Bruce Maiman: I don't believe that all people are dumb. I believe that some folks are unaware or willfully or unwillingly ignorant and that's just plain stupid. Go to YouTube. Type "Americans are stupid" in the search box, but if you laugh, be advised: Surveys repeatedly show that ignorance, willful or otherwise, is widespread in American history, basic civics and current events.
Unawareness, either due to incuriousness, obliviousness or laziness, seems a microcosm of who we are today, a society that, as it moved forward, became dumber - OK, less informed.Not in the age of Trump and probably never since the very existence of today's GOP is based on voter ignorance, anger, and outrage mostly directed at fellow citizens who dare to want a more inclusive public and private sphere than the rabblerousers.
A scary thought here is that those folks may not even know how unaware they are. Instead of willfully ignorant, a choice, they're unwittingly ignorant - ignorant of their ignorance. Or, ignorance is bliss. And again, not necessarily because they're stupid.
Funny, one of my conservative acquaintances couldn't resist trashing Biden's executive orders to address the border. He texted, "It's official, as suspected. Joe's move on the border crisis = strictly to try and get votes come Nov. If it wasn't election year he wouldn't have done anything."
I asked: How is that any different than Trump getting lawmakers to quash a bipartisan border bill earlier this year to prevent Biden from getting an election-year win so Trump would have a campaign issue?
His response: "Because Joe has to go."
Classic invincible ignorance fallacy. That's the fallacy of defending one's position while refusing to consider immutable contradictory facts to the contrary. "I don't care what the experts say; no one is going to convince me that I'm wrong." Sometimes, it's just, "Fake news!!"
Sound familiar?
Here is the fine point of it: Our political culture is a reflection of our general culture. If we don't know what our Constitution says about the separation of powers, if fully half of us mistakenly believe Trump was better at handling immigration without considering how the pandemic slowed border migration to a trickle, or if faithful legions continue to insist that the 2020 election was stolen, it affects how we decide to govern ourselves.
Bad enough we forget the past; worse still is when we refuse to comprehend the present and its consequences for the future.
What matters most is not what we think but how we think.
Will we as a nation learn to dismiss tonsorial talking-point artists and shrill performance politicians and relearn to revere the learned? Will we ever tire of empty sloganeering and yearn for reflective thought and honest, intelligent dialogue?
For those of us who were paying attention back in the mid 2010s, our predicament today has been exacerbated by Russia's ongoing destabilization of democracy worldwide. And in America they particularly found fertile mental ground to plant their flags of distrust and propaganda through the use of the rightwing mediasphere created after the fall of the Fairness Doctrine and the rise of AM radio as the home for half-a-century's worth of grievance towards both Civil and Equal Rights for those groups of Americans previously disenfranchised.
Our democracy depends upon its citizens knowing and understanding the basics of governing and government.
This is a problem of the education system. I would argue that the knowledge has decreased as the test scores have decreased. My daughter doesn't have a civics course.
The schools in the US have exchanged learning important ideas, with trivial facts.
By Abandoning Civics, Colleges Helped Create the Culture Wars.
www.nytimes.com
I am sure you'll disagree, but the evidence is overwhelming.
#16
I couldn't agree more. The most frustrating thing of all to me is that this has never been an argument about "left" or "right," it's always been a disagreement about right and wrong. All I want is for people to viscerally and internally understand the objective truths, facts, and history that has brought us to today. I don't want to tell others how they should feel about those things, simply that we can agree that x or y actually happened, and z came out of the events.
The invincible ignorance fallacy has been subsumed into today's GOP's DNA. It is impossible to have an intelligent discourse or negotiation when one side refuses to accept documented and annotated facts and truths while simultaneously espousing fantasies and embellishments untethered to reality.
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