KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD

A couple of days after the Inauguration of our First Felon, upon completing my Zoom Pilates class (yes, we take Pilates weekly via Zoom) the instructor and I began a conversation about what we could expect over the next four years.

As the conversation veered to how we arrived at this desultory situation, she commented that people don’t know or appreciate our history, or know much if anything about our government or political processes.

Before becoming an attorney, I was a high school history, government/polisci, economics, and “law” teacher. Credit where credit is due: she was spot on. People don’t know very much about our history and worse, they don’t give a rip.

Making matters worse, people seemingly know even less about the process of elections, the operations of government, or have a basic understanding of macroeconomics.

I felt like I owed her an apology.

It’s almost like a large swath of our voting age population graduated from Faber College whose founder inspired generations of students when he said, “Knowledge Is Good.” One of its most esteemed graduates, John “Bluto” Blutarsky, became a United States senator.

Unfortunately, too many voters behave like “Bluto” before he became a senator. On a positive note, there haven’t been too many recorded food fights.

Focusing solely on the 2024 presidential election, voters were in one of three groups: MAGAs for Trump, non-MAGAs for Harris, and non-voters. The significant plurality of these groups belonged to the non-voters.

Using data compiled by the Election Lab at the University of Florida, 156,302,381 people voted. On the other hand, 88,364,572 did not vote. Trump garnered 77,303,562 votes, or 49.8% of the votes cast, to Harris’s total of 75,019,230 votes, or 48.3% of the votes cast.

There’s a 1.5% difference between the victor and the runner up. So much for a historic mandate!

There total number of voting age people in 2024 was 240,687,370. Taking each of the above totals, the percentage of each group is as follows:

Non-voters = 36.7%

Trump = 32.1%

Harris = 31.1%

Voter apathy WINS!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!!

I understand that there are legitimate reasons why people don’t vote. They’re ill. They recently moved and hadn’t the chance to transfer their registration. They were suddenly called away on business and didn’t have time to file an absentee ballot. I’m sure I could list at least 10 more.

But for whatever reason, they didn’t vote and not voting has consequences at least equal to the consequences of the results of votes cast. What we can hypothesize is that a vast preponderance of those who didn’t vote in the presidential election didn’t think it was worth their time.

Let’s face it, most people don’t give a rip about politics or government. That is until some program or service is taken away.

For instance, in 2018, Johns Hopkins University conducted a survey to determine the public’s level of knowledge of politics and government at the local level. From the survey of 1500 respondents, the University wanted to know how aware people were of local their state government, especially when all the states took in $1.7 trillion and spent $1.9 trillion of taxpayer money on a variety of public services.

From the survey:

• Most respondents didn't know if being a state legislator was a full-time job.

• Nearly a third of respondents didn't know which state officials they voted for beyond governor, lieutenant governor, and members of the legislature. (Depending on the state, other elected officials might include the state attorney general, comptroller, treasurer, agriculture commissioner, land commissioner, and more)

• Most people surveyed had no idea if the chief judge of the state's highest court is elected or appointed

• More than half didn't know if their state had a constitution

• About half couldn't say if their state had a one- or two-house legislature

• More than half didn't know who came up with the boundaries of legislative districts

• About 25 percent didn’t know who ran elections

• More than half didn't know if their state allowed ballot initiatives

• About a third didn't know if absentee voting was an option

• More than half didn't know if their state ever held special elections

• About 75 percent didn't know if their state had special purpose districts

• About a quarter of respondents weren't sure if it was federal or state government that was mostly in charge of law enforcement

• Thirty percent didn't know who made zoning laws

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Yet nearly 70% of the respondents said that their state governments did a better job than the federal government.

A national survey conducted by the American Historical Association found that there was little correlation between persons interested in history and their civic engagement. But what was clear was that persons not interested in history were consistently among the least civically active.

The results are too extensive to be listed in this piece but can be found at https://www.historians.org/teaching-learning/current-events-in-historical-context/history-the-past-and-public-culture-results-from-a-national-survey/10-is-there-a-link-between-historical-outlooks-and-civic-engagement/.

Added to the above is a 2022 survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, which found the following:

• Less than half of U.S. adults (47%) could name all three branches of government, down from 56% in 2021 and the first decline on this question since 2016.

• The number of respondents who could, unprompted, name each of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment also declined, sharply in some cases. For example, less than 1 in 4 people (24%) could name freedom of religion, down from 56% in 2021.

• Over half of Americans (51%) continue to assert incorrectly that Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment.

• But large numbers recognize other rights in the Bill of Rights and the veto process.

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You can access it here: https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/americans-civics-knowledge-drops-on-first-amendment-and-branches-of-government/

A 2024 survey in too many ways mirrored the 2022 survey and can be found here: https://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org/most-americans-cant-recall-most-first-amendment-rights/

Finally, and an important ingredient to this mix of civic illiteracy and disengagement, is the fact that the average American reads at a 7th to 8th grade level, with one-half the population only able to read at or below a 6th grade level.

This is a lethal witch’s brew in a democracy. Too many of us ignore our basic minimum duty in a democracy, the duty to vote, while millions more haven’t the ability or interest to access the information necessary to make sound decisions. And our communities suffer from this collective ignorance.

On February 24, 2016, after winning the Nevada Republican primary, then presidential candidate Donald Trump exclaimed, “I love the poorly educated.” With that comment he validated the lack of education, poor reading levels, and profound ignorance of public policy and the normal legal operation of government.

Too strong? Nope. In a fast changing, increasingly complex world, people should not get a presidential shout out for being poorly educated.

I know that some might be reading this seething with rage thinking that I am a smug liberal know-it-all. Maybe they’re right. When I was nine years old, I did read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. I’m not saying I breezed through it, but I read it and understood most of it.

Lest some think I had latent Nazi tendencies, I did read Winston Churchill’s six volume memoir about World War II when I was eleven.

For reasons that remain unclear to me, as a society we have not placed an importance, and thus a value, on civic education. I found this when I got my first full time teaching gig at a high school in a middle-class community.

I had anticipated that there would at least be a civics class, if not a government class. Instead, there was a world history class and a U.S. history class. Then there was a variety of electives such as Street Law, sociology, and something called Consumer Economics. That last course at least had some practical use to kids as they entered adulthood.

After a couple of years, I set out to establish a government/political science course, a macroeconomics course, and an independent study advanced economics course. In my U.S. history classes, I focused on the philosophic underpinnings of this country’s foundations as manifested in our founding documents. In my Street Law class, I focused on the logic of the law as it impacted individual rights.

There’s more I could say but suffice it to say that I taught what some, especially today, would call the boring stuff. But I wasn’t there to entertain, I was there to impart essential information, hopefully in an engaging manner, to help students become productive citizens.

A few years after I left teaching to practice law, I found out that the classes I started were eliminated by the system. Evidently, they expected students to become productive citizens without providing some support for them to do so.

Initially recognizing that an educated public is essential to the continuation of a well functioning democracy, public education has now become a political football kicked around by disgruntled taxpayers and rightwing interest groups. Underfunded with increased responsibilities, starved of resources, kids are the victims of the public’s ambivalence about student performance as long as they graduate.

Public ambivalence toward public education has contributed to the political ignorance of too many voters and the total apathy of millions of non-voters. The studies cited above and the results of last year’s election bear this out.

This is a lethal threat to our democracy, to our economic well-being, and because of our global position, the stability of the world. This level of civic illiteracy and apathy are the essential ingredients that spawn and nurture authoritarian rule.

I write this one day after the aviation disaster that resulted in the deaths of 67 people. This morning, the president, after a disgusting, cynical display of faux sympathy directed to the families of those lost, launched into a 40-minute diatribe blaming this crash – absent any facts whatsoever – on the DEI policies of the Obama and Biden administrations, the performance of the former Secretary of Transportation, and possibly the performance of the helicopter pilot involved in the crash.

In a better time, the public’s outrage over Trump’s performance would have been deafening; today it’s crickets. That too is the product of the political and civic illiteracy that I’m trying to point out.

Trump, or someone like him, was inevitable. Wannabe tyrants play to the public’s fears rather than reason. By downplaying the necessity of providing a sound foundation of civic literacy, we have created a situation where fear is the only thing too many citizens respond to.

In the words of the old comic strip character Pogo, “We have met the enemy, and they are us.”

Because of yesterday’s obscene use by the president of 67 dead bodies to attempt to score cheap political points to advance his racist, misogynistic, hateful agenda, I will no longer refer to him by name or title. He is unworthy of either. From this point forward, I will only refer to him as “Occupant of the White House” or just “occupant.”