Ignorant "Conservatives," Bone-headed "Liberals"

Author Rich Shenkman revisits a year-old book he wrote — Just how stupid are American voters? "After Barack Obama's election friends emailed me wondering if I still believed the voters are uninformed," he writes. "Didn't Obama's election mean they were pretty smart?"

"Alas," he sighs, "the answer is no." It's not that "American voters are not any smarter for having voted for Obama." The author implies that Obama voters are a smart lot. In fact, he says he has "hope that for the vast majority of Americans information remains a vital consideration in the formation of opinion." What irks him is those who were taken up in "controversies over Obama's bowling score, his middle name Hussein, and Hillary's crying."

Irksome or not (I've never heard anything about his bowling score, but the other two could be valid points), his "five-part test" designed to "determine whether a mistake is just a mistake or whether it's a sign of rank stupidity" has some value:

•First, is sheer ignorance: Ignorance of critical facts about important events in the news, and ignorance of how our government functions and who’s in charge.
•Second, is negligence: The disinclination to seek reliable sources of information about important news events.
•Third, is wooden-headedness, as the historian Barbara Tuchman defined it: The inclination to believe what we want to believe regardless of the facts.
•Fourth, is shortsightedness: The support of public policies that are mutually exclusive, or contrary to the country’s long-term interests.
•Fifth, and finally, is a broad category I call bone-headedness, for want of a better name: The susceptibility to meaningless phrases, stereotypes, irrational biases, and simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears.

It is regrettable but not surprising that the author fails to see how all of these categories, but most damningly that of "bone-headedness," apply to the President's supporters. Indeed, these are at least as "bone-headed" if not much more so than are his opponents.

Was there ever a more "meaningless phrase" uttered in American political history than "Yes We Can?" Did not candidate Obama resort to "stereotypes" and "irrational biases" when talking about the rural Americans who "cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them?" What were both "Hope" and "Change" if not "simplistic diagnoses and solutions that play on our hopes and fears?"

And what do you say of those who continue to support a man who has reneged on every significant promise he made to those who voted for him and whose régime is essentially the same as the one it replaced? How would these same supporters have acted had his opponent won, and enacted the same extension of the imperial Bush Doctrine overseas and invited Wall Street insiders to take over the management the economy?

The terms "conservative" and "liberal" are placed in quotations because they have not only lost almost all of their original meanings but are now utterly useless in describing American political tendencies. In fact, they are no longer even political terms. What we have now in America is nothing but "identity politics." People liked President Bush because they saw him as one of their own, just as those who like President Obama see him as one of their own. A liberal friend supported Hillary because "her biography was the same as [his] mother's."

So, we have two allegedly divided camps of people whose political prescriptions on the big issues are essentially the same and vote for candidates whom they'd like to spend time with. This politics of identity leads to politics as usual, which means no end to the un-American Empire and the Corporatism that feeds it.

It's not difficult to be charitable toward the ignorant; to the willfully boneheaded who pride themselves on the superiority, however, one is reminded that Someone once said, "And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye; and seest not the beam that is in thy own eye?"