Marble Composition

Citizen Dummy

The Carpetbagger highlights a new Pew Research Center study and finds:

Americans have countless ways to learn about current events, but we remain a woefully ignorant bunch.

The bedrock of America's democracy rests on an informed citizenry. It's really that simple. More from the Bagger:

One in three Americans don’t know who the Vice President is. One in four don’t know that Democrats now run the House. One in three can’t name their governor. Four in five can’t name the Secretary of Defense. Two in three don’t know that there’s a difference between Sunni and Shia.

The poll asked 1,502 respondents 23 fairly straightforward questions that, I suspect, nearly all of you would get right. Eight answered all 23 correctly in the survey. Not eight percent; eight people.

This has been a pet issue of mine for a very long time, so forgive the rant, but I strongly believe that an uninformed electorate creates a dysfunctional democracy. As Digby put it a while back, “We simply cannot adequately govern ourselves if a large number of us are dumb as posts and vote for reasons that make no sense.”

[...]

But our system relies on a certain level of sophistication among the public, and there’s ample evidence, including this new Pew study, that we’re just not at that level.

[...]

But at a certain point, people have to some making excuses and start taking some responsibility for having a clue. When 31% of Americans don’t know who the Vice President is, it undermines our political system.

The solution to this problem probably requires a multi-layered approach. Perhaps we need required high school and college exit courses pounding home the responsibilities the people of this country owe their own democracy: you need to make an effort to stay informed and vote. Maybe we need a massive taxpayer-funded media campaign to remind people that, hey, we as a nation need to hear from you, come to the table with informed opinions, and make informed decisions based on current information.

By the way, this isn't new. This is well worn turf. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"Convinced that the people are the only safe depositories of their own liberty, and that they are not safe unless enlightened to a certain degree, I have looked on our present state of liberty as a short-lived possession unless the mass of the people could be informed to a certain degree."

"No nation is permitted to live in ignorance with impunity."

"Above all things I hope the education of the common people will be attended to, convinced that on their good sense we may rely with the most security for the preservation of a due degree of liberty."

The population of America seems to think we can all glide on cruise control because our nation was some kind of immaculate conception, and that no tending to the garden is needed at all. That we need not participate because some kind of collective correction will come along at the moment of crisis and right the this listing ship of state. Wrong. It doesn't work that way. This is why we have an incurious idiot for a president.

In the end, you get the democracy you deserve.

posted by FuzzFinger @ 4/17/2007 05:22:00 PM