Just look at our intense national confidence! Ergo, we are doing well as a nation! Not so fast, scientists have warned. There is actually an inverse relationship between one's own incompetence and one's awareness of one's incompetence. In a 2003 article entitled "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence," psychologists…
This new portrait of the United States by the British, as reported by The Daily Telegraph. People in Britain view the United States as a vulgar, crime-ridden society obsessed with money and led by an incompetent president whose Iraq policy is failing, according to a newspaper poll. The United…
Yesterday’s coverage of the 2006 midterm elections on NPR’s All Things Considered immediately grabbed my interest. Like the major Democratic upset of 1994, polls show that the public feels extremely disillusioned with those currently running our government. This could lead to a decisive shift in the composition of the House, just as when the Republicans took control 12 years ago. This year’s election parallels the 1994 election in many other ways: voters that identify with the minority party feel more energized than those of the party in control, and independent voters claim they prefer the opposing party to the current majority.
That part doesn’t really surprise many people at this point, though it does invigorate me a bit to see Americans have actually paid enough attention to the legislature’s behavior in recent years to find it disturbing. The real surprise in this story lies in what makes this year’s election different from the one in 1994: voters don’t just dislike Republicans, they dislike Democrats too.
In 1994, dissatisfaction with the Democrats drove many to vote for the then-better-regarded GOP. But this year, polls by the Wall Street Journal and the Pew Research Center show that Americans have a marked distaste for both parties:
…“The proportion saying the current Congress has achieved less than previous ones has climbed to 45%, double the number who said this in the 2002 or 1998 midterms, and higher than the number who expressed frustration with Congress in 1994 (38%). Republican leaders in Congress are blamed
Check out Jay Rosen's eloquent piece on the power of blogs to empower formerly passive audiences: The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry fees and a few…
Check out the July 13 edition of Rolling Stone, where Al Gore concludes that the real energy issue is not whether we will "run out" of fossil fuels. Rather, the question is whether we will burn so much of the existing supply to make the entire planet uninhabitable before rethinking our…