None of us, not even the greatest historians, are really intimate with historical eras other than the one we live in,. That fact alone would make it unlikely that we could derive much useful, valid insight from looking for indicative parallels between our own age and others. All the same, the temptation to draw such parallels and make such comparisons is pretty hard to resist.
Way back in the magical year 1999, the venerable Gallup Organization conducted a poll of Americans which found that 18% of them believed the Sun orbited around the Earth, rather than the other way around. Eighteen Per Cent. I rather doubt that number has changed for the better in the eleven years since, alas.
Since I first learned of this poll result, I have rolled this bitter-tasting statistical herb around on my palate with several different flavor themes emerging. But the one that wants to be explored in this essay is the political flavor. What does it mean for a country to have such a substantial block of people either so stunningly ignorant of, or stubbornly resistant to, well-established, objective facts?
As the Gallup poll pointed out, some other “advanced” nations have similarly high fail rates on this and similar questions. However, any effort to ease the pain of anguished fact-oriented Americans by saying “Germans aren't much better at this” do not help me out of my worry zone. America's “18 Percenters” are our problem here more immediately and than are the analogous fact-averse population in other countries.
When Galileo made the case that shattered the geocentric world view that had held sway among the “experts” for a very long time, had Gallup been on the scene, he no doubt would have found much lower support for Galileo's picture of the Sun-Earth relation than is found today, four centuries later, when about four-fifths of Americans embrace the heliocentric scheme. So, there has been progress, and, I think we can mostly agree, that's a Good Thing.
But when I see this Gallup finding, I can't help but wonder what other manifestations of Fact Resistance Syndrome (FRS) can be unearthed in polling. I remember, during the last months of the Bush-Cheney era, when public job approval for both men got down to around 18%, I would ponder and remark to myself (or whomever) “sounds like the 18 Percenters again!”. Recent CNN polling, here in the grim wasteland of Y2KX, indicated that 41% of self-identified Republicans either doubted that President Barack Obama was born in the USA or are sure he wasn't.
Even the Republican-leaning Rasmussen Reports polling outfitrecently reported that self-identified Republicans are only about 32% of the electorate. Forty-one percent of that figure would amount to only 13% of the whole voter pool, but because FRS on the Obama Birth Location front affected Independents and even some Democrats as well, fully 27% of the CNN polling sample were as disbelieving as were the 41% of Republicans about the Obama nativity facts that have been attested to by Hawaii's two-term Republican governor, Linda Lingle.
These are truly disturbing numbers, and, had I the time and strong stomach to hunt down and collect here other examples of high-incidence FRS amongst our fellow Americans, I am sure I could come up with many as lurid and disturbing or more so. It represents a great handicap for this country, and, though we may no longer be (if we ever were) the “indispensable nation”, what happens here among us in the USA still has great impact on, and portent for, the rest of humankind and the other creatures who call Earth home. It seems to me the FRS crisis needs to be seen as a crisis not unlike a financial or public health crisis, but unfortunately we have not established an accepted authority like the CDC or the Fed to turn to in such a crisis for decisive, well-founded and well-leveraged action. As President Obama has often said, “change comes from below”. So obviously our schools need to do a better job of teaching critical thinking skills and basic research techniques. We as citizens need, where we can, to educate our FRS-afflicted fellow citizens, although, like not-yet-recovering addicts, they may resist intervention, unless it be by persons whom they already respect and trust.
The current Republican party seems to be moving sharply and rapidly in a dangerously radical reactionary direction (that's not just my opinion, but the view of a number of Republicans themselves, whom you can probably google easily if you do it right – start maybe with Sen. Voinovich and Rep. Inglis). Even the leadership of their ostensibly “Establishment” wing, such as Sen. McConnell of Kentucky, have taken a stance of such thorough-going obstructionism on many of the critical problems facing the country post-Bush-Cheney that there is little stress-tolerance left for reckoning with the FRS side-effects from the 18 Percenters' cognitive dysfunction.
Until and unless enough reasonable Independents and Republicans turn decisively away from candidates who continue to follow the Tripartite Primrose Path (TPP) of Obstructionism, Obscurantism and Extreme Reaction, the cancer upon the body politic that is FRS will leave us virtually no margin for further progress. Yes, Democrats need to make their case more effectively and work harder and with more integrity to turn themselves into the agents of positive change. If the Democratic Party can live up to its potential at this moment, as it did in the Early 1930's, and as the Republicans did at their Party's earth-shaking birth and when Teddy Roosevelt was their leader, perhaps the illness afflicting the GOP can be shocked out of them by surprising reverses in the Fall of 2010 and a 1936 or 1984-scale landslide for Obama in 2012. But failing that sort of Democratic Renaissance, unless the Republicans pull themselves back from the slippery path into the abyss, we could be in for some horribly destructive and unstable years ahead.
I wish to close this essay with what is meant to be an encouraging word. Weirdly, it's about the French Presidential Election of 2002. Incumbent center-right President Jacques Chirac found himself in a runoff with far-right leader Jean-Marie LePen. The center-left leader Leonel Jospin had been sufficiently uninspiring that he drew fewer votes in the first round than LePen, who was considered beyond the fringe by most of France, except of course for his fanatical followers (remind you of a certain Moose-Huntin' Lady?).
So the center and left voters of France took a serious look at what faced them on that runoff ballot, and, much as many of them despised Chirac and/or what he stood for and had done in his first mandate, they rallied round him to the extent that the runoff was a total rout. Chirac 82%, LePen 18% -- there's that number again! The 18 Percenters of France are still there, but they have been sufficiently marginalized by the results of 2002 that they are probably quite a long way from threatening to attain Presidential power.
Could America produce a similar result in 2012? Say, Obama 82% Palin 18%. It seems impossible to the Conventional Wisdom of the present day. When, however, I ponder the underlying reality and implications both of FRS and of the TPP, I certainly hope such an outcome, and the salutary reform of the Republican Party that it would likely occasion, would not be out of the realm of possibility. Considering our history, even 65-35 would go a long way to recalibrating our national mind-set away from what many Netizens call “Teh Crazy”.
And, hey, we wouldn't want to admit that France could do this better than we! They invented the Guillotine, and we invented the Internet. We should surely be able to heal our body politic from the ravages of FRS and TPP!
Be it so.
(Cross-posted at the blog Echo and Boom )