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.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
"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 chairpersons 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?
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