A MAN AGAINST THE MACHINES

[Geee]

American Spectator:

On Wednesday night Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly and pundit/columnist Charles Krauthammer debated the ignorance and passivity of the American electorate.

 

O’Reilly argued that polling showing Vice President Joe Biden leading every Republican in a hypothetical presidential election despite the same poll respondents’ recognizing that the country is on the “wrong track” demonstrates that Americans are “simply dumb, don’t pay attention, and don’t care.” He ascribed this cognitive dissonance to people who “don’t have to live in the real world anymore” because their “machines” can “obliterate reality” as drugs and alcohol once did.

 

Krauthammer offered a substantially different view: In addition to political arguments (an important one being that Biden is currently a “sympathetic abstraction” whose popularity would certainly decline upon becoming a declared candidate), he responded to O’Reilly with a question: “What’s your evidence that we have a greater number of lemmings today than we had thirty, forty, fifty years ago?” O’Reilly had to admit that “the evidence is anecdotal,” hardly a strong position for such an aggressive claim on his part. As I often say — and I can’t claim to have come up with this myself — the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”

 

Krauthammer continued to push back on O’Reilly’s Luddite claim that Americans are wildly uninformed, and more so than in the past due to smart phones, iPads, and computers: “I don’t think Americans are less aware of their surroundings than they were when they lived on a farm with no information from the outside a hundred years ago. They have infinitely more information; they are more literate, more involved, and I think the explanation obviously lies elsewhere.”

 

The right answer lies in between the two men’s arguments (though Krauthammer is, as always, closer to correct than O’Reilly is).