This morning I spoke to and with a group of about 100 middle school students – something, by the way, I think everyone involved in politics should do on a regular basis. I love middle and high school classes because the students ask the questions that adults never do – either because adults are worried that the question will sound ignorant or dumb, or because we know too much detail and miss the simple, big picture. Plus, kids that age, on average, have exceptional bullshit detectors. It’s a blast.
My task was to explain, as neutrally and concisely as possible, the government shutdown and debt ceiling crisis, and to take their questions.
We had an hour. I spent the first 10-15 minutes just describing the different structures and why they’re important, how we’d gotten to this point, and what was motivating the different players (Democrats, Republican leadership, Tea Party congresspeople). Then came the questions.
As a focus group, smart middle school students are not a bad stand-in for uninformed, apolitical voters – they know what they hear in the news, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. They just lack the filters of adults. And within their limits of how the world works, they often have a good deal more common sense. And, so, the questions.
A lot of students didn’t get why this couldn’t be resolved (“Can’t the president just make them do it?” “Don’t they know that people are suffering?”) or why other countries never have something like a government shutdown (cue explanations of the strengths and weaknesses of our unique government structure, and the purpose, when it works properly, of checks and balances). Several students had parents who are public employees for the city or county; they were worried that their dads would be laid off. (“Those are separate budgets, so, no – but in the long term they get affected by the money that filters down from the state and feds.”) And so on. After about 20 minutes of listening to this, a small kid up front raises his hand and asks, simply, “Are Republicans stupid?”
Because the teachers wanted me to keep it neutral, I couldn’t directly answer his question either truthfully (“Well, actually, by demographics Tea Party supporters tend to be among the least intelligent, least educated, and most poorly informed segments of our society”) or how I’d answer it publicly (“Scientists have yet to devise a scale that can accurately measure just how stupid some of these people are.”) Instead, it’s a discussion of how different parties have always had different ideologies, values, and priorities, but with the rise of the Internet and separate conservative media outlets like Fox and talk radio, Republicans are now also operating from a different set of facts – like that climate change isn’t happening, or a default wouldn’t be a big deal. That can be because someone’s stupid, but it can also be a product of what they’re exposed to or what it’s convenient to believe – not necessarily a function of intelligence. You wind up pulling a lot of punches.
But yes, Virginia, a lot of these people are mind-blowingly stupid. It’s true.
The reason I mention all this is because these are sorts of questions and conversations, in adult contexts, that polls suggest a lot of adults are also having. People just can’t believe this is happening.
It’s an open question how long the average American political memory lasts, but if the questions of 13-year-olds are any indication, the damage to not just the Tea Party but the Republican brand is going to last even longer than many Democrats think. And that’s if they don’t, you know, trigger a global economic collapse.
“Are Republicans stupid?”
From the mouths of babes…
Awesome story. Are you an educator by trade? Or just doing a solid for a friend?
Anyway, I’ve always said that children tend to reflect alot of what the adults around them are thinking and doing. From gestures (my 2 year old cousin likes to hold the phone between here head and her shoulder, which is exactly what my aunt does), to sayings (I have another lil cousin who says “girl” at the end of almost every sentence, something my other aunt does) to just mouthing out word for word what their parents think, children are like a sieve.
So yeah, if the children you spoke to are asking those types of questions and saying these types of things, then you can bet the adults surrounding them are where they are getting alot of the sentiments.
Good on you for being fair and balanced when teaching knowledge to the youth
Echo that. It must be hard not to be “Fair And Balanced (TM)” rather than truly fair and balanced.
I have some local visibility from years of writing and activism, so I have a number of friends and acquaintances at various local schools (university through middle school) who from time to time invite me to come talk with their classes. Not an educator by training, though the times I’ve actually taught classes I’ve really enjoyed it, as I enjoy this. It’s the internal politicking (especially in higher ed) I can’t stand.
And yeah, being “neutral” on this topic is very much a challenge!
Interesting quick read about the rube-ification of America:
http://www.salon.com/2013/10/11/fox_news_and_talk_radio_brainwashed_my_
Many of these people didn’t start off as stupid.
They started off as caring, somewhat intelligent, children – and then, adults.
They earned their stupid, either reading, or listening to and watching propaganda, or got stupid through osmosis, with friends and relatives.
And then, you have the really, REALLY, stupid ones – they’re the ones who get elected by the other stupid people!
“Idiocracy” was a documentary.
I’ve been telling everyone that for years.
I wonder, I went to a private evangelical christian school for middle school. While the teachers and school stayed away from discussing social or economic issues (not even in the daily chapel) the students themselves were nearly all little brainwashed religious right. And since most of them were upper middle class, they had the rightwing economic attitudes to go with the prosperity BS their parents fed them.
Wonder how they would have responded.
Then again…
My sister went to the same school only a few years ago, which had expanded into a k-12. In her highschool class the students were less brainwashed. In fact a book they were assigned to read actually told like it is in terms of what republicans do resulting in them all asking my sister (who was is openly a lefty) to explain further.
Evangelism–new believer get even newer believers until you create a social environment. A lot of folks I know had their parents start with religious broadcasts, then started mainlining Pat Robertson, and before you knew it their parents were 24-hour-a-day Fox addicts. That process began in the late 1970s.
But what staggered me in the early 1980s were the solidly educated 25-year-Reaganauts spewing their conservatism. It was like the Reagan election flipped a light-switch somewhere and it was push-push-push at work, in social gatherings, at church meetings. And the sick jokes about Mondale and Dukakis (the punchline of the Dukakis one was “And when Reagan paroled him he told him Dukakis is seeing Jodie Foster”)
There is more than stupidity going on and it is not limited to the Tea Party crowd. It is a vicious aggression. Those 25-year-olds are now 55 or so and really put out that the Reagan revolution did not happen. And the guys have gone from sending emails with pics of Hillary as a dominatrix to pics comparing Putin and Obama with a supposed nude pic of Obama’s mom. What kinda of sick sexuality has the Value Voter Summit created?
And the military retirees and retired defense contractors who are wanting smaller government and an end to entitlements really are hilarious.
Interesting. What’s the background? For the record, I think 16 year old should be allowed to vote.
I’d lower the voting age to 12, and allow students to vote in school during school hours. I suspect the school children would be among the most informed voters in the country and I almost guarantee they would take voting more seriously than most adults. After six years of forced/highly-encouraged participation They would almost have to be more politically aware than the country as a whole.
I wouldn’t be opposed outright but I’m not sure about 12. 14 would be ok with me without any debate. But I would definitely be open to it going as low as 12; I’d need to see it debated first.
The background is pretty simple. I’d spoken at the school on another topic years before; one of the teachers was the principal back then, and a lot of her students were asking her questions about the shutdown, so she thought it’d be cool to have me come in and talk about it and answer questions. So she asked, and I did.
I posted this comment on Booman’s early story on “The Real Problem” where I thought he didn’t get to the REAL problem. It also seems relevant here…
Booman Tribune ~ The Real Problem
But there shouldn’t be a period there, because that is where it gets interesting. We can argue about how many crazies there are at any on time, or the degree to which their craziness is amplified and mainstreamed by the plutocrats. But what actually makes them crazy?
American Capitalism has created a system of systemic insecurity. Unless you are wealthy you are in fear of losing your job, your benefits, your healthcare, your health, and the respect of your family and community which you derive from being a provider. Your status is perceived as being relative to your peers and other communities.
The rise of knowledge based capitalism has created an underclass of relatively unqualified, insecure, unappreciated workers and unemployed. This is nothing new to minorities who are used to being at the bottom of the pile.
But the rise of a black and Hispanic middle class has moved relatively unskilled working class whites further down the pecking order, and they don’t like it one little bit. So they try to sabotage the educational system and other “entitlements” which they perceive as enabling the rise of minorities against them (as they see it) or more objectively, relative to them. Their kids can’t get good jobs because better educated minorities are getting them.
So the answer is to try to destroy the political system they see as enabling this – be it public education, public healthcare, anything which they see as benefiting minorities. It doesn’t even have to be an affirmative action program because even a program which helps all equally puts them at a disadvantage to abler or better educated minorities.
President Obama is the very embodiment of this problem. It doesn’t matter that he is abler or better educated than most of his white competitors, he represents a defeat for racial solidarity within the white tribe. And those librul whites who have sided with him are the most hated of all, for they are traitors to their race.
So there is nothing irrational about less able whites feeling betrayed by their white establishment and hating on Obama. His success symbolizes their failure and their fall from grace. They hate the education, the science, the religion and the government programs that got him there, and they would rather tear it all down than see him succeed.
Fascist movements the world over – be they white South African Apartheid supporters, German working class ravaged by unemployment and hyperinflation and needing someone (the Jews) to scapegoat for their misfortune, or Spanish landed elites worried by the rise of industrial workers – have responded with extreme xenophobia and violence whenever their prior status and place in the pecking order was challenged.
And these fearful and insecure people are easy meat ripe for manipulation by the plutocrats of their time. But as the German elite found out to their cost in the 1930’s, you may think you control the little Hitlers of the world, but in the end they can devour you.
The US plutocrats who thought they could control the Tea Party to their own benefit may be in for a nasty surprise: Once weaponized, they can bring the whole house down on everyone.
I often refer to Teabaggers as stupid, but the truth is, many of them are not, they just act stupid.
I put it down to what some people call “tribalism”, but I would rather call simply “culture” (in the neutral sense in which everybody has a culture of some kind).
I’m going to sound very neutral here, please don’t mistake that for approval.
Whatever you or I may think of them, most people value their culture. (If they don’t, they “assimilate” to another.) If they feel that culture is under attack, they enhance that cultural singularity by mutually reinforcing it. They exaggerate it and flaunt it in front of others who are not “in”.
This is where people come to say things and take positions not because they literally believe what they are saying. The question whether they literally believe it, for some of these people, probably doesn’t cross their minds. Their job is to “perform” their cultural attitudes so that their own group, and all outsiders, can see where their loyalties lie. They “show their colors”, in other words, with all kinds of signs and signals. The more negative reaction they get, the more in-group reinforcement they also get, and crave. They double down.
A good example would be the “belief” that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Now there are some people who truly believe this — they are either stupid or crazy (Orly Taitz, for example, is not stupid, she’s clinically paranoid.)
But there are many other people, among them educated professionals, who will spout the same lines. We’ve seen this again and again. It can’t be explained by stupidity. They don’t even believe what they are saying, for them it is simply an emphatic way of signalling their allegiances.
Exactly. That’s why, glibness aside, it’s a difficult question to answer succinctly and objectively to an audience of middle schoolers. A lot of Tea Partiers are objectively stupid, but a great many others are not. As with almost everything related to this crisis – by which I mean not the shutdown or the debt ceiling, but the unprecedented division of our country culturally and geographically into self-contained tribes that can’t even agree on basic laws of physics – it’s not that simple.
For some it’s a way of testing other peoples’ allegiances.
True.
Not all Republicans are stupid, but they are all behaving in a stupid manner. Fortunately, kids are so intuitive that you didn’t have to answer that question honestly. I can guarantee that they figured out how you felt. Those who came from Republican homes will likely be listening to their parents with a bit more cynicism. It’s sad that they have to go through that, but opening their minds is necessary for everyone’s well being.
I have always been fond of this quote from John Stuart Mill (though he was presumably speaking of British Conservatives):
“I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”
And so it is with the Tea Party. They may not represent the greater mass of Republicans, but they pollute the political space of the GOP just by holding a minority of its House seats.
(I believe you did a wonderful job of instructing those young people. Thank you.)