Of the three scandals, two are non-scandals, and one is part of the real scandal. The real scandal, in America, the home of democracy and probably the greatest document ever written to secure the rights of all people, the Constitution, is that the American people are no longer well enough informed to manage their democracy.
Thomas Jefferson said “A properly functioning democracy depends on an informed electorate.” Ours isn’t functioning and the reason is that we have a totally uniformed electorate. And not only what they don’t know is scary, what they think they do know is not critically evaluated. Here are some examples:
- 67% of Americans can’t name any Supreme Court Justices
- 41% of Republicans believe Benghazi is the worst political scandal in American history, but nearly half don’t know where it is
- Fewer than 40% of Americans could name the three branches of the federal government
- 40% of Americans don’t know Obamacare is the law of the land
- Only 6 % of Americans know that the budget deficit has been shrinking during President Obama’s presidency, despite the fact that this is a demonstrable, incontrovertible, entirely objective truth. Oh and it is shrinking at the largest rate in post WWII America
- Only 18% of Americans profess to have a good idea of what the consequences of the sequester will be
- 46% of Americans believe in Creationism. That means that almost half of Americans reject science or facts that are inconvenient to what they need to believe
- And my favorite, while 97% of all scientists have accepted global warming as human caused, more than half the nation thinks scientists are split 50-50 on the issue and the numbers change with the weather
This is just the tip of the iceberg. And it tells you how Americans can elect and believe fruit loops like Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, or Ted Cruz. It tells you how false rumors on the internet and scandal gates get rolling. Of course it has been aided and abetted by our press which either in an attempt to be non-judgmental (fair and balanced) gives equal footing to the crazies, or utilizes the sensational as entertainment, contributes to our dumbing down. But the real problem is that most people just don’t know very much even with all the amazing technological ways to fact check things, and they believe whatever they hear from familiar sources without any critical thought. Oh, and it doesn’t help that corporate America continues to try to confuse to market us dangerous things (Tobacco, global warming, pesticides, and food additives to name a few).
So can you run a democracy with so much disinformation? I don’t think so. We continue to make bad choice after bad choice and dismantle the America we built looking for some Nirvana that did not exist in the 19th Century (See Republican Economic Theories). We learned how to cope with depressions in the 1930s and we threw all that knowledge away. We know we need to invest in our people, and yet we continue to cut and marginalize government. It is as though we put the inmates in charge of the insane asylum and we are running amuck. Fruit loops are becoming main stream and America declines.
I wonder if and when people, intelligent people, will re-engage, where intellectualism is valued. And don’t be confused by the honest difference of opinion argument when the data is staring us in the face. I wonder when we will look at policies that are not working (austerity) and change course. I wonder when we will not be afraid to try new ideas, and not be afraid to change them if they don’t work. Instead we get cries of the government is coming for our guns, death panels, and the IRS is one big Democratic conspiracy. It is sad to watch this experiment fail because most people can think critically and yet are being sold elixir by traveling medicine men. But if you are a traveling medicine man, you are doing just fine. Don’t change a thing.
Oh, and back to why one scandal is part of this bigger problem: The Justice Department’s attempt to stifle our news media’s ability to inform us about what our government is really doing is just part of the bigger picture of treating us like mushrooms, keep us in the dark and feed us …and then let us vote.