Willful Ignorance
by Mark Nuckols
I remember when George W. Bush was initially running for President, I would ask people I knew who were inclined to vote for him: doesn’t it bother you that he just doesn’t seem very smart? And I always got the same response: Oh the President doesn’t need to be all that smart, and besides he’ll have lots of smart people around him. I thought that was a profoundly inadequate response, for many reasons, but firstly because of this: what if all the smart people disagree and the President has to make a decision on his (or her) own? Of course, the 2000 election became known as the election where many voters chose “the guy they’d most rather have a beer with” (notwithstanding that that guy was the teetotaler).
In the course of the second Bush’s presidency I noticed what I came to call the He’s Secretly Smart In Ways We Can’t See theory. There are many ways to define and measure intelligence, but with respect to public figures, I employ two easily observable criteria: can they speak clearly and articulate sensible ideas, and do they exhibit a command of relevant facts? And when I watched Bush speak in public, I observed that by these criteria, he was not someone I could consider to be a particularly smart person.
Now there were many reasons why Bush won that election. (And the insistence in some quarters that the Republicans somehow “stole” that election is a corrosive falsehood, often cited by corrupt governments rigging their own elections, and citing America as an example that “even the Americans do it.”) But one of them, maybe the primary one, is that a critical number of voters decided that Al Gore was too much of a smartypants egghead and that they’d be happier having the (Ivy educated monied aristocrat) Regular Joe as their President. We know now how well that turned out.
Mitt Romney is very likely to be the Republican nominee for President. I like Mitt Romney. If I cared enough to vote I’d probably vote for him, even though I think a lot of Mormon religious doctrine to be silly (not to say most religions don’t have ridiculous elements in their fundamental doctrines). But Mormons are by and large some of the hardest working, honest people I’ve met in America, and they put great stock in education. I don’t care for hereditary privilege (or affirmative action) but I think Romney’s a smart guy at least. He’s been very successful as a businessman and as Governor of Massachusetts. He also has both a legal education and a business education at Harvard University, which is really quite a good school in many respects. Oh, and he speaks French fluently, having spent two years performing his church mission in France. A Harvard education in law and business plus fluency in the “language of diplomacy”? Sounds to me like he’s a smart cookie and very well schooled at least for the job.
And Mitt Romney’s nightmare has to be Republican primary voters becoming more fully aware that he’s Harvard educated and that he speaks French, probably better than John Kerry does. This will probably hurt him in New Hampshire, but will be pure poison in Iowa, South Carolina, Nevada and Florida. In fact, it will marginally hurt him in the general election. “I was going to vote for any Republican in order to get rid of Obama (black and Harvard educated) bu, jeez, Romney went to Harvard and he speaks French.” And so at no time prior to December 2016 will poor Mitt Romney be able to mention in public where he attended graduate school or say a single word in French (a very lovely language, by the way).
Now it’s easy to overstate this problem. Democrats of a (much) older generation love retelling yarns about Claude Smathers, the Republican candidate for US Senate in 1954, going around northern (cracker) Florida telling crowds that “my opponent Claude Pepper is known in Washington DC for being a a notorious extrovert, and his sister is a thespian in New York City.” Well, they’re just yarns, however colorful. But there is a tendency, and a growing one at that, to denigrate intelligence, sophistication and knowledge when it comes to selecting our political leaders.
I saw Herman Cain boasting on CBN that he doesn’t know anything about the world outside the United States. Well, his actual words were, “”I don’t need to know who’s the president of Uz-beki-beki-stan-stan.” To my ears, that’s basically saying, I don’t need to know any of that BS. And many people are more, not less, inclined to vote for him on the basis of that statement and it’s mocking tone.
Well, Uzbekistan does matter to America.
We have a base in neighboring Kyrgyzia that is critical to the American logistics in Afghanistan. We had a base in Uzbekistan until we closed it after a massacre in the Uzbek city of Andidjon. Uzbekistan faces serious internal instability, and it neighbors Kazakhstan, a major world supplier of oil, and Turkmenistan, a major world supplier of natural gas, and Afghanistan itself. So yes, I do expect Herman Cain to know some basic facts about Uzbekistan if he wants to become President of the United States. Oh, and Islam Karimov has been President of Uzbekistan since its independence in 1991.
Is that too much information to expect a supposed first tier candidate for President to have at hand?
But then there’s another kind of ignorance I find even more annoying. Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klien exemplify this particular kind of ignorance. writing lengthy tracts filled with big words and even bigger claims, either that free-marketeer fanatics are working hand-in-hand with dictatorial tyrants to organize coups that deny the world’s longing nations the opportunity to organize their economies by consumer and worker co-ops, just like they had at Yale and Macgill universities when Naomi and Naomi were in college. Or that the First Army Brigade is moving into position to suspend voting in three Southern states to prevent Obama from being elected. Or making false and morally repellent comparisons between murdering six million innocent Jewish civilians and water boarding (yes, torturing) three high-level terrorist commanders.
I call all of this willful ignorance.
In the case of voters in 2000, it was a willful decision to cast aside what information they had readily at hand regarding the two candidates intellectual capabilities (Gore was at least marginally brighter than Bush, Jr if not exactly Doctor Einstein) and to proudly declare their indifference to the question of whether a president should be smart. Actually not indifferent, but hostile actually. Herman Cain is downright proud of the fact that even though he has the stated ambition of being elected President, he has the outrageous audacity to declare that he doesn’t give a fig for knowing much about many of the vitally important issues that would confront him, were he actually elected. Naomi Wolf has as privileged a life and education as money and status can provide, and she uses it to read prominent historians’ works in order to cherry pick factoids and misleading use them in the service of scaring poor easily frightened people into believing that we are on the verge of entering a dark era of police-state terror.
I understand plain simple ignorance. Some people are not very bright; in fact, I read once that 50% of Americans are of below-average intelligence. Some people have not had the benefit of a proper education or live in a remote village without much contact with the larger world. But for people with presidential aspirations or Yale educations to be so willfully, unnecessarily, and stubbornly ignorant is truly a cardinal sin in my eyes.
By the way, I do think President Obama is a very smart guy. Not as smart as some of his breathless admirers thought in 2008 (“he’s the smartest man in the world”), but smart enough for the job. I think Romney’s smart enough, too. I’m actually looking forward to seeing them debate and campaign next year: it will be a refreshing change for the better.
Mark Nuckols is a graduate of Georgetown University Law Center and The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He travels extensively. In recent years he has practiced corporate law in London and Washington, led an economic research team in Moscow, and advised on energy policy in Tbilisi. He strives to opine less and to understand more.