Great letters, everyone! I always learn something reading through them all. This is the kind of Salon experience I've been missing these past several months, with the endless Obama/Clinton civil (or not so civil) war going on. Finally! Thoughtfully crafted letters and reasoned responses.

Ahhh, let me bask a bit. Mmmmm. Goodness.

Or stupidity.

And in truth, the condition that Shenkman seems to be anatomizing is not so much stupidity as malleability. Americans are very good, he says, at being manipulated and lied to (to buttress his point, he offers a brief history of political ads) and we're equally good at lying to ourselves. Is it any wonder, then, that our current president was able to ram such an ill-advised war down our throats?

We have been taught to be malleable from the day we become aware of ourselves. WE MUST RESPECT AUTHORITY! We are taught to have faith in our parents, our elders, our police, our teachers and our government. we then get older and the powers that be know they can treat us like mushrooms (keep us in the dark and feed us shit) and they can do so without question.

Shenkman's argument is appealing, and is one I would have embraced enthusiastically four years ago. Basically, it appeared to me that we had reached some sort of stupidity threshhold, beyond which the stupidity of the average American would steadily increase. I saw the situation as follows: Republicans cut taxes irresponsibly, which creates bad educational systems, so more Americans are poorly educated, and, in consequence, wind up voting Republican. Every conversation I had with another American in 2003 or 2004 just seemed to affirm, more and more clearly, that the American public was now too stupid to save itself. The final nail, it seemed to me, was country music. Hearing Toby Keith bragging about how America was going to put a "boot in the ass" of terrorists everywhere is an experience I won't soon forget (though I'd like to).

What Shenkman misses, though, is the larger picture, and, when you look at what American democracy has accomplished in the last forty years, it really is breathtaking. As recently as the early eighties, George Wallace was still a political power in the South; nowadays a politician like him is unthinkable. Our society, and, by extension, our government, have changed radically in less than a generation. Progress that might have taken other societies millenia has occurred here at breakneck speed. It can be frustrating when things seem to head in the wrong direction for extended periods of time (the whole period between 1980 and 2006 was pretty awful, and marked by a Republican resurgence based on the "Southern Strategy"), but, given how fast progress was prior to that period, some sort of backlash was probably inevitable. On the whole, the American political system trends toward reason and tolerance. But, like any large, complex, chaotic system, extended periods of apparently-baffling behavior are inevitable. That goes double for the global political system.

In physics, computer-based Monte Carlo simulations are often useful in explaining thermodynamic phenomena. The concept is really elegant; one creates what are essentially virtual boxes, within which one turns loose simulated molecules. At any instant in time, the state of the system is impossible to predict. However, if the simulation is allowed to go on long enough, it will eventually trend toward its most thermodynamically stable state. As a researcher, the hard part is knowing when to stop the simulation (waiting for a computer to work through all the calculations iteratively can also be an extreme test of patience). Often, you know what the answer should be, but, for whatever reason, your simulations just seem to keep heading in the wrong direction. Watching American politics for the last eight years has been very similar: Everyone knows what's happeing is ridiculous and inexplicable, but it happens anyway.

Relax. Over 200 years, the system has survived a revolution, a civil war, a huge global economic reordering, two world wars, and several nasty military defeats in Asia (along with oil shocks, terrorist attacks, huge influxes of poor people from the world's worst places, etc.). And despite all of that, America is, today, more tolerant and open than at any other period in history. Reason and rationality are the ground state, and the system will tend toward this ground state.

The simple fact is that large groups of people make better decisions than small ones. No one citizen knows everything; every citizen brings a unique point of view to the process. Politicians have to know how to cajole and persuade even the dumbest voters, but they also have to know how to govern in a way that impresses the smartest ones. Bill Clinton was a master of this trick in the 90s; hopefully Obama can manage it, as well. But the point is that, no matter who the individual is charge is, he has to be responsive to the whole system of voters, and making sure that the poorly-informed, the unemployable, the distracted, the permanently-depressed, and the hopelessly-disconnected all participate in the process ensures that no one is ever really left behind. Knowing that these elements are part of the voting public generally gives politicians an incentive to make the public smarter, happier, and better-informed; no one, I think, really wants to wind up governing a country where the populace really has become fundamentally irrational. That sort of populace behaves unpredictably, and is just as likely to turn on a politician as it is to support him.

You can lament the stupidity of the American public all you like, but half of them will be below average, no matter what you do. Gratifyingly, the ability of the average American to behave rationally and intelligently has increased drastically in the last hundred years. For God's sake, in 1900, Irish people weren't allowed in restaurants in New York. There's a lot of progress yet to be made, but there is no reason to change the fundamental way the system works.

Besides, if you want to exclude dumb people from the process, you create an entirely new problem, since you now have to decide who's dumb. That would be a really fast way to destabilize the system, and would give the most powerful elements within the system every incentive to cheat. Broad, participatory democracy is the only effective antidote against rule by closed elites, and if you want to see what that kind of society looks like, just take a quick look at Burma.