Reality Check
From Alternet, why exactly sophisticated propaganda (or hell, low grade bullshit) is so effective in this country:
"There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate. And their numbers are growing by an estimated 2 million a year. But even those who are supposedly literate retreat in huge numbers into this image-based existence. A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book.
Comments
I don't know, I think intelligent people are just as easily swayed by good propaganda -- e.g., the large number of my 'intelligent' friends who told me they were voting for Obama because he's "anti-war." Lesser-of-two-evils maybe, but anti-war? -- not even remotely true. What's worse is that Obama never even claimed to be anti-war (if he had, he certainly would have lost), but instead posited himself as the anti-Bush, claimed he would have voted against the Iraq War (even though he voted for all the subsequent funding), and stressed the words Change and Hope while remaining vague on the specifics of his agenda, allowing voters to project their own expectations onto him. I also think that many of my 'intelligent' friends were actually influenced by McCain's propaganda into thinking that maybe Obama IS secretly a political radical a la Bill Ayers' former self, or possibly even a closet anti-capitalist.
In politics, Democrats too often think that people only vote Republican if they're either dumb or uninformed (or just straight evil), but fail to realize that people on all sides of the political spectrum, regardless of intelligence, often vote against their own interests. The reasons are complex for sure, but I think it has less to do with intelligence than people think, and more to do with the political contradictions inherent in a two-party system (i.e., voters' choices are so limited that they often choose the candidate that seems most like them, regardless of issues).
Posted by: jason | November 13, 2008 11:29 AM