But, we’re not stoopid:
The Pew Research Center asked people this summer to identify the current chief justice of the United States from among four possibilities: John Roberts, Thurgood Marshall, John Paul Stevens and Harry Reid. Only 28 percent correctly picked Chief Justice Roberts. The late Thurgood Marshall came in second, with 8 percent. Fifty-three percent could not make a selection, answering “don’t know.”
The result was surprising; after all, people weren’t asked to pull a name out of thin air. And the alternatives to the real chief justice were scarcely plausible: Justice Thurgood Marshall died 17 years ago (or maybe people thought the question referred to Chief Justice John Marshall — he died in 1835); Senator Harry Reid has never been a justice at all; and Justice John Paul Stevens was prominently in the news this summer not for being chief justice, but for retiring.
People just don’t give a shit. That’s why you can get away with treating them like idiots, lie to them, steal their money, run the country into a ditch, and still get reelected.
The 53% is strange. People usually aren’t afraid to take a chance and choose from one of 4 answers. Is it seen as less embarrassing to admit to not knowing than to give a wrong answer? I wonder if the real meaning of the result is that respondents didn’t want to bother with the intrusive phone call?
With the glut of TV shows like Cash Cab, maybe nobody’s interested giving it away for free. I bet the DK number would be down to single digits if respondents were offered a few bucks for the right answer. It would be an interesting experiment.
OTOH the result does indeed correlate perfectly with how you can get away with treating them like idiots, lie to them, steal their money, run the country into a ditch, and still get reelected.
In America, stupidity isn’t embarrassing, it’s something to be proud of.
Pierre Bourdieu (good sociologist) said that the skill to form a political opinion is a very unevenly distributed privilege. He also wrote an article with the name “Public Opinion does not exist” – choosing among options in an opinion poll does not constitute having a political opinion, but opinion polls hide this inequality behind a veil of democracy.
If you’re in a system that excludes you from power from the get-go, why bother to dig deep to formulate the smartest comprehensive opinion on your own (journalists were supposed to help?), and if you’re not doing that, why should you care who’s the chief justice? There’s all sorts of fake democratism around…
The modern American political party arose just as mixed/subsistence farming was giving way to single-crop cash monculture, thanks to among other things industry.
You bought cloth from a peddler, and didn’t ret your own flax. You bought glass bottles from a store, and stopped growing gourds.
Parties provided the same service. They let those who could do, or cared to do something they were good at while the rest of us, not very interested in or good at it, get on with our lives. And when the smoke cleared, you had President Martin Van Buren, the first great machine politician, where once sat Washington.
Small-d democratic ignorance is not desirable phenomenon, perhaps, but it’s not a new phenomenon, either.
Ignorance is now a virtue. Witness the success of former half-term governor Palin, the new high priestess. Assisting in the dumbing-down of America is the fan club of stoopid, the ‘baggers.
It’s not the ignorance of the individual voter that’s the problem. According to the “wisdom of crowds” theory, a very large number of “dumb” units can give you surprisingly intelligent results. But here’s the catch – they have to all be independent. That’s not what we have today – we have a lot of ignorant people who are making their voting decisions based on what they hear in the media. If Joe Schmoe says, “I got laid off, I’m voting Republican”, that’s fine. If he says, “Sean Hannity sez Obama is a communist, I’m voting Republican” then we have a problem.
People only give a shit when it affects them personally. That’s why you have so many so-called “progressives” claiming to have no qualms sitting out this election despite what a republican congress will mean to the country.
I’ll tell you a secret about those self-described progressives. They’ve probably never voted because Eugene Debs wasn’t on the ballot. And even if he were, he would not be principled enough.
It is hard to satisfy their principles enough that they can vote their principles.
In short, it’s a pose.
The American public has been inoculated against political thinking by 90 years of having civics classes taught by athletic coaches.
But consider this. People vote for judges, state supreme court justices, county commissioners, school board members without knowing who they are voting for except their name was on a sign.
When I was in college a friend’s mother explain to me how she votes. “First, I go through the ballot and vote for all Italian names. Then, I go through it again, and vote against all the Irish names. Finally, in the races that are left, I vote Republican.”
This pretty much shows what’s wrong in Illinois politics.
There is Illinois politics, and there is Chicago politics.
The way it used to work in Chicago is that the precinct captains would advocate a ticket (generally Daley’s chosen slate) with the incentive of the City making some investment in the neighborhood–improvements to a park, relocating a police station, city investment in real estate through leasing for city offices, and so on. I don’t know if Daley the son still operates that way but I bet that is the expectation of precinct captains.
I have no clue how downstate works.
We both lived in a suburb adjacent to Chicago. From what I hear, City investments are more retail, i.e. new garbage cans or having a pothole filled. Sometimes an alderman will help get a license (one had a father in the business of selling fake Social Security cards and driver’s licenses) or cut through some red tape, but that requires a cash “campaign contribution”.
Well part of the answer is good public education, which is why the republicans are trying to get rid of it (another option for winning elections just in case fearmongering and running homeless ppl as green party candidates and burning up voting machines doesn’t pan out).
Well, why should people care about who is the current Chief Justice? It’s not like they get to vote for him, writing him a letter won’t make a bit of difference, about the only thing that knowing his name does is allow you to curse the frakkin right-wing jerk more effectively.
It’s more important that people are aware of what the USSC does than who is on the bench, I think.
It may also say something about how the stature of the Supreme Court has fallen in recent years. Stevens is perhaps the only living justice (and even he is now an ex-) who could be compared to the great justices of yore as an equal: Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, Brennan, etc. It’s no coincidence, either, that Stevens is by far the oldest living justice. 30 years of mostly ideologically conservative SC appointees combined with the degradation into farce of the nomination process has prevented the appointment of the most truly independent thinkers out there. There’s a reason that the nominally conservative judge Richard Posner, who is widely considered one of if not the most brilliant living American jurist, still isn’t on the court, even after all those Republican presidents.
Until we can figure out a way to tone down the vicious ideological partisanship associated with the Court, we’re not going to get any more Stevens’s, or Blacks or Douglas’s or Jacksons. The best we’re going to be able to get (and I mean best from an independent-thinking, legal brillance standpoint) are Kennedys, Breyers and Kagans. And as smart as the current group is, they just don’t compare to the old school. So yes, in that respect, it’s no wonder the public doesn’t pay attention to the Court anymore. The great giants of yesterday have left the field.
I used to think that access to lots of information would ultimately help citizens make smarter choices, and would inevitably lead to more progressive policy outcomes. Clearly, I was naive and overly optimistic.
Ppl have to be trained how to assess info, how to weigh evidence, and how to find the less-easy to find info. Task of education is different nowadays.