The 2020 election makes clear: We are a very sick society
By: Peter Warski
Tags: 2020 Presidential Race, Election 2020, Politics

For starters, as a general rule, the American people are incorrigibly uninformed and ignorant — not just about the issues but also a basic understanding of how our government works or who represents us at its various levels.

Tommy Tuberville, Alabama’s senator-elect who is a far-right extreme ideologue (because what else do you get from the Republican Party these days?), was unable in an interview last month to correctly name the three branches of American government and similarly revealed himself to be ignorant of basic facts of U.S. and world history.

A U.S. senator-elect. Someone who is about to enter the most powerful legislative body in the land. If he doesn’t know these things, what are the chances that the people who voted for him do? Not good.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t mean to just pick on Alabama (though, granted, it is an easy state to pick on). Civic and political ignorance is not so much an Alabama problem as it is an American one.

As a general rule, the American people are incorrigibly uninformed and ignorant — not just about the issues but also a basic understanding of how our government works or who represents us at its various levels.

Seriously—how many Americans could name the three branches of their federal government, or the chambers of Congress? How many even know what Congress is, much less who represents them in it? How many could tell you the number of U.S. senators they have, who those senators are, or who their state’s governor is? How many have even a rudimentary understanding of how laws are made? How many have even a clue what the U.S. Supreme Court is, much less the name of even one single justice on it, or how many justices there are, or what function they serve, or for how long? If you say the name Mitch McConnell, how many Americans could tell you who he is? How about John Roberts?

For an illustration of the gravity of this problem, look no further than Florida (because of course this happened in Florida), where Republicans apparently successfully stole a state Senate seat by placing a fake third-party candidate on the ballot whose last name was the same as that of the Democratic incumbent, siphoning votes away from that incumbent. The fake candidate received more than 6,300 votes.

It’s true—many voters don’t even have a clue who they’re voting for. Some just pick a name that sounds familiar, assuming, of course, that they vote at all.

Sadly, most Americans are still stuck at the “how many branches of government” phase.

A clueless electorate is one that is especially vulnerable to lies and propaganda, which is exactly how Donald Trump came to power in the first place. There are several insidious factors that have accelerated this trend: the death of legitimate local news outlets, which have largely been replaced by partisan, ideological sites that often exist for the express purpose of spreading disinformation; the profit-driven nature of corporate mainstream media, where headlines are written based on what will generate the most clicks, rather than what’s actually newsworthy; and the rise and dominance of unfiltered social media, which allows bad actors to communicate falsehoods directly to their audiences without the traditional layers of journalistic accountability that were in place long before the existence of platforms like Twitter.

A clueless electorate is one that is especially vulnerable to lies and propaganda, which is exactly how Donald Trump came to power in the first place.

Now, all Donald Trump has to do is tap the “tweet” button, and millions of people consume his lying, sociopathic filth in real time before fact-checkers even know what hit them. Trust me—he won’t be the last aspiring tyrant in America who exploits this, and the next one might be far more competent and intelligent than he ever was.

But even that’s not the full story. An electorate that is either unwilling or unable (for whatever reason, and I can’t think of a good one) to become knowledgeable about their system of government, their elected officials, and the issues that face them is an electorate that is far more likely, by and large, to simply “pick sides.” This phenomenon is exacerbated by absurd diametric paradigms that prevail in American culture, such as red states versus blue states, left versus right, Democrat versus Republican, socialist versus capitalist, etc., which essentially demand that the public abandon any respect for nuance, complexity, ambiguity, or intellectual curiosity, and instead just line up behind their “tribe” no matter what.

I happened to live in Seattle in 2014, the year the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. I did not (and still do not) have a clue about the Seahawks, and I never cared to learn. But when they started doing well, I jumped on the bandwagon just as easily as anyone else, strictly because of the intensity of the environment in which I was living, where people were talking passionately and relentlessly about the team and I had some very close friends who were heavily invested in it.

Never mind that I had absolutely no idea what I watching, up to and including Super Bowl XLVIII, where the Seahawks defeated the Denver Broncos 43–8. I still celebrated along with everyone else, simply because my team had emerged victorious, even though it’s a team about which I knew nothing and thus could never hold an intelligent, informed conversation.

An electorate that is either unwilling or unable to become knowledgeable about their system of government, their elected officials, and the issues that face them is an electorate that is far more likely, by and large, to simply “pick sides.”

I suspect that this is the way many or even most Americans treat politics. If you live in a context where an overwhelming majority of the people you interact with espouse certain passionately-held ideological beliefs, follow a very narrow collection of slanted media outlets, approach the external world with certain deeply-ingrained prejudices, etc., you are very likely to follow suit. That’s just human nature; we are social creatures and thus are deeply and inextricably shaped by each other. Emotions, and emotional experience, influence us much more than objective fact. That’s why “owning the libs” has become so much more important to so many people than actually justifying the merits of their arguments.

This might also be a clue as to why we managed to oust Donald Trump even as the Republican Party tragically made some huge downballot gains in Congress and maintained its malignant chokehold on statehouses across the country. There were probably just enough people in just enough swing districts who found Donald Trump to be personally offensive but nevertheless grew up voting Republican, have memories of voting Republican in the past, have close friends and family who are Republicans now, perhaps follow right-wing media, and thus still believe that voting Republican is an acceptable or mainstream option. But because most Americans are woefully uninformed on the issues, they don’t understand or perhaps refuse to countenance the fact that today’s Republican Party is just as bad as Donald Trump himself. So here we are, sadly.