"And in truth, the condition that Shenkman seems to be anatomizing is not so much stupidity as malleability."

Alright, so the herd isn't a herd of vegetables; it's still a herd.

"...the decisions we make about candidates can't help being informed by all the things that Shenkman distrusts: emotions, hopes, values."

Emotions, hopes and values are fine informants about what is worth doing and not doing in the world. They are still lousy administrators of action. The problem with most people is that what they value, what feels good is not bearing the responsibility of being the most basic agents of their government. These are bad values. Why should The People be allowed to govern themselves when they time and time again show how unseriously they take it?

I bet Shenkman doesn't take into account the controlling factor of economics though. For a long time, The People simply haven't been able to afford to be good at their civic roles. I don't mean just in the sense of cost of education. I mean that it is in the interest of Big Business, who employees most of the common-people, that The People are not only ill-equipped to think for and govern themselves, but that it actually leaves a bad taste in their mouth. It's in someone else's interest that The People do their job poorly.

The People live with the threat of a cognitive dissonance of unspoken magnitude: they are responsible for their own domination and exploitation. This is why you get anarchist and otherwise small-government types who pit themselves against the State as if it weren't an extension of themselves. It's easier to fight an enemy when it is not yourself. Unfortunately, The People are their own worst enemy, not a secret society of elites. If anything, it's the elites who keep everything from falling to shit.

There has been a serious lack of popular, bright heroes, and this has led to a general perception just below the surface of America's psyche that being bright is a flaw.

Americans are probably not as stupid as they are misinformed. They are misled into believing fictions rather than facts. The barrage of propaganda from religious organisations, politicians, think tanks, laissez-faire devotees, gun enthusiasts, fear mongers and other assorted loonies, all funnelled through self serving journalists and media interests, is overwhelming. Perhaps however the events of the last eight years are slowly alerting credulous minds that 2+2 no longer adds up to 5.

First, I hope my "lynchmob" analogy didn't sound somehow like Jeremiah Wright in a straightjacket. It simply is a fine line.

Now then, as regards the Switzerland comparison: I couldn't agree more. I've given a lot of thought to this (How the US might have evolved as a direct democracy vs. a Republic). In fact, I came to a similar, but less benign, conclusion. Then I've also played through the "What if the South had Won the Unpleasantness" scenario any number of times and, of course, the really big one: "What if Buddy Holly had survived that plane crash in 1959?" I find all three actual vs. imagined outcomes to contain significant insights regarding how American culture has evolved. The most significant by far, of course, is that direct democracy evolution, and again, I do completely concur with your example, which is extremely attractive to this communitarian. However, that's not what happened (we didn't start out as a direct democracy, and I think if we had we'd probably more likely now be a handful of states rather like a big Benelux cluster). My concern over and extreme comparison of direct democracy to a potential (and only potential) lynch mob arises solely from the tendency of many to feel that "if only" we could throw off this Republic and/or spread direct democracy throughout the developing world, where other, even more strictly-controlled forms of governance exist, we would usher in a new Golden Age. I think that starting today, in this age of information overload, such a switch could very easily become, in short order, a recipe for total chaos. It's hard to imagine a Switzerland being created out of thin air in this atmosphere, even if it were to have a common language (which makes it all the more unique). It is the notion that now is as good a time as any to make the switch, that we'd all be better off now (what would have happened to our cluster of democracies or even one huge one, with the coming of the Information Age?) which concerns me greatly.

The biggest problem, I think, is that the relative stupidity of people is greater now than it was at the time of our founding (more information to misinterpret), yet I continue to believe we will evolve to a point where we can safely trust ourselves to mind the whole store.

Oh, and as far as shots to innoculate against thinking, not that I'm aware of, but I understand they're lining up for the virtual lobotomy of the Great Flat Sceen on the Wall.

So what's the alternative? Letting more competant people (read: wealthy, powerful people) make our decisions for us. Autocracy, oligarchy, dictatorship, they've all been tried and they don't work much better. The fact is that although it is a very flawed system, democracy is the best thing going and despite what the author says, people are better informed today than any time in history. For anyone with an internet connection, the resources are there to become a virtual expert on our government. As always, people will have very little interest in how the country is run until it starts affecting them, their personal liberties, or more likely their wallets.

For starters, they know nothing about government or current events. They can't follow arguments of any complexity. They stuff themselves with slogans and advertisements. They eschew fact for myth. They operate from biases and stereotypes, and they privilege feeling over thinking.

O.K. so much for the media guys and dolls.

I want to thank everybody who's posted comments on this piece. I've written a response to the review on my blog ( http://howstupidblog.com ), reprinted below. Click on my name to go to the blog and watch a video that addresses the themes of the book.

RESPONSE

It's probably a bad idea for an author to respond to a review, especially one as generous (in places) as Salon's.

But I cannot resist making two points.

1. My suggestion that we should consider giving voters a civics test (which the reviewer says smacks of Jim Crowism) was never intended to be taken literally. I don't want to limit the vote. I want to have smarter voters.

2. His suggestion that the voters are smart enough flies in the face of the facts. Smart voters never would have fallen for the dropped hint that Saddam was behind 9-11. The reviewer claims people eventually wised up. Yes. And in the meantime tens of thousands of people died.

I acknowledge in the book that Americans are good at recognizing success and failure. After several years of being bamboozled they finally came round to the view that the war was a mistake. But while mistakes are inevitable we should be able to avoid the ones based on flagrant misinformation, as this one was. The reason we weren't was because too many voters simply didn't take the time to investigate the administration's claims.

To quote from the book:

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.

In January 2003, three months before our invasion of Iraq, the survey-takers found that a majority of Americans falsely believed that “Iraq played an important role in 9/11.” Over the next year and a half PIPA polls indicated that a persistent 57 percent believed that Saddam Hussein was helping al Qaeda at the time we were attacked. (Other polls came up with higher numbers. For instance, in September 2003 a Washington Post poll found that 70 percent of Americans believed Saddam was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.) In the spring of 2004 the 9/11 Commission flatly stated that Saddam had not provided support to al Qaeda. The Commission’s findings received saturation coverage. Nonetheless, in August of the same year, according to a PIPA poll, 50 percent were still insisting that Saddam had given “substantial” support to al Qaeda. (A full two years later, in 2006, a Zogby International poll indicated that 46 percent of Americans continued to believe that “there is a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”)

The illusion that Saddam was behind 9/11 had realworld consequences. A poll for Investor’s Business Daily and the Christian Science Monitor cited by the PIPA researchers found that 80 percent of those who backed the Iraq War in 2003 said that a key reason for their support was their belief that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda.

Another clear indication of public ignorance concerned the claim that Saddam possessed “weapons of mass destruction,” which became such a ubiquitous part of the national conversation that the phrase soon became known by its initials: WMD. Poll results show that the voters were quick to absorb the administration line, but only slowly came to realize that they had been snowed.* As late as the spring of 2004 a clear majority remained unaware that experts such as Hans Blix (head of the UN weapons inspectors), David Kay (the former head of the Iraq Survey Group), and Richard Clarke (the national coordinator for counterterrorism) had firmly concluded that Iraq lacked WMD at the time of our invasion, even though their findings had received wide publicity.

Finally, there was the question of world opinion. By all measures the Iraq War was unpopular around the world. On the eve of the war millions protested, bitterly denouncing George W. Bush and the United States. In several countries these were the largest anti-American rallies ever held. Opposition was strong even in countries that were traditional American allies, such as Spain. Most Americans, however, did not comprehend the isolation of the United States. According to PIPA, the majority either believed that world opinion was about evenly divided or actually favored the war (31 percent were in the second camp). Only 35 percent realized that the planned invasion had drawn far more criticism than support.

Given all this, a robust debate about public opinion would seem warranted. If Americans cannot think straight about events of the magnitude of 9/11 and the Iraq War, what can they think straight about? But no such debate has been forthcoming. Instead, we have had endless arguments about the media and the nefariousness of the Bush administration. Both of these arguments have merit, in my opinion. But they were never pushed far enough to get to the real problem.