Uneducating America

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Imagine a democratic country where voters ended a political campaign knowing more about the difficult issues than they did at the beginning. Imagine the learning experience of hearing presidential candidates seriously discussing how to curb the wars in Europe and the Middle East, compete sensibly with China, retard climate change, address the coming revolution of AI, open economic opportunity for the impoverished, reduce racial discrimination, and gain control over immigration. Now flip that upside down and you have the world’s supposed model of democracy, the United States of America.

                On the tasks before us, we understand less and less. If we once believed we lived in a free-market economy with prices set mainly by supply and demand, the campaign has taught us to think that a president has all the power and so should get all the blame—or credit—for our struggles or our prosperity, whichever happens to occur during an administration.

                If we ever understood the limits of US control over global conflicts, we are now convinced that an omnipotent president could stop Russia vs. Ukraine and Israel vs. Hamas and Hezbollah.

                If we ever took the trouble to grasp the complex forces of desperation and hope that drive immigrants from their violent homelands to ours, we can no longer be bothered with anything but simplistic measures and instant cures.

                Elections seem to dumb us down. Its practitioners filter out the nuance, contradictions, and history essential to forming smart policy. We retreat into our caves of certainty and disparage the “undecideds.”

The problem is not brand new, just worse with Donald Trump, whose fabricated unreality flows effortlessly out to a gullible electorate. It’s worse now with social media and biased journalism that flatten the intricate contours of the country’s challenges. It’s worse with Russia attacking democracy itself by aiming fake posts and videos at a pluralistic system that Moscow has long feared, from the communist era into the present.  

                You can get to some issues if you get your news from responsible sources—The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, PBS NewsHour, for example. Good reporting has been done on   important challenges facing the country. But the campaigns themselves have been negligent. If you look for detailed policy papers on the candidates’ websites, you’ll find that Trump’s are mostly propaganda and Kamala Harris’s mostly platitudes.

Instead, campaigns bombard us with symbols and slogans, smears and slanders designed to trigger more emotion than thought. Trump advocates huge tariffs on imports, which he claims China and other foreign countries will pay, which they will not. Harris counters that Trump’s tariffs are a “sales tax,” which they are not. Neither tries to educate the public about how tariffs work: taxes charged to the importer, who will probably, but not definitely, pass at least some on to the consumer. Or, foreign manufacturers could reduce prices in response. Neither candidate makes an effort to discuss the pros and cons of tariffs as a tool to promote domestic business alongside their risk of fueling inflation. Unless you take the trouble to read a BBC or Wall Street Journal analysis, you are left misinformed by both sides.

Even the BBC can get it wrong, as in a fact-checking article that said, “The Biden administration has added 729,000 manufacturing jobs.” As for Trump, “He added 419,000 manufacturing jobs during his first three years in office.” Sorry, folks, the jobs were added by the manufacturers, not the presidents.  

Yes, government influences the economy through spending and taxes legislated by Congress and interest rates set by the Federal Reserve. But personifying in the presidency vast powers over barely controllable developments, domestic or foreign, distorts discussion and evades the hard tasks of problem-solving.

Therefore, as election analysts have observed, many of us vote more with our guts than our heads. We are wooed or repelled by a candidate’s images, and the image of strength, candor, and decisiveness holds sway over the studious, the reflective, and the instinctive regard for the multiple sides of a question. That blanks out the chance to be educated about policy during an election.

                Good leadership contains a paradox. Presidents need to be both strong and yet studious, decisive and yet open to various viewpoints. They are also entitled to change their minds as, one hopes, they mature in their thinking. In the electoral process, however, ironclad consistency is celebrated as principled while evolution is denounced as hypocrisy. Both can be true, but not always. No considered policy discussion is possible when no space is given a candidate for a change of mind, even for purely political expediency,

Harris, for example, has not been able to delve into the virtues or pitfalls of fracking, because she once opposed it and now accepts it, the arguments on each side be damned. It’s a worthwhile discussion, but we don’t hear it from her or, it goes without saying, from Trump.

Trump, instead, projects an aura of power by being dogmatically closed-minded, insulting, and authoritarian, and therefore worshipped from the gut by millions who are drawn to their sense that the country needs a strongman, with all the accompanying dangers to democracy.            

                A remarkable feature of this campaign has been its lack of serious examination of the peril the world faces of widespread warfare and of ways to avoid it. Trump has warned of an imminent World War Three, and in this case it might not be hyperbole. But he doesn’t lead an intelligent conversation on parrying China’s expansionist strategy, and he merely brushes away Ukraine as something that he’ll magically solve between his election and inauguration.

On the Middle East, Harris tries not to antagonize pro-Israel voters while giving little nods of recognition to the suffering of Palestinians, not enough to erase many Arab-Americans’ distress at the Biden administration’s support for the Jewish state. Trying that balancing act is politically protective, but it wipes out any chance of serious discussion of the confounding issues in that war and America’s longterm role in addressing the conflict.

            In sum, neither Trump nor Harris has offered creative thinking for managing and defusing this most dangerous period since the end of World War Two. But if they had, would their ideas have penetrated the miasma of puffery and propaganda intrinsic to American political campaigns? Would they have been heard through the noise and carefully considered by voters as they made their choices in this most consequential election? Don’t bet on it.