Food for Thought
The following is an article that was written in Harper's Magazine February 2009
A Quibble
By Mark Slouka
We have every reason to be pleased with ourselves. Bucking all
recent precedent, we seem to have put a self-possessed, intelligent
man in the White House who, if he manages to avoid being bronzed
before his first hundred days are up, may actually succeed in correcting
the course of empire. The bubble is rushing back to plumb; excitement
is in the air. It would be churlish to quibble.
Still, let's. Although the guard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has
indisputably changed, although the new boss is not the same as the old
boss, I'm less certain about us. I'd like to believe that we're a different
people now; that we're more educated, more skeptical, more tough-
minded than we were when we gave the outgoing gang of criminals
enough votes to steal the presidential election, twice, but it's hard work;
actual human beings keep getting in the way.
My neighbor, a high school teacher living about an hour outside
New York City, wants to torture a terrorist. He's worried because he
believes that Osama-excuse me, Obama-cares more about terrorists
than he does about us. He's never heard of the Spanish Inquisition.
Another neighbor-an actual plumber, actually named Joe-wants Mark
Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time tossed out
of the high school library. Joe came by recently. Did I want my kids
learning how to curse and kill dogs and commit adultery? he asked. I
said that my kids already knew how to curse, and that I hadn't realized
that killing dogs and committing adultery were things you had to learn.
He showed me the book. He and his wife had gone through it with a
blue highlighter and highlighted the words "crap," "shit," and "damn"
every time they appeared, on every page. They'd written to Laura Bush
about it, and received a supportive letter in return, signed by the first
lady. "You're a teacher," he said. "Don't tell me you support this kind of
filth." I asked him if he'd read it. Well, no, he said, but he knew what it
was about. He didn't really go in for reading, himself, he said.
I like a party as much as the next man, and I still have moments
when I realize that the bastards are really, truly out and think that maybe,
this time, it really is morning in America, but a voice from outside the
ether cone keeps whispering that we haven't changed at all, that we're
as dangerous to ourselves as we've ever been, and that the relative
closeness of the popular vote in this last election (given the almost
embarrassing superiority of the winning ticket and the parade of
catastrophes visited on the nation by the outgoing party) proves it. Go
ahead and bask, this voice says, but that mumble you hear above the
drums and the partymakers is real, and it's coming our way.
What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about,
particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign
languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much
everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face
of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our
foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some
redeeming twinge of shame-no longer. Today, across vast swaths of
the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We're deeply loyal to it.
Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our
representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.
Seen from a sufficient distance (a decade abroad, for example), or
viewed through a protective filter, like film, or alcohol, there can be
something almost endearing about it. It can appear quaint, part of our
foolish-but authentic, naive-yet-sincere, roughhewn spirit. Up close and
personal, unromanticized and unfiltered, it's another thing entirely. In the
flesh, barking from the electronic pulpit or braying back from the
audience, our ignorance can be sobering. We don't know. Or much
care. Or care to know.
What do we care about? We care about auto racing and Jessica.
We care about food, oh yes, please, very much. And money. (Did you
catch the last episode of I Love Money?) We care about Jesus, though
we're a bit vague on his teachings. And America. We care about
America. And the flag. And the troops, though we're untroubled by the
fact that the Bush Administration lied us into the conflict, then spent
years figuring out that armor in war might be a good idea. Did I mention
money?
Here's the mirror-look and wince. One out of every four of us
believes we've been reincarnated; 44 percent of us believe in ghosts; 71
percent, in angels. Forty percent of us believe God created all things in
their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the
same number-not coincidentally, perhaps-are functionally illiterate.
Twenty percent think the sun might revolve around the earth. When one
of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive
in class because they have an indigo "vibrational aura" that means they
are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with
the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the
bookstores to lay our money down.
Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has
migrated to the region of the belt-not below it, which might at least be
diverting, but only as far as the gut-where it has come to a stop. The
gut tells us things. It tells us what's right and what's wrong, who to hate
and what to believe and who to vote for. Increasingly, it's where
American politics is done. All we have to do is listen to it and the answer
appears in the little window of the eight ball: "Don't trust him. Don't
know. Undecided. Just because, that's why." We know because we feel,
as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in
the human heart, like love.
I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do
something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and
have successfully passed it on to my children. I don't believe I have the
right to an opinion about something I know nothing about-
constitutional law, for example, or sailing-a notion that puts me sadly
out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom
may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism,
or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don't believe in it.
Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who
can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing
rant, and bloggers' speculation that's so divorced from actual,
demonstrable fact, that's so not true, as the kids would say, that the
mind goes numb with wonder. "Way I see it is," a man in the Tulsa Motel
6 swimming pool told me last summer, "if English was good enough for
Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us."
Quite possibly, this belief in our own opinion, regardless of the
facts, may be what separates us from the nations of the world, what
makes us unique in God's eyes. The average German or Czech, though
possibly no less ignorant than his American counterpart, will probably
consider the possibility that someone who has spent his life studying
something may have an opinion worth considering. Not the American.
Although perfectly willing to recognize expertise in basketball, for
example, or refrigerator repair, when it comes to the realm of ideas, all
folks (and their opinions) are suddenly equal. Thus evolution is a damned
lie, global warming a liberal hoax, and Republicans care about people
like you.
But there's more. Not only do we believe that opinion (our own)
trumps expertise; we then go further and demand that expertise assume
the position-demand, that is, that those with actual knowledge
supplicate themselves to the Believers, who don't need to know. The
logic here, if that's the term, seems to rest on the a priori conviction that
belief and knowledge are separate and unequal. Belief is higher, nobler;
it comes from the heart; it feels like truth. There's a kind of Biblical
grandeur to it, and as God's chosen, we have an inherent right to it.
Knowledge, on the other hand, is impersonal, easily manipulated,
inherently suspect. Like the facts it's based on, it's slippery,
insubstantial-not solid like the things you believe.
The corollary to the axiom that belief beats knowledge, of course, is
that ordinary folks shouldn't value the latter too highly, and should be
suspicious of those who do. Which may explain our inherent discomfort
with argument. We may not know much, but at least we know what we
believe. Tricky elitists, on the other hand, are always going on.
Confusing things. We don't trust them. So what if Sarah Palm couldn't
answer Charlie Gibson's sneaky question about the Bush Doctrine? We
didn't know what it was either.
How did we come to this pass? We could blame the American
education system, I suppose, which has been retooled over the past
two generations to churn out workers (badly), not skeptical, informed
citizens. Or we could look to the great wasteland of television, whose
homogenizing force and narcotizing effect has quite neatly
corresponded to the rising tide of ignorance. Or we could spend some
time analyzing the fungus of associations that has grown around the
word "elitist," which can now be applied to a teacher driving a thirteen-
year-old Toyota but not to a multimillionaire CEO like Dick Cheney. Or,
finally, we might look to the influence of the anti-elitist elites who,
burdened by the weight of their Ph.D.s, will argue that the words
"educated" and "ignorant" are just signifiers of class employed by the
oligarchy to keep the underprivileged in their place, and then proceed to
tell you how well Bobby is doing at Princeton.
But I'm less interested in the ingredients of this meal than in who's
going to have to eat it, and when, and at what cost. There's no
particular reason to believe, after all, that things will improve; that our
ignorance and gullibility will miraculously abate, that the militant right and
the entrenched left, both so given to caricature, will simultaneously
emerge from their bunkers eager to embrace complexity, that our
disdain for facts and our aversion to argument will reverse themselves.
Precisely the opposite is likely. In fact, if we take the wider view, and
compare today's political climate (the arrogance with which our leaders
now conduct their extralegal adventures, the crudity of the propaganda
used to manipulate us, our increasing willingness to cheer the lie and
spit on the truth, just so long as the lie is ours) to that of even a
generation ago, then extend the curve a decade or two into the future,
it's easier to imagine a Balkanized nation split into rival camps cheered
and sustained by their own propaganda than the republic of reason and
truth so many of us want to believe in.
Traditions die hard, after all. Anti-intellectualism in America is a very
old hat-a stovepipe, at least, maybe even a coonskin. We wear it well;
we're unlikely to give it up just like that. Consider, for example, what
happens to men or women (today as ever) the minute they declare
themselves candidates for office, how their language their syntax, their
level of diction, the field from which their analogies are drawn-takes a
nosedive into the common pool. Notice how quickly the contractions
creep in and the sleeves roll up. The comparison to high school seems
appropriate; the pressure to adapt is considerable, and it's all in one
direction-down. In American politics, as in the cafeteria, the crowd sets
the tone. It doesn't know much, and if you want in, you'd better not
either. Should you want out, of course, all you have to do is
inadvertently let on-for example, by using the word "inadvertently" -
that you're a reasonably educated human being, and the deed is done.
Communicate intelligently in America and you're immediately
suspect. As one voter from Alaska expressed it last fall, speaking of
Obama, "He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly." This isn't race
talking; it's education. There's something sneaky about a man like
Obama (or even John Kerry, who, though no Disraeli, could construct a
sentence in English with a beginning, a middle, and an end), because he
seems intelligent. It makes people uneasy. Who knows what he might be
thinking?
But doesn't this past election, then, sound the all clear? Doesn't
the fact that Obama didn't have to lower himself to win suggest that the
ignorant are outnumbered? Can't we simply ignore the third of white
evangelicals who believe the world will end in their lifetimes, or the
millennialists who know that Obama's the Antichrist because the
winning lottery number in Illinois was 666?
For starters, consider how easily things might have gone the other
way had the political and economic climate not combined into a perfect
political storm for the Republican Party; had the Dow been a thousand
points higher in September, or gas a dollar cheaper. Truth is, we got
lucky; the bullet grazed our skull.
Next, consider the numbers. Of the approximately 130 million
Americans who voted this past November, very nearly half, seemingly
stuck in political puberty, were untroubled by the possibility of Sarah
Palm and the first dude inheriting the White House. At the same time,
those of us on the winning side might want to do a cross-check before
landing. How many of us-not just in the general election but in the
primaries, when there was still a choice-voted for Obama because he
was the It thing this season, because he was so likable, because he had
that wonderful voice, because he was black, because he made us feel
as if Atticus Finch had come home? If nothing else, the fact that so
many have convinced themselves that one man, thus far almost entirely
untested, will slay the culture of corruption with one hand while pulling
us out of the greatest mess we've known in a century with the other
suggests that a certain kind of "clap your hands if you believe" naiveté
crosses the aisle at will.
But the electorate, whatever its issues, is not the real problem. The
real problem, the unacknowledged pit underlying American democracy,
is the 38 percent of the population who didn't move, didn't vote. Think of
it: a country the size of Germany-83 million people-within our own
borders. Many of its citizens, after decades of watching the status quo
perpetuate itself, are presumably too fed up to bother, a stance we can
sympathize with and still condemn for its petulance and immaturity, its
unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that in every election there is a
better and a worse choice. Millions of others, however, are adults who
don't know what the Bill of Rights is, who have never heard of Lenin,
who think Africa is a nation, who have never read a book. I've talked to
enough of them to know that many are decent people, and that decency
is not enough. Witches are put to the stake by decent people. Ignorance
trumps decency any day of the week.
Praise me for a citizen or warm up the pillory, it comes down to the
unpleasant fact that a significant number of our fellow citizens are now
as greedy and gullible as a boxful of puppies; they'll believe anything;
they'll attack the empty glove; they'll follow that plastic bone right off the
cliff. Nothing about this election has changed that fact. If they're ever
activated-if the wrong individual gets to them, in other words, before
the educational system does-we may live to experience a tyranny of
the majority Tocqueville never imagined.
A Quibble
By Mark Slouka
We have every reason to be pleased with ourselves. Bucking all
recent precedent, we seem to have put a self-possessed, intelligent
man in the White House who, if he manages to avoid being bronzed
before his first hundred days are up, may actually succeed in correcting
the course of empire. The bubble is rushing back to plumb; excitement
is in the air. It would be churlish to quibble.
Still, let's. Although the guard at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has
indisputably changed, although the new boss is not the same as the old
boss, I'm less certain about us. I'd like to believe that we're a different
people now; that we're more educated, more skeptical, more tough-
minded than we were when we gave the outgoing gang of criminals
enough votes to steal the presidential election, twice, but it's hard work;
actual human beings keep getting in the way.
My neighbor, a high school teacher living about an hour outside
New York City, wants to torture a terrorist. He's worried because he
believes that Osama-excuse me, Obama-cares more about terrorists
than he does about us. He's never heard of the Spanish Inquisition.
Another neighbor-an actual plumber, actually named Joe-wants Mark
Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time tossed out
of the high school library. Joe came by recently. Did I want my kids
learning how to curse and kill dogs and commit adultery? he asked. I
said that my kids already knew how to curse, and that I hadn't realized
that killing dogs and committing adultery were things you had to learn.
He showed me the book. He and his wife had gone through it with a
blue highlighter and highlighted the words "crap," "shit," and "damn"
every time they appeared, on every page. They'd written to Laura Bush
about it, and received a supportive letter in return, signed by the first
lady. "You're a teacher," he said. "Don't tell me you support this kind of
filth." I asked him if he'd read it. Well, no, he said, but he knew what it
was about. He didn't really go in for reading, himself, he said.
I like a party as much as the next man, and I still have moments
when I realize that the bastards are really, truly out and think that maybe,
this time, it really is morning in America, but a voice from outside the
ether cone keeps whispering that we haven't changed at all, that we're
as dangerous to ourselves as we've ever been, and that the relative
closeness of the popular vote in this last election (given the almost
embarrassing superiority of the winning ticket and the parade of
catastrophes visited on the nation by the outgoing party) proves it. Go
ahead and bask, this voice says, but that mumble you hear above the
drums and the partymakers is real, and it's coming our way.
What we need to talk about, what someone needs to talk about,
particularly now, is our ever-deepening ignorance (of politics, of foreign
languages, of history, of science, of current affairs, of pretty much
everything) and not just our ignorance but our complacency in the face
of it, our growing fondness for it. A generation ago the proof of our
foolishness, held up to our faces, might still have elicited some
redeeming twinge of shame-no longer. Today, across vast swaths of
the republic, it amuses and comforts us. We're deeply loyal to it.
Ignorance gives us a sense of community; it confers citizenship; our
representatives either share it or bow down to it or risk our wrath.
Seen from a sufficient distance (a decade abroad, for example), or
viewed through a protective filter, like film, or alcohol, there can be
something almost endearing about it. It can appear quaint, part of our
foolish-but authentic, naive-yet-sincere, roughhewn spirit. Up close and
personal, unromanticized and unfiltered, it's another thing entirely. In the
flesh, barking from the electronic pulpit or braying back from the
audience, our ignorance can be sobering. We don't know. Or much
care. Or care to know.
What do we care about? We care about auto racing and Jessica.
We care about food, oh yes, please, very much. And money. (Did you
catch the last episode of I Love Money?) We care about Jesus, though
we're a bit vague on his teachings. And America. We care about
America. And the flag. And the troops, though we're untroubled by the
fact that the Bush Administration lied us into the conflict, then spent
years figuring out that armor in war might be a good idea. Did I mention
money?
Here's the mirror-look and wince. One out of every four of us
believes we've been reincarnated; 44 percent of us believe in ghosts; 71
percent, in angels. Forty percent of us believe God created all things in
their present form sometime during the last 10,000 years. Nearly the
same number-not coincidentally, perhaps-are functionally illiterate.
Twenty percent think the sun might revolve around the earth. When one
of us writes a book explaining that our offspring are bored and disruptive
in class because they have an indigo "vibrational aura" that means they
are a gifted race sent to this planet to change our consciousness with
the help of guides from a higher world, half a million of us rush to the
bookstores to lay our money down.
Wherever it may have resided before, the brain in America has
migrated to the region of the belt-not below it, which might at least be
diverting, but only as far as the gut-where it has come to a stop. The
gut tells us things. It tells us what's right and what's wrong, who to hate
and what to believe and who to vote for. Increasingly, it's where
American politics is done. All we have to do is listen to it and the answer
appears in the little window of the eight ball: "Don't trust him. Don't
know. Undecided. Just because, that's why." We know because we feel,
as if truth were a matter of personal taste, or something to be divined in
the human heart, like love.
I was raised to be ashamed of my ignorance, and to try to do
something about it if at all possible. I carry that burden to this day, and
have successfully passed it on to my children. I don't believe I have the
right to an opinion about something I know nothing about-
constitutional law, for example, or sailing-a notion that puts me sadly
out of step with a growing majority of my countrymen, many of whom
may be unable to tell you anything at all about Islam, say, or socialism,
or climate change, except that they hate it, are against it, don't believe in it.
Worse still (or more amusing, depending on the day) are those who
can tell you, and then offer up a stew of New Age blather, right-wing
rant, and bloggers' speculation that's so divorced from actual,
demonstrable fact, that's so not true, as the kids would say, that the
mind goes numb with wonder. "Way I see it is," a man in the Tulsa Motel
6 swimming pool told me last summer, "if English was good enough for
Jesus Christ, it's good enough for us."
Quite possibly, this belief in our own opinion, regardless of the
facts, may be what separates us from the nations of the world, what
makes us unique in God's eyes. The average German or Czech, though
possibly no less ignorant than his American counterpart, will probably
consider the possibility that someone who has spent his life studying
something may have an opinion worth considering. Not the American.
Although perfectly willing to recognize expertise in basketball, for
example, or refrigerator repair, when it comes to the realm of ideas, all
folks (and their opinions) are suddenly equal. Thus evolution is a damned
lie, global warming a liberal hoax, and Republicans care about people
like you.
But there's more. Not only do we believe that opinion (our own)
trumps expertise; we then go further and demand that expertise assume
the position-demand, that is, that those with actual knowledge
supplicate themselves to the Believers, who don't need to know. The
logic here, if that's the term, seems to rest on the a priori conviction that
belief and knowledge are separate and unequal. Belief is higher, nobler;
it comes from the heart; it feels like truth. There's a kind of Biblical
grandeur to it, and as God's chosen, we have an inherent right to it.
Knowledge, on the other hand, is impersonal, easily manipulated,
inherently suspect. Like the facts it's based on, it's slippery,
insubstantial-not solid like the things you believe.
The corollary to the axiom that belief beats knowledge, of course, is
that ordinary folks shouldn't value the latter too highly, and should be
suspicious of those who do. Which may explain our inherent discomfort
with argument. We may not know much, but at least we know what we
believe. Tricky elitists, on the other hand, are always going on.
Confusing things. We don't trust them. So what if Sarah Palm couldn't
answer Charlie Gibson's sneaky question about the Bush Doctrine? We
didn't know what it was either.
How did we come to this pass? We could blame the American
education system, I suppose, which has been retooled over the past
two generations to churn out workers (badly), not skeptical, informed
citizens. Or we could look to the great wasteland of television, whose
homogenizing force and narcotizing effect has quite neatly
corresponded to the rising tide of ignorance. Or we could spend some
time analyzing the fungus of associations that has grown around the
word "elitist," which can now be applied to a teacher driving a thirteen-
year-old Toyota but not to a multimillionaire CEO like Dick Cheney. Or,
finally, we might look to the influence of the anti-elitist elites who,
burdened by the weight of their Ph.D.s, will argue that the words
"educated" and "ignorant" are just signifiers of class employed by the
oligarchy to keep the underprivileged in their place, and then proceed to
tell you how well Bobby is doing at Princeton.
But I'm less interested in the ingredients of this meal than in who's
going to have to eat it, and when, and at what cost. There's no
particular reason to believe, after all, that things will improve; that our
ignorance and gullibility will miraculously abate, that the militant right and
the entrenched left, both so given to caricature, will simultaneously
emerge from their bunkers eager to embrace complexity, that our
disdain for facts and our aversion to argument will reverse themselves.
Precisely the opposite is likely. In fact, if we take the wider view, and
compare today's political climate (the arrogance with which our leaders
now conduct their extralegal adventures, the crudity of the propaganda
used to manipulate us, our increasing willingness to cheer the lie and
spit on the truth, just so long as the lie is ours) to that of even a
generation ago, then extend the curve a decade or two into the future,
it's easier to imagine a Balkanized nation split into rival camps cheered
and sustained by their own propaganda than the republic of reason and
truth so many of us want to believe in.
Traditions die hard, after all. Anti-intellectualism in America is a very
old hat-a stovepipe, at least, maybe even a coonskin. We wear it well;
we're unlikely to give it up just like that. Consider, for example, what
happens to men or women (today as ever) the minute they declare
themselves candidates for office, how their language their syntax, their
level of diction, the field from which their analogies are drawn-takes a
nosedive into the common pool. Notice how quickly the contractions
creep in and the sleeves roll up. The comparison to high school seems
appropriate; the pressure to adapt is considerable, and it's all in one
direction-down. In American politics, as in the cafeteria, the crowd sets
the tone. It doesn't know much, and if you want in, you'd better not
either. Should you want out, of course, all you have to do is
inadvertently let on-for example, by using the word "inadvertently" -
that you're a reasonably educated human being, and the deed is done.
Communicate intelligently in America and you're immediately
suspect. As one voter from Alaska expressed it last fall, speaking of
Obama, "He just seems snotty, and he looks weaselly." This isn't race
talking; it's education. There's something sneaky about a man like
Obama (or even John Kerry, who, though no Disraeli, could construct a
sentence in English with a beginning, a middle, and an end), because he
seems intelligent. It makes people uneasy. Who knows what he might be
thinking?
But doesn't this past election, then, sound the all clear? Doesn't
the fact that Obama didn't have to lower himself to win suggest that the
ignorant are outnumbered? Can't we simply ignore the third of white
evangelicals who believe the world will end in their lifetimes, or the
millennialists who know that Obama's the Antichrist because the
winning lottery number in Illinois was 666?
For starters, consider how easily things might have gone the other
way had the political and economic climate not combined into a perfect
political storm for the Republican Party; had the Dow been a thousand
points higher in September, or gas a dollar cheaper. Truth is, we got
lucky; the bullet grazed our skull.
Next, consider the numbers. Of the approximately 130 million
Americans who voted this past November, very nearly half, seemingly
stuck in political puberty, were untroubled by the possibility of Sarah
Palm and the first dude inheriting the White House. At the same time,
those of us on the winning side might want to do a cross-check before
landing. How many of us-not just in the general election but in the
primaries, when there was still a choice-voted for Obama because he
was the It thing this season, because he was so likable, because he had
that wonderful voice, because he was black, because he made us feel
as if Atticus Finch had come home? If nothing else, the fact that so
many have convinced themselves that one man, thus far almost entirely
untested, will slay the culture of corruption with one hand while pulling
us out of the greatest mess we've known in a century with the other
suggests that a certain kind of "clap your hands if you believe" naiveté
crosses the aisle at will.
But the electorate, whatever its issues, is not the real problem. The
real problem, the unacknowledged pit underlying American democracy,
is the 38 percent of the population who didn't move, didn't vote. Think of
it: a country the size of Germany-83 million people-within our own
borders. Many of its citizens, after decades of watching the status quo
perpetuate itself, are presumably too fed up to bother, a stance we can
sympathize with and still condemn for its petulance and immaturity, its
unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that in every election there is a
better and a worse choice. Millions of others, however, are adults who
don't know what the Bill of Rights is, who have never heard of Lenin,
who think Africa is a nation, who have never read a book. I've talked to
enough of them to know that many are decent people, and that decency
is not enough. Witches are put to the stake by decent people. Ignorance
trumps decency any day of the week.
Praise me for a citizen or warm up the pillory, it comes down to the
unpleasant fact that a significant number of our fellow citizens are now
as greedy and gullible as a boxful of puppies; they'll believe anything;
they'll attack the empty glove; they'll follow that plastic bone right off the
cliff. Nothing about this election has changed that fact. If they're ever
activated-if the wrong individual gets to them, in other words, before
the educational system does-we may live to experience a tyranny of
the majority Tocqueville never imagined.