America: Land of the Uninterested and Uniformed

For better or for worse, the fate of democracy rests on the shoulders of an informed and engaged citizenry.  The founders of these United States entrusted ordinary people with the responsibility to elect those who would govern their country.  It was a noble but novel concept.

Until the American revolution, most nations were ruled by kings, queens and royalty.  The aristocracy  turned up their noses at the huddled masses as too ignorant and too ill informed to be involved in decisions of government.  America was to be the first experiment in an enlightened democracy.

Today that founding principle is crumbling, undermined by an uninterested and uniformed populace.  Far too many Americans are uninvolved in the political process.  Even worse, most do not care about what happens in the nation's capitol.  They are content to be politically ignorant.

Thomas Jefferson, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, was rightly worried about investing the right to vote in illiterate commoners.  "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be," he famously said in 1816.

Jefferson would be horrified by a survey that found only one in five Americans could name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.  However, nearly one-fourth of Americans could correctly identify all five characters of the cartoon series "The Simpsons."

Assistant Professor Ilya Somin of George Mason's School of Law has done extensive research on political participation in U.S. elections. After years of study, he concludes there is "overwhelming evidence that the electorate fails to meet even minimal criteria for adequate voter knowledge."

A recent Pew Research poll found only 14 percent of those surveyed could answer rudimentary questions about political parties, taxes, unemployment and heads of state.  This shouldn't be surprising in light of the study's discovery that the number of people who rely on social media for their news has doubled since 2010.

America has become a nation that spends more time combing You Tube, Twitter, Facebook and Goggle for information, where pop culture figures like Kim Kardashian dominate what passes as news.  It doesn't help that Americans' distrust of mainstream media is at an all time high.

This dumbing down of America is at least partly responsible for low voter turnout in recent decades.

The 1860 presidential election reached an apogee in voter participation.  Fully 81 percent of Americans cast ballots that year. Until 1904, presidential contests attracted no less than 73 percent of the voting age public.  Recent presidential elections have been testimonials to American apathy.

In 2008, a total of 57 percent of the voting age population showed up on election day.  In 2012, the percentage held steady at 57 percent, but voting in other federal and state elections has been a vast wasteland of indifference.

A telling statistic from the most recent presidential election: 64 percent of those with less than a high school education voted for Barrack Obama, while challenger Mitt Romney won 49 to 48 percent among those who had at least some college background.

Those does not bode well for the future of America.  The country's political course has been usurped by the uneducated and unenlightened.  Centuries ago, Jefferson foresaw this problem as an obstacle to the continuation of the world's foremost democracy.

In 1789, Jefferson wrote that "whenever the people are well informed they can be trusted with their own government."  Under Jefferson's apriorism, most Americans are ill equipped to be handed the keys to democracy.

The unsophisticated and the misinformed are determining America's destiny.  If this trend continues, then the country will no longer be recognizable to its founders.  The nation will stumble and fall into the abyss of philistine rule.