur to them that the money
should be saved. And it appears that the only reason they felt
compelled at this point to acknowledge that the money was
needed for Social Security was because they wanted to blunt the
Republicans' call for tax cuts. The Social Security surplus could
not both be used to pay for the large tax cuts Republicans wanted
and for the future retirement benefits of aging Boomers.
The Republicans have been equally unctuous. While they have
claimed that they are terribly worried about Social Security, they
have been busy irresponsibly spending the system's surplus on tax
cuts, one cut after another. First Reagan used the surplus to hide
the impact of his tax cuts and then George W. Bush used it to hide
the impact of his cuts. Neither ever acknowledged that it was only
the surplus in Social Security's accounts that made it even plausible
for them to cut taxes.
Take those Bush tax cuts. Bush claimed the cuts were made
possible by several years of past surpluses and the prospect of
even more years of surpluses. But subtracting from the federal
budget the overflow funds generated by Social Security, the
government ran a surplus in just two years during the period the
national debt was declining, 1999 and 2000.
In the other years when the government ran a surplus, 1998 and
2001, it was because of Social Security and only because of
Social Security. That is, the putative surpluses of 1998 and 2001,
which President Bush cited in defense of his tax cuts, were in
reality pure fiction. Without Social Security the government would
have been in debt those two years. And yet in 2001 President
Bush told the country tax cuts were not only needed, they were
affordable because of our splendid surplus.
Today, conservatives argue that the Social Security Trust Fund is
a fiction. They are correct. The money was spent. They helped
spend it.
To this debate about Social Security -- which, once one understands
what has been happening, is actually quite absorbing -- the public
has largely been an indifferent spectator. A surprising 2001 Pew
study found that just 19% of Americans understand that the United
States ever ran a surplus at all, however defined, in the 1990s or
2000's. And only 50% of Americans, according to an Annenberg
study in 2004, understand that President Bush favors privatizing
Social Security. Polls indicate that people are scared that the
system is going bust, no doubt thanks in part to Bush's gloom-and-
doom prognostications. But they haven't the faintest idea what going
bust means. And in fact, the system can be kept going without
fundamental change simply by raising the cap on taxed income
and pushing back the retirement age a few years.
How much ignorance can a country stand? There have to be terrible
consequences when it reaches a certain level. But what level? And
with what consequences, exactly? The answers to these questions
are unknowable. But can we doubt that if we persist on the path we
are on that we shall, one day, perhaps not too far into the distant
future, find out the answers?
Excerpted from Just How Stupid Are We?, by Rick
Shenkman, by arrangement with Basic Books.
Copyright 2008 Rick Shenkman
Rick Shenkman, Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter, New
York Times bestselling author, and associate professor of history
at George Mason University, is the founder and editor of
History News Network, a website that features articles by historians
on current events. This essay is adapted from chapter two of his
new book, Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth about the
American Voter (Basic Books, 2008). His observations about the
2008 election can be followed on his blog, "How Stupid?" His
recent appearance on Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show" can be
viewed by clicking here.
© 2008 Tomdispatch.com All rights reserved.
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