Are you ready for a little cognitive dissonance?
The latest MSNBC/Newsweek poll tracking how well Americans know the facts about current news events is out, and the results confirm that we’re getting stupider faster than ever!:
The number of people who think Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 has RISEN since the last time this poll asked the same question. 41% of Americans continue to believe that it was Saddam’s evil-doing, up from 36% in October 2004.
A whopping 89% of respondents could not identify John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. EIGHTY-NINE percent, boys and girls!! The only upside to this is that 81% could not correctly identify who won this year’s “American Idol”, so at least there’s that.
Meanwhile…this article in The Nation by Rick Perlstein uses some findings from a 20-year meta-analysis of opinion polls from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (which many of you will know from their frequent appearances on NPR) to make the assertion that Americans are getting more and more progressive, not less (as the media tend to report).
While Perlstein is making a pitch for the resurgence of the Democratic Party, it’s worth stripping away the partisan element of the piece and thinking about the poll data a little. 69% of Americans agree with the statement that “government should help those in need” (even 58% of Republicans agree with this). The same percentage, 69%, believe that the government should guarantee every citizen enough to eat and a place to sleep.
More tidbits: 54 percent, think “government should help the needy even if it means greater debt”, up from 41% 13 years ago. 75 percent of the population SUPPORT Roe v. Wade. 62 percent support amnesty and eventual legal status for illegal immigrants.
So what can we conclude from this, my friends? As a group, Americans are generally very liberal — the “liberal” tag has simply come to mean “anything I don’t like” because we’ve allowed the political right and the media to frame it that way. And that’s part of the problem — we’re collectively, and dangerous, apathetic and uninformed to the point that a very small, very vocal, and very right-wing minority has been able to dictate the terms of public discourse. The disconnect between the core beliefs of the majority of the American people and the current political powers-that-be is significant to the point that people like Vice President Dick Cheney have been able to all-but-overthrow our representative government and replace it with a plutocratic authoritarian dictat.
