What’s happening to America? I have much reason to be worried about the soundness of popular thinking on some very weighty issues if an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report on the state of public opinion post-election has any validity. My concern isn’t due to the findings running counter to my opinions. It’s my suspicion – call it an informed suspicion – that there is little awareness of a counter point of view, or much of anything else for that matter. We appear to be well-connected but poorly informed, maybe predominantly non-informed.
Perhaps we have always been this way to a significant degree. Perhaps. But what of all that talk about our “great schools” and vibrant free press? Honestly, that “free press” isn’t so much “free” as it is monotone, at least for the big shots. As for the schooling, never before has so many Americans spent more years behind a desk and come out of it with so little. The prerequisites for sound reasoning are quickly disappearing.
Our scandalous press has been much written about, so little need to go there. But what of our schools? The only real snapshot of learning attainment is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NEAP). We are forever exhorted to spend more, trillions more, but are getting less and less. Reading and Math proficiency scores have plummeted from 2017 to 2019 (pre-pandemic): Reading fell from 40% to 34% and Math from 37% to 34%.
And what of those other subjects, like those that contribute to cultural literacy? Could our graduating seniors pass a citizenship test? Call me skeptical given the state of the other subjects.
Money, or the lack of it, isn’t the problem. Something more fundamental is afoot. Are we a healthy society? Is the infrastructure for the schools – college preparation, grad school teacher-training, curricular materials such as textbooks, etc. – healthy? They are festooned with a rigorless leftist ideology, wokeness run amok.
And let’s pull the rug back on our commonly chaotic homes. Now there’s a new normal for you.
No wonder according to AEI, 60+% expressed hostility to the Electoral College. I’ll bet that most don’t understand it and the Founder’s complex reasoning for it. This is a discussion in a vacuum, and a poll result coming out of the vacuum.
The sudden popularity of marijuana is another thing. Let’s strip the debate of the much-ballyhooed medical benefits and get real. This is about getting high, and not much else. The popularity of weed has been on the upswing for at least a couple of generations, as getting high has made a comeback. As these young adherents pass through the age pyramid, they tow along with them the residue of their younger escapades. This might help account for the jump of 22% for legalization in the AEI analysis.
Combine the corrupted education with the increasing frivolity of our new techie world and we get the idea in polls that Biden will unite the country. Where’d that come from? Biden spent all summer threatening many of our jobs and imposing on us the semi-literate musings of a few half-wits in Congress. Unite the country by foisting on us over-complicated junk like hybrids, by having us grow more accustomed to intermittent blackouts and expensive energy, by having fewer guys and gals with guns and more overpaid Sociology majors patrolling our neighborhoods, by Soros-funded DA’s not enforcing the laws and emptying the jails, by freezing your kids out of college slots to benefit other upper middle-class kids who check the right identity boxes, by hiking taxes on job creators, by open-borders caterwauling . . . . ?
This isn’t the stuff of a “uniter”. The whole scheme is based on division and a smear: a parceling out of blame to one group and government bennies to categorical favorites.
And then there’s the view in the poll that Biden will do better with COVID. Once again, where’d that come from? Biden is frozen in March 2020 when we didn’t know anything. He wants to double down on stupid. Measures such as lockdowns, school closures, and having us masked-up everywhere at nearly all times may have been appropriate when COVID-knowledge was a blank slate. Now we know a lot more about who is vulnerable (very few), the nature of the bug, and how to treat it. Instead of targeting efforts on the truly vulnerable, Biden and company wants to bring back totalitarianism, the kind of thing that failed at preventing our current second surge. Yeah, doubling down on stupid.
The polling analysis by AEI doesn’t say nearly as much about public opinion as it does about the condition of the minds behind those broader set of opinions. I think that it was Will Rogers who said, “It’s not what he doesn’t know that’s so dangerous. It’s what he knows that ain’t so.” Chew on that.
RogerG