The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
By Rick Shenkman, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on July 2, 2008, Printed on July 2, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/90161/
"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
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?
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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