From the final chapter of Susan Jacoby’s “The Age of American Unreason”:
“Real political leadership, comparable to Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to educate Americans in the late 1930s about their stake in the future of Europe and the threat posed by Nazism, could take advantage of the public’s justified economic fears to make this a truly teachable moment instead of a simple repudiation of failed policies.
“But it would take awesome courage for President Obama, or any other political leader, to say to Americans, ‘the great problem in America life today isn’t just the heritage of the previous administration’s policies, or the lies that were told in service to ideology. A big part of the problem is that we, as a people, have become too lazy to learn what we need to know to make sound public decisions. Two thirds of us can’t find Iran on a map. Two thirds of us don’t know how much interest we’re paying on our credit cards. Most of us don’t bother to read newspapers or even watch the news on television. Our own ignorance is our worst enemy, and that has been as true of government officials as of other Americans.’
“It is so much easier, so much safe politically, to simply say, ‘You were the victims of a lie,’ than to suggest that both voters and the elected representatives, in both parties, must shoulder much of the blame for their willingness to be deceived.”
