Rick Shenkman: Just How Stupid Are We?

Rick Shenkman: Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (2008, Basic Books)

This book asks an important question. Unfortunately, it doesn't answer it, and it comes off rather stupid itself. Clearly, voters are not very well informed about most issues. In fact, you could dig up quite a bit of evidence showing that members of Congress don't necessarily know what they're talking about. It's possible that some of this is because people are getting dumber. There are a number of possible reasons for that, with television and the PR and advertising industries that cohabit with it the most obvious candidate. Jane Jacobs, in Dark Ages Ahead, offered several other candidates, like the decline of traditional families, and credentialism in education. Another possibility is that the world is getting more complex at a rate that swamps out even real gains in individual expertise. I think that's the single biggest part of it, and that it manifests itself not just by leaving the uninitiated behind -- it also seems to be confusing so-called experts, which in turn confuses the hell out of everyone else. (E.g., try talking to economists about the role of speculation in rising oil prices -- then follow that up talking to politicians and pundits.)

Shenkman, who is a history professor at George Mason University, tries to suss this out anecdotally, which might be entertaining but is unlikely to get to the root of the problem. (Like his proposal for a Too Many Stupid Voters Act is unlikely to fix the problem.) One might instead try looking at outcomes: Do votes accurately advance the voter's considered interests? Do voters even grasp their real interests? Are there political choices to match the voters' preferences, and if not why not? It seems obvious that the political successes of the Republican Right at best benefit a small portion of the people who vote for them, so those outcomes are arguably due to stupid voters (whether ignorant or manipulated). Too bad the book doesn't sort them out better.

(pp. 2-3):

The willingness to address our myths calls for a certain amount of courage. The thesis of this book is that courage of the sort we need has been in short supply of late. We have allowed the myth of The People to warp our politics, limit the choices of our leaders, and hinder us in our war with Islamist terrorists, putting our democracy, and possibly even our lives, in danger. While pundits on both the Left and the Right have advanced vigorous arguments about a seemingly endless number of hot topics, they have largely ignored how the voters limitations have sabotaged us time and again. One of the purposes of this book is to provide various ways to have a constructive conversation about this most sensitive of subjects. [ . . . ]

Of all our myths, I believe the myth of The People to be the most dangerous one confronting us at present. The evidence of the last few years that millions are grossly ignorant of the basic facts involving the most important issues we face has brought me to this sad conclusion. As became irrefutably clear in scientific polls undertaken after 9/11 by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA), millions of Americans simply cannot fathom the twists and turns that complicated debates take.

(pp. 14-15):

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 exclusive, 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 word: the susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

He then follows up with various pieces of poll data, showing that there are lots of things that lots of Americans don't know squat about (p. 24):

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 percent 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 percent know that Congress can override a presidential veto. Some 49 percent think the president can suspend the Constitution. Some 60 percent believe that he can appoint judges to the federal courts without the approval of the Senate. Some 45 percent believe that revolutionary speech is punishable under the Constitution.

On the basis of their comprehensive approach, Delli Carpini and Keeter concluded that only 5 per5cent of Americans could correctly answer three-fourth of the questions asked about economics; only 11 percent, the questions about domestic issues; 14 percent, the questions about foreign affairs; and 10 percent, the questions about geography. The highest score? More Americans knew the correct answers to history questions than to other kinds of questions (which will come as a surprise to many history teachers). Still, only 25 percent knew the correct answers to three-quarters of history questions, which were rudimentary.

Maybe history does better because the answers are more clear cut right or wrong.

(p. 43):

The mistakes voters make fall into four basic patterns, according to Samuel Popkin's review of the evidence. The first mistake is what is known as the Drunkard's Search. Like the drunk who looks for his lost keys under a sidewalk lamp because "that's where the best light is," voters tend to pick up information passively. The second mistake is that voters tend to remember personal information about candidates rather than hard facts about issues. Personal information picked up later tends to block out facts about issues learned earlier. Third, voters have a preference for yes/no answers, which provide "pseudo-certainty." They do not like ambiguity and they abhor complexity. Fourth, voters do not see the connections between actions and results. If the economy improves during a president's term, voters tend to give him the credit without knowing what, if anything, the president did or did not do to bring about these favorable conditions.

(pp. 45-46):

Particularly difficult for voters is following debates about issues. Issues often require knowledge the voters lack. In the absence of knowledge irrational biases often dictate the policies voters support. Take economics. According to Bryan Caplan, the public is irrationally biased in four different ways against good public policies broadly supported by economists. First, the public, fearful of the greed of the selfish, generally is suspicious of markets. Second, the public has an anti-foreign bias. That is, people generally underestimate the benefit of foreign trade. Third, the public is fixated on employment as a measure of economic success; economists, in contrast, focus on productivity. Fourth, the public tends to believe things are getting worse, not better; unlike economists who seek to see the big picture, voters tend toward pessimism, seizing on bits of bad economic news. Given the biases of the public, politicians who possess a solid grasp of economics have to either conceal their real views through smoke-and-mirror games or outright lie about what they actually believe. In office they may well follow sound policies, but they may not. One thinks of Richard Nixon's hypocritical embrace of wage and price controls, which helped aggravate the inflationary pressures the policy was designed to mitigate by creating an artificial market. When the controls finally were lifted, prices exploded.

Actually, he's not very convincing there that the economists are right and The People are wrong. That decontrolled prices exploded suggests that wage and price controls did have the effect of holding prices down, no matter how hypocritical Nixon was. Markets in theory are transparent; in practice they are not, which makes them much less trustworthy. If productivity gains were distributed to workers, they might matter as much as unemployment, which always affects workers. There is no single set of economic policies that are right for everyone. It all depends on who you are and where you fit in the system.

(p. 51):

Politicians count on their doing this [giving in to their emotions]. One of Reagan's keen insights was that he could cut taxes drastically without worrying that the voters would punish him for running large deficits. As long as he didn't try to make up for the loss in revenue by cutting the programs of the middle class the voters stood by him. In the election of 1984 the Democratic candidate, Walter Mondale, tried to make an issue of the budget deficit. He got nowhere. In his speech accepting his party's nomination Mondale told voters the truth, that both he and Reagan would have to raise taxes because the deficits had grown too large to be sustained without damage to the economy: "He won't tell you. I just did."

The response to Mondale's act of candor? Initially, the polls indicated that his straight talk went over well with voters. But then the Republicans began attacking Mondale and within weeks public opinion shifted. Although Mondale had the facts on his side, the voters preferred Reagan's rosy talk of Morning in America. What about those deficits? Reagan, as Mondale had predicted, grudgingly had to go along with several tax increases. These still weren't enough. By 1990 the deficit had become such a monster that Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, felt compelled to approve what was up to that point the largest tax increase in history. His reward for finally tackling a problem Reagan had largely sidestepped? His own party revolted, contributing to his loss two years later to Bill Clinton.

(pp. 62-63):

What George W. Bush benefited from over and over again as he stumbled from one misadventure to another was the public's susceptibility to the appealing myth he had created for himself as the Hick President. He took his vacations in Crawford, Texas. He wore a big Western-style belt buckle on his waist. He bragged to Yale students that he had earned a C average. He used bad grammar. He confided that he wanted Osama bin Laden dead or alive. And at Ground Zero, with his arm casually draped over a firefighter's shoulder, he used a megaphone to declare that he would get our revenge.

Was he really dumb, or did he just pretend to be? Whole books have been produced to demonstrate that he is dumb. But is it not more likely that he deliberately dumbed down his message and adjusted his image to persuade the folks at home watching him on TV that he is one of them? The great danger to his career from the beginning was never that he would be perceived as dumb, but that ordinary folks would hold his elite background and education against him as voters in the nineteenth congressional district in West Texas did during his first run for office in 1978. It is truly remarkable that a man with his distinguished educational pedigree -- Andover, Yale, and Harvard -- and his membership in one of the country's greatest political dynasties came to be regarded as a man of the people. Previous patrician presidents like FDR and John Kennedy had persuaded people that they identified with the common man. Bush alone succeeded in convincing people he was a common man.

(p. 78):

Another reason millions feel that the country is becoming less democratic is that in a very real way it is. Special interests today often have an iron grip on the federal government. Lobbying the government has become a small industry. Between 2000 and 2005 the number of registered lobbyists in Washington D.C. doubled to nearly 35,000.

How, then, can we square what is happening in Washington with the claim that the people are more powerful than ever before? In all those subjects in which the public takes a direct and lively interest, it has become super-powerful. But the number of subjects about which the public has a clear opinion is tiny. This gives special interests an edge they exploit to the maximum. Because people do not follow what is happening in Congress closely, lobbyists are able to win breaks for their clients and manipulate the system to their advantage. By virtue of the wealth at the disposal of special interests, they are in a position as well to make enormous campaign contributions and to hire high-priced lobbyists, many of whom formerly served with the people they are now seeking to influence. In addition, and this is the truly insidious part, special interests can finance advertising campaigns to shape public opinion on issues they care about (like the "Harry and Louise" commercials the insurance industry financed in 1993 to sabotage support for the Clinton healthcare plan). These advertisements can have a dramatic impact on how the voters think because they latter are so uninformed.

Extensive review here of the odd tics that tilted televised presidential debates one way or another (pp. 105-106):

One wonders how the Lincoln-Douglas debates would have been headlined had they been televised. Would the newspapers have skipped the arguments over slavery to focus on Lincoln's unkempt hairdo and Douglas's paunch? One's mind reels at the possibility that national policy about slavery might have been determined by the viewers' reaction to Lincoln's high-pitched voice or Douglas's short stature. It may be that television would have destroyed both men's careers. Standing on the same platform, the six-foot-three Lincoln net to the five-four-four Douglas, undoubtedly would have made each look ridiculous. And people surely would have commented on the men's personalities. But how reassuring is that?

(p. 115):

Never in our history has the individual voter been at a greater disadvantage. He has been left to his own devices to figure out what he should think, where his interests lie, and how he should vote. At the very moment in history when we turned to the individual voter and said, here, you take the wheel of American democracy, we left him bereft of the help of the political party bosses, party machines, and labor unions, which in the past had helped shape his political understanding. Society even encouraged him to catch the news on television rather than reading it in a newspaper, though television is a far inferior transmitter of information.

Television transmits visual information, which we tend to value highly, even in cases where it is misleading. The decline of unions is especially significant because they generally took a public interest rather than a narrow special interest. There are, of course, many special interests left for people who care about them -- the NRA is a prime example. And the Republican Party bosses have become more effective than ever, not through patronage so much as through their tightly controlled media network.

Our Dumb Politics: The Big Picture; starts with a pretty good intro quote (pp. 117-118):

Karl Rove deserves to be remembered as the man who thought Americans should have enough education to understand his fables but not enough to doubt them. -- Eric Rauchway in Altercation (August 14, 2007)

Decade by decade the American public has been getting smarter and smarter -- at least as measured by the number of college degrees handed out at graduation. And decade by decade our politics have been getting dumber and dumber, owing to the forces I have singled out in earlier chapters. How dumb?

Studies show that the speeches of presidents today are pitched at the level of seventh graders; in the old days -- a scant half-century ago or so -- they talked at the twelfth grade level. Research also shows that young Americans generally know far less about politics than their counterparts did a generation or two ago, even though they spend more time in school. What meager knowledge Americans do have about candidates' positions on the issues is picked up from those inane TV spots that proliferate at election time like a biblical plague of annoying locusts.

(p. 137):

As the United States geared up for a war against Iraq the shallowness of the public's understanding of Islam and history was exploited by the Bush administration. I do not wish to engage in a debate about the Iraq War. But the thought of planting a largely Christian army in the middle of the Muslim Middle East over the opposition of most countries in the region, when put as I have just put it, sounds daft. Why did it not ring bells of alarm to Americans in 2003 and after, especially as it became clear that our troops would be staying a long time and that no quick victory was possible? It did not because the administration saw to it that the issue was framed differently. We weren't planting an army. We were spreading God's miraculous gift of freedom to a benighted people very much in need of America's missionary help. It was another triumph of myth over logic.

Talks about Howard Dean's "scream" speech (pp. 154-156):

Democrats are angry for a multitude of reasons. They are angry that Bill Clinton did not seem to get more done. They are angry that when he got into political trouble he turned repeatedly to Republicans like David Gergen and Dick Morris for guidance. They are angry that Clinton had sex with an intern and lied about it. They are angry that Kenneth Starr went after Clinton relentlessly and humiliated him. They are angry that liberal-bashing became a national pastime, turning books demonizing liberals into New York Times best-sellers. Democrats are so angry they are willing to admit that there are American politicians they actually hate. They hate Newt Gingrich. They hate Zell "Spitball" Miller, the turncoat Georgia Democrat. And of course they hate George W. Bush.

Because they are angry they cannot see what is really bothering them. It is not just the typical "loser's lament" (to borrow the historian Gil Troy's nice phrase). The cause of their discontent goes deeper. It has to do with the striking dissonance between what America has been for years and what America previously seemed to be. Once the United States seemed to be a liberal country open to liberal ideas. Until the 2006 elections it was beginning to seem like a conservative country openly hostile to liberalism.

It would have been helpful to Democrats to hold an honest conversation about the real sources of their discontent. But they couldn't without facing foursquare the myth of The People. So instead they entertained a series of excuses for their electoral failures, only some of which even come close to the truth.

The comforting answer many liberals came up with was that, time and again, nefarious forces had bamboozled people. Nixon did it by appealing to the stark grievances of whites who felt threatened by the new breaks given African-Americans. Reagan did it by combining a sunny personality with manipulative media campaigns. George W. Bush did it by exploiting people's fears about 9/11.

In book after book liberals decried the many ways in which they had been victimized by Republicans. George Lakoff, in Don't Think of an Elephant, charged that Republicans had manipulated the language to fool the voters, substituting, for instance, the phrase death tax for estate tax. Al Gore argued that what was wrong was that Republicans had replaced reason with emotion in public debates, putting Democrats at a disadvantage. Drew Westen, a social scientist, argued that the problem was that Democrats weren't emotional enough and recommended that they adopt the same manipulative tactics Republicans had used to great success. Still others charged that right-wing radio talk show hosts had inflamed public opinion with demagogic appeals.

One of the largely unspoken assumptions of these liberal analyses was that people are easily duped. But few pundits admitted this, placing the emphasis, once again, on the nefarious manipulators. [ . . . ] Fully in the grip of the myth of The People, some liberals insist that but for the manipulation of dastardly Republicans and powerful special interests Americans would support Democrats most of the time because basically Americans really are liberal.

Well, the alternative to "the myth of The People" is to tell people they're stupid, which is the basic point of Shenkman's book, but isn't a tactic that many successful politicians have tried out, and probably not just for lack of courage or brains. Most people like flattery, and that's what the myth does, that's what plays to patriotism do, and so forth. You can try to reason with people, try to educate them, but in the end they're going to be about as smart or dumb as they started out, and that's a fact of life politicians have to learn to live with.

(p. 166):

In the twenty-first century conservatives have joined liberals in competing as flatterers of the vox populi. Whatever The People believe is right. On Fox News nary a single commentator is given time to express skepticism of The People. In their hurry to curry favor with viewers Fox News conservatives are unwilling to suggest that the voters are ever in error. It is never the voters who make mistakes. It is liberals. We are all populists now.

The timing of this development could not be stranger. Here we are in the Second Gilded Age, when every single person on the Forbes 400 list is a billionaire, and CEOs often earn several times more money in a day than their employees do in a year, and the conservatives who are the defenders of wealth and privilege are claiming to be one with The People while liberals are derided as elitists.

When you get down to it, the conservatives sense of "The People" tends to be somewhat more constrained than liberals' sense of "The People." To pick on the obvious, they tend to be whiter. They tend to be more religious and more fervently patriotic. They tend, in short, to be conservatives.

(p. 180):

Benjamin Franklin said that in America we are all politicians. That may have been true in the eighteenth century. It is not true in the twenty-first. As John Dewey predicted, consumers care little for politics and we are all consumers now. The average American today spends far more time thinking about what he shall buy than about how he should vote. Most of us clip coupons. Few of us clip the papers for news stories that might be worth remembering later when we have to cast a ballot. While we know the price of a gallon of milk, most of us don't know basic civics facts. Could it be that the more we identify as consumers the less we identify as voters? It would seem so.

posted 2008-07-09