The Wrong Focus for our Anger?

I’ve mentioned Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of American Unreason in a previous posting. Here is a paragraph in her book that especially struck me:

‘Out-of-power (In Washington) liberal intellectuals also have a good deal to answer for, and one of their most serious failures of vision has been a reluctance to acknowledge the political significance of public ignorance. Liberals have tended to define the Bush administration as the problem and the source of all that has gone wrong during the past eight years and to see an outraged citizenry, ready to throw the bums out, as the solution. While an angry public may be the short-term solution, an ignorant public is the long term problem in American life. Like many Democratic politicians, left-of-center intellectuals have focused on the right-wing deceptions employed to sell the war in Iraq rather than on the ignorance and erosion of historical memory that make serious deceptions possible and plausible – not only about Iraq but about a vast array of domestic and international issues.”

It does seem to me that those who rail endlessly at the Bush administration’s errors – and there have indeed been many errors – need to stop and realize that this administration was lawfully elected by the American public. (Spare me more griping about how the first election was stolen – the unusually thorough after-the-fact reviews showed that Bush did indeed win, if only by the slimmest of margins.)

So instead of blaming the Bush administration, which is fruitless at this point, think about why at least half the American public voted this administration into office, and then returned them to office in a second election. Of course the Democrats have themselves to blame in part for the dismal lack of credible new ideas and the less-than-stellar quality of the candidates they put forth. Both those elections were the Democrat’s to lose, and they managed to lose them.

But I think Jacoby’s point is a valid one – the American electorate does indeed seem to be especially gullible these days. One might ponder why this is, and seek to change whatever of that we can, in ourselves, and in any arena in which we have influence.