You should have to pass a test before being allowed to vote. Who is your Congressperson? Who are you Senators? Who is the Governor of your State? What is your State capital?

If a person can't pass that very simple test, he or she is too damned ignorant to vote.

We should also restrict the right to have children to people who can pass simple tests showing that they are competent to raise children and have the means to do so in a minimally sufficient way.

Or, we can maintain the status quo and be a nation ruled by idiots and con artists, plagued by rampant child neglect and abuse, and suffering the crime and Republicanism that it all produces.

I counted the number of very dumb people personally. I came up with 62,040,606. By sheer coincidence, this was the number of people voted for Bush in 2004.

Hooray to him for putting a stake through that mistaken notion that the US is a republic because it is not a directly elected democracy. I never could understand how so many intelligent people kept stating this until he mentioned that is what is taught in civics class.

So once again: the US is a republic because its head of state is an elected person rather than a heriditary monarch. How the head of state is elected, whether directly or indirectly, has no bearing on this. There are many countries that directly elect their head of state and they are still republics.

The American electorate is ignorant. It knows very little about political ideology and current events. The American people are easily brainwashed by the media and elitist ego-centric thinkers i.e(Willam F. Buckly) into voting or doing what is in the best interest of the rich and powerful--acquistion of more money, power and privilege. If the ignorant mass does not educate itself it cannot make informed decisions about the leaders it votes for. Consquently, they cannot elect leaders that will better their lot in life. They will be doomed for ever living in a world run by the corrupt elites who have little interest in bettering there pathetic lives. Education of the mass is of critical importance if things are to change. However, there is a contradiction present .... if the ignorant mass becomes educated most of them will also seek power and priviledge and and follow the yearnings of their own corrupt self interested nature and not give a dam about the less fortunate. Alas, Human nature has doomed us all.

We read the old stories about the American Civil War: "Brother Against Brother!" We are reaching that point now, again. I see it within my own family. We cannot even speak about politics.

We have our irrational, tribal, myth-believers versus our rational, practical wing. The irrational people are very nice, one-on-one, but they cannot, will not reason, and they WILL vote for Senator McCain, and for blood, for national bankruptcy, and against health care, against tolerance.

In my family, this does not break down by age. We have people of three generations on each side. This, I guess, is just how humans behave. We Americans are not special. Same old chaotic, brutal stuff, no matter what.

As an interesting, most timely reminder of the importance of a culture that enables and ensures effective 'self-critiques', here's a relevant story that has just broken:

"Gates ousts Air Force leaders in historic shake-up"

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080606/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/air_force_shake_up

The story discusses this issue of 'self-critique' (or 'self-assessment', in the words of the report) - see 3rd para as quoted below:

"Defense Secretary Robert Gates ousted the Air Force's top military and civilian leaders Thursday, holding them to account in a historic Pentagon shake-up after embarrassing nuclear mix-ups.

"Gates announced at a news conference that he had accepted the resignations of Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Moseley and Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne — a highly unusual double firing.

...

"In somber tones, Gates told reporters his decision to remove Wynne and Moseley was based on the findings of an investigation of the Taiwan debacle by Adm. Kirkland Donald. The admiral found a 'lack of a critical self-assessment culture' in the Air Force nuclear program, making it unlikely that weaknesses in the way critical materials such as nuclear weapons are handled could be corrected, Gates said." (Emphasis mine)

.

Well, at least the US Defence Secretary was able to make this specific evaluation in regard to his charge of the US Air Force. I observe that there is apparently no one at all in the whole of the US power structure to point out the lack of an adequate self-assessment culture at the upper levels of the US power structure, specifically at the top levels of the GW Bush administration. (Individuals like us at letting off steam in discussion forums like Salon obviously do not count at all in the power structures of any nations!) Two specific cases in point:

-- The first has to do with GW Bush's famous "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!" outing by an Air Force/Navy plane to the flight deck of the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (with GW Bush having pretended to fly the plane himself all decked out in his fancy yellow pilot suit with handkerchiefs stuffed in at his crotch to emphasise his malehood to the admiring audience on the ship - not to mention some huge TV audiences).

As an outsider, I for one surely find that whole vainglorious exercise by GW Bush to simply scream of the lack of a 'self-assessment culture' in the Bush administration. How come no one called him out on this? How come no one in the whole administration told him that this was an utterly idiotic way to go?

(Remember also that this was a 'leader' who had managed through of his family ties to evade his own military draft duties in Vietnam).

There are undoubtedly scores (probably hundreds) of such incidents in the history of the GW Bush administration - particularly if you take the performance of various actors such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, --- Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice..... I do not have a detailed checklist of the doings and sayings of all of them, but particularly revealing to my mind was the fatuous GW Bush Thanksgiving outing to Baghdad (2005?), where GW Bush posed for photographs and massive TV coverage handing out phony, plastic servings of turkey dinner to his valiant troops there, saying something along the following lines: "I just wanted to have a good Thanksgiving dinner".

The question I have is: This is the kind of person to whom US citizens entrust the leadership of their nation, the world's sole superpower????!!!! Twice Over!!!! Wow!!! Talk about the lack of a self-assessment culture!

(I'm NOT claiming that we in India are perfect, or even significantly better in regard to self-assessment at the upper levels of our political hierarchies - but surely we have to be, I think, a wee bit better placed at least.

(I observe in passing that in India we do not have a useful forum such as Salon readily available here, where such issues can be discussed. In that respect we are a bit worse off than the US is. I also observe that even this Salon forum, while quite useful for us to raise such issues as 'self-assessment', 'self-critique' etc - at a 'start-up level' - even Salon does not provide any practical means to enable people to design and develop practical enhancements and improvements in their systems that could, perhaps at some stage in the future, ensure more effective self-assements, etc at the upper levels of our societal hierarchies.

(Note to Salon Editors: Practical tools are readily available that can help individuals and groups "design better systems" for all kinds of purposes. One of the most important aspects of 'better systems' is practical means being available within the systems to enable and ensure reasonably effective means to continuing 'self-assessment', 'elf-critique', etc. You might like to enquire about how such systems could be developed with Salon itself, if you ever feel the need for enhancing a culture of 'self-assessment': it is evident that merely enabling your readership freedom to raise such issues in standard prose does not adequately develop that much-needed culture. What's essential is something I have described in some of my earlier postings as 'prose + structural graphics' [p+sg]).

-- GSC

As Bayard rightly points out, although terms like dumb and stupid are pretty clear in meaning and intent in conversation, they become 'slippery' when academics like Shenkman try to study them.

Is there a serious problem with the American electorate? Absolutely. But is it a lack of knowledge, or a lack of knowledge regarding how to apply our knowledge?

I mean this in two distinct senses. The first is the question of what Bayard refers to as priority setting. Certainly the process of voting requires making a decision with regards to which pluses and minuses of various candidates are most important to you. But as tempting as it is to say all opinions are equal and everyone has a right to their priority set, it is easy to allow ideology to overwhelm rationality when choosing priorities. In many ways, this is what Senator Obama was getting at with his 'bitter' remark some time ago -- is voting against your self interest, in favor of a war, poor economic policies, and environmental destruction, really worth it just so gay people don't get married? Certainly some voters for Bush and McCain would contest the claims in my last sentence - I'm not saying these are universal truths. But for other voters, despite an awareness of issues such as Iraq, ideological issues such as gay marriage overwhelm rational consideration.

This reason for this is that it is difficult to set aside emotions, and it is difficult to engage in rational cost-benefit analysis. These are skills that are learned, not given. But they are also skills that are indispensable to good decision making.

The second sense I referred to is coming to the knowledge that we do not always know what we know, and knowing that things we know are not necessarily true. In essence, a willingness - as frightening as this seems to some people - to examine our most deeply held beliefs and admit that we may be wrong about everything. Even superficial assumptions we take as true, such as Bayard's remark that the Simpsons is the most subversive comedy in modern America, are often wrong (in the end of Scenes From The Class Struggle in Springfield, when the Simpson family discovers they are happier allowing the rich to be richer and learn to accept with joy their poor lot in life instead of attempting to remedy disparity, does this teach subversion or docility?) When the assumptions become more complicated than remarks on the Simpsons, the potential for error is greater.

What I am getting at is that I do not believe Americans suffer from a general lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of knowledge about cost-benefit analysis, instruction in rational decision making, and a willingness to question their own beliefs.

Is there a remedy for this? Hopefully. I am nearing the limit of this letter, but I will expound on one potential: debate. Competitive policy debate as practiced in high school and college forces participants to argue about frameworks for weighing policy proposals, articulate reasons why various results should be preferred, and switching sides forces students to defend arguments they do not believe -- in doing so, becoming intimately familiar with ideologies counter to their own, and accepting that their own viewpoints may not be objectively true. This does not result in sophistry - many students keep their core beliefs and values - but it does result in a deeper understanding of their belief system, and a more rational application of it.

The American electorate is damaged. But the solution to this is not to remove power from the people. If Mr. Shenkman is truly an academic, he is aware of the amply demonstrated dangers that trends toward authoritarianism pose. The solution is to educate and reform the American electorate.

My suggestion about debate is doubtless not the only way to accomplish this -- it is simply one that comes to mind. All of us who care about this issue should advance our own suggestions, and - dare I say it - debate about them. Then, we should work to implement them. Hopefully, over time, America will prosper as a result.