# Posted 2:52 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

A CARDINAL ERROR: Kevin Drum marvels at the ignorance of the American people, specifically their belief that 24% of the US budget is spent on foreign aid. As Kevin writes,

The ignorance of Americans about the real world never ceases to amaze me. Ask them what percent of the population is black and they guess it's about a third. Ask them how much they pay in income taxes, and they figure about 50%. Ask them how big the foreign aid budget is and they're off by a factor of 24.

Is it any wonder our political decisions are so screwed up?

While I'm pretty sure Kevin meant that as a rhetorical question, I'm going to answer it anyway. Why? Because condescending attitudes toward the American public have been responsible for some of the most misguided policies in recent history, most notably the Vietnam war.

But first, I have to acknowledge that Kevin's is right when he says that the American public lacks basic information about public affairs. Comparative studies have shown that Europeans consistently score better on factual tests. In fact, polling firms now shy away from 'pop quiz' style questions since they tend to embarrass respondents. [This information comes straight from academic journal articles on public opinion. When I'm back in England with all my old notebooks, I'll dig out the footnotes for y'all.]

But if Americans are so ignorant, how did the United States manage to become the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth? The Realist (in the polisci sense of the word) answer to this apparent contradiction is that American power is an accidental byproduct of America's favorable geography and boundless natural resources. But even the Realists admit that this explanation does not account all that well for the United States' success after 1945.

In the opening decades of the Cold War, leading Realists argued that democratic heads of state must ignore public opinion, lest it prevent them from defending the balance of power. In practice, this became a prescription for constant deception, as practiced by Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Ironically, it was such deception that was responsible for the tragic war in Vietnam, since it was only Johnson's lies that persuaded the American public to stand and fight. [Footnote forthcoming.]

Because of the war in Vietnam, liberals and progressives came to believe that foreign policy must be made democratically. However, in response to the Reagan Revolution, liberals and progressives began to wonder whether the public was actually fit to steer the ship of state.

After all, how could a President who lied so early and so often maintain such constant public support? One theory is that Reagan was simply much more proficient than his predecessors at the art of deception. Yet at the same time it is hard to ignore the genuine passion he inspired. Thus, elitist condescension increasingly became a staple of liberal approaches to foreign affairs.

Liberal reactions to George W. Bush are almost identical to their reactions to Ronald Reagan. In short, they aren't sure whether to blame the President for willful deception or the public for willful ignorance. Of course, Republicans tend to ask the same sort of questions when confronted with a president such a Clinton, who can't even give a straight answer about the meaning of the word 'is' but still had a 60% approval rating.

Thus, one ought to ask how it is that politicians with such deficient records of public honesty manage to build support for their foreign initiatives.

Answering such a question becomes possible if one shifts one's focus from ignorance to values. While the American public may not have much factual knowledge about the world, they have an impressively stable set of preferences and values about how the United States should relate to the world around it.

One might ask how it is possible to have a reasonable opinion if one lacks basic information about world affairs. The best answer I can give is "culture". Americans simply pass on their values from one generation to the next. (Where did such values originally come from? England, mostly. But that's a whole 'nother story...)

The sum total of American values with regard to foreign affairs approximates a combination of the four traditions described by Walter Russell Mead: the Hamiltonian, the Jeffersonian, the Jacksonian and the Wilsonian. Americans tend to favor free trade, democracy promotion, and international law but accept that force is often a critical component of success abroad.

Unsurprisingly, that sort of vague description can't really predict what sort of policy the American public will support in any given situation. But it does explain why the American public never seems to be as far left as the Democrats or as far right as the Republicans. For example, the American public consistently thought that Jimmy Carter spent too little on defense but that Ronald Reagan spent too much.

More recently, the pragmatism of the American public explains why the Rumsfeld/Cheney argument for avoiding the United Nations fell on deaf ears, yet the American public supported the President's decision for war once he made an extended effort to win over the Security Council.

Thus, far from being "screwed up", American foreign policy tends to chart a rather moderate-but-inconsistent course that frustrates ideologues on both sides of the partisan divide (as well as ideologues of the center, such as myself). While it isn't hard to compile lists of American failures abroad, the United States' record has been, more or less, one of considerable success.

As I see it, this success reflects the American electorate's principled pragmatism. Rather than favoring an ideological line, the American public throws its support behind whichever party or politician comes up with the policies best-suited to a given situation.

The greatest limitation of this sort of pragmatism is that it applies only to the most pressing issues of the day. Given the United States' tremendous influence, its officials make countless decisions that affect countless lives abroad but get negligible coverage at home. That is why I plan to dedicate my professional life to foreign affairs. I believe I can make a difference.

But even if all of the starry-eyed idealists such as myself ceased to exist, America would get along just fine. Its people know how to protect themselves while also doing their part to make the world a better place. As such, even the brightest of the pundits should check their condescension at the door.

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