By Michael Kinsley
Take out a piece of paper and write down you response to this question:
Should the U.S. Government spend more, less, or the same on foreign-aid?
The weekend before President Clinton's State of the Union Address, the Wall
Street Journal assembled a focus group of middle-class white male – the
demographic group du jour to plumb the depth of their proverbial anger. The
results were highly satisfactory. These guys are mad as hell. They're mad at
welfare, they're mad at special-interest lobbyists. "But perhaps the subject
that produces the most agreement among the group," the Journal reports, "is the
view that Washington should stop sending money abroad and instead zero in on the
domestic front."
A poll released last week by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at
the University of Maryland contains similar findings. According to this survey,
seventy-five per cent of Americans believe that the United States spends "too
much" on foreign aid, and sixty-four per cent want foreign-aid spending cut.
Apparently, a cavalier eleven per cent of Americans think it's fine to spend
"too much" on foreign aid. But there is no denying the poll's larger finding
that big majorities say they think the tab is too high.
Respondents were also asked, though, how big a share of the federal budget
currently goes to foreign aid. The median answer was fifteen per cent; the
average answer was eighteen per cent. The correct answer is less than one per
cent: the United States government spends about fourteen billion dollars a year
on foreign aid (including military assistance), out of a total budget of a
trillion and a half To a question about how much foreign-aid spending would be
"appropriate," the median answer was five per cent of the budget. A question
about how much would be "too little" produced a median answer of three per
cent-more than three times the current level of foreign-aid spending.
To the International Policy folks at the University of Maryland, these results
demonstrate "strong support for maintaining foreign aid at current spending
levels or higher." That's just their liberal internationalist spin, of course.
You might say with equal justice that the results demonstrate a national wish to
see foreign aid cut by two-thirds. It's true that after the pollsters humiliated
their subjects with the correct answer to the question about how much (or,
rather, how little) the United States spends on foreign aid, only thirty-five
per cent of the respondents had the fortitude to say they still wanted to see it
cut. But what people will say after being corrected by an authority figure with
a clipboard hardly constitutes "strong support."
This poll is less interesting for what it shows about foreign aid than for what
it shows about American democracy. It's not just that Americans are scandalously
ignorant. It's that they seem to believe they have a democratic right to their
ignorance. All over the country-at dinner tables, in focus groups, on call-in
radio shows, and, no doubt, occasionally on the floor of Congress-citizens are
expressing outrage about how much we spend on foreign aid, with-out having the
faintest idea what that amount is. This is not, surely, a question of being
misinformed. No one-not even Rush Limbaugh-is out there spreading the falsehood
that we spend fifteen per cent of the federal budget (two hundred and
twenty-five billion dollars) on foreign aid. People are forming and expressing
passionate views about foreign aid on the basis of no information at all. Or
perhaps they think that the amount being spent on foreign aid is a matter of
opinion, like everything else.
Populism, in its latest manifestation, celebrates ignorant opinion and
undifferentiated rage. As long as you're mad as hell and aren't going to take it
anymore, no one will inquire very closely into what, exactly, "it" is and
whether you really ought to feel that way. Pandering politicians are partly to
blame, to be sure. So is the development christened "hyperdemocracy" by last
week's Time: the way the communications revolution is eroding representative
government by providing instant feedback between voters' whims and politicians'
actions. But ubiquitous opinion polls are part of the problem, too.
The typical opinion poll about, say, foreign aid doesn't trouble to ask whether
the respondent knows the first thing about the topic being opined upon, and no
conventional poll disqualifies an answer on the ground of mere total ignorance.
The premise of opinion polling is that people are, and of right ought to be,
omni-opinionated-that they should have views on all subjects at all times-and
that all such views are equally valid. It's always remarkable how few people say
they "aren't sure" about or "don't know" the answer to some pollster's question.
("Never thought about it," "Couldn't care less," and "Let me get back to you on
that after I've done some reading" aren't even options.) So, given the
prominence of polls in our political culture, it's no surprise that people have
come to believe that their opinions on the issues of the day need not be
fettered by either facts or reflection.
Add opinions to the list of symptoms of the free-lunch disease that blights
American politics. First, in the early nineteen-eighties, came the fiscal free
lunch: taxes can be cut without cutting middle-class government benefits. Then,
with the end of the Cold War, came the foreign-policy free lunch: America can
strut as the world's superpower without putting blood or treasure at risk. Now
there's the intellectual free lunch: I'm entitled to vociferous opinions on any
subject, without having to know, or even think, about it.
All this may sound horribly snooty. But it isn't. It is not the argument that
Walter Lippmann made in "Public Opinion," where he advocated relying on elite
"bureaus" of wise men to make crucial policy decisions. Lippmann's belief was
that modern life had rendered public policy too complex for the average voter.
But there is nothing especially complex about the factual question of how much
the country spends on foreign aid. It may be too heavy a burden of civic
responsibility to expect every citizen-what with work and family and life
outside politics-to carry this number around in his or her head. But it is not
asking too much to expect a citizen to recognize that he or she needs to know
that number, at least roughly, in order to have a valid opinion about whether it
is too large or too small. Americans are capable of making informed, reflective
decisions on policy questions. But they often seem to be under the impression
that they needn't bother.
We need a new form of democratic piety. It shows respect, not contempt, for "the
people" to hold them to something approaching the intellectual standard you
would apply to yourself or a friend. By contrast, it is contemptuous, not
respectful, to excuse "the people" from all demands of intellectual rigor or
honesty on the ground that their judgments are wise by definition. We honor our
friends by challenging them when we think they're wrong. It shows that we take
them seriously. Believers in democracy owe "the people" no less.