The main reason we lost the election in 2004 was the total lack of critical thinking on the part of millions of voters. When one compared the records of John Kerry and George Bush, no reasonable person could have concluded that Bush was the best man for the job. But 62 million people did. And the mess has gotten worse and worse since then.
The problem is that people did not learn to think for themselves. Instead, they believed everything they were spoon-fed, such as when their preacher told them to vote for the candidate who was the strongest opponent to abortion or the belief that all these phony terror alerts were all about protecting us from the Big Bad Terrorists.
People showed some of the highest interest in the election that I have seen. And yet I suggest that many people saw it as a spectacle. People saw the start of the Iraq War as a spectacle in which the idea was to be entertained. Announcers called every shot fired like a blow by blow account of a sports match. Like the Romans of old, people saw this as a case of bread and circuses.
As a result, the Bush administration was able to seize unprecedented power through the manipulation of the masses in the same way that the Romans were able to manipulate the masses in the old days. When the masses were restless, someone would remind them that the next religious festival was coming up. When the Bush administration's poll numbers dropped, he would issue a terror alert, launch a phony offensive, or announce the capture of the 51st Al-Qaeda Number Two.
Now, people are starting to see through the lies and the deception. All the pundits agree that we will take many seats in the House and Senate. But the next question becomes, will we learn our lesson or not? Or will we be like after the Nixon administration, where we let down our guard and mistakenly thought that right-wing hate was gone for good?
In order to create a permanent Democratic majority, we need to engage in a three-part process - a process that involves radical skepticism of anything and everything, constant vigilance against insidious threats to our freedom, and the willingness to question even well-respected figures within our movement like John Conyers, Russ Feingold, Martin Luther King, and others. The only process that matters is objective truth - not anything Conyers, Sheehan, Reid, Dean, or anybody else says.
Does that mean that I am going to swagger through the threads of Daily Kos and bluster against whatever someone says? No - I will ask, "Well, what about this POV or that?" Or, I might show a link that is relevant to the case.
If we take back Congress in 2006 and take back the White House in 2008, we still will not have done our job. We will only hold on to power, keep dictatorial forces out of our government, and continue the process of achieving a high standard of living for everybody for as long as we maintain this state of constant vigilance. The second we let down our guard will be the second the right-wingers will come back with a vengeance. And the doctrine of radical skepticism will mean holding Democrats' feet to the fire after we take back power just as much as we are holding Republicans' feet to the fire now.
All of this means that we must reject all forms of faith-based thinking whatsoever - whether it be on the left or the right. All of us would reject Creation Science, Intelligent Design, the claim that Iraq purchased Uranium from Niger, the claim that Iraq secretly smuggled its WMD's to Syria, the Left Behind Series, and other such theories.
And that means that we must reject all forms of faith-based thinking on the left. Whether it means the pod theories, Bigfoot, the 9/11 bombing theory, the Pentagon Missile Theory, the claim that there is no AIDS virus, or the claim that Israel bombed London on 7/7, we must be just as skeptical and just as critical.
A faith-based theory is one which is not supported by any evidence whatsoever or supported by unreliable sources. Professor Stephen Jones, for instance, falsely claimed to have discovered cold fusion. Therefore, we can safely conclude that he is not reliable when he claims to have proof that the government bombed the WTC. I could say, with no documentation, that aliens landed outside my window last night. But that would not be a reliable source of information because all you would have is my word for it.
For a belief or theory to become objective fact, it has to become falsifiable - you have to be willing to prove it false. Thus, my claim that aliens landed outside my door would be rejected because there would be no way of knowing whether it would be true or not. And if you know that I have habitually lied in the past, then you could dismiss my claims of truth as unreliable because of the fact that I am a known liar.
The problem in both cases is that people want to believe the information presented. People on the right want to be able to reduce truth down to a few easy answers that they can look up. People on the left want to be able to blame Bush for framing Bin Laden on 9/11. But this has nothing to do with what I want to believe or what you want to believe. It is a matter of arriving at objective truth, no matter where it takes you.
Believing what we want to believe leads to dangerous territory. Supposedly liberal writers like Richard Cohen supported Bush in 2000 because he wanted to believe that Bush would be the man to "restore a sense of decency to Washington." Now, six years later, the blood of 150,000+ Iraqi lives and 2,500 of our own soldiers lies on the hands of people like Cohen - people who did not stop to consider the consequences of their actions. They did not consider whether it was objectively true that Bush would do so or if they simply wanted to believe that.
And the lack of critical thinking back in the Middle Ages was what created a permanent underclass of people who did nothing but work the lands all day while the Church set themselves up as the guardians of knowledge. If we don't want to think for ourselves, then we might as well pick our favorite faith-based theorist and let them do the thinking for us and show hostility or condescension towards anybody who thinks differently. Is that how we wish to run a country?