Please see pollingreport.com on Iraq which has the most recent results of the leading polls and tracks some questions back to 2003. Where possible also note how things break down according to party loyalty/afffiliation.

We don’t have a direct democracy. The founders apparently felt that, given human nature, we would be better served by a representative democracy: a republic Our particular form of government would not have survived this long if it did not accept human nature. Knowledge and experience of human nature is everywhere in the Constitution beginning with checks and balances. The idea of having elected representatives that serve for limited terms is based on human nature.

In a perfect but fantasy democracy, the likes of which has not been seen on earth to my knowledge, all citizens, all members of a society able to vote, would in fact vote having complete knowledge and understanding of the issues. In addition they would vote with wisdom ,after some deliberation with their fellow citizens, for the good of the whole. AS WELL that vote would happen on all vital issues as they come up (not once every two years or four years).

In reality, not only do we not get all of the information we need to make informed decisions ( and sometimes we get lies), not everyone is of such able mind; not everyone is interested or even mentally equipped to have an informed vote/opinion Moreover, not every vote/opinion reflects the same conclusion that you have (or I have). There is substantial disagreement for instance about which way to go and what to do regarding the situation in Iraq.

After voting day, regardless of how many voted, people put their trust in their elected leaders.

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Are folks who see their kids come home in boxes are against the war? They would rather think that it was for some good, not for naught right? I have heard those who have convinced themselves that “we have to fight them there so we will not have to fight them here” etc. and they will probably go to their own graves believing that. The soldier on the ground in Iraq will tell you the same and perhaps tell you we are “winning”.

The current polls say that a good majority are for leaving in a phased withdrawal and a minority or for escalating. Does matter what the people think? GWB is talking about escalation! We have no say, just as a good portion of us had no say about whether to go to war in the first place, REGARDLESS of our vote in 2000, in 2004, REGARDLESS of Clinton or Kerry’s vote in a Republican Congress, REGARDLESS of public skepticism and opinion in the polls.

What could be happening now, hearings, is not, the Republican Congress being shamefully uninterested checking the executive. With the change in Congress from election of 2006, and hopefully in 2008, we will hopefully have hearings and an accounting and even change/reversal in/of laws that have been enacted, eroding our freedoms, moving us frightfully towards authoritarian rule.

That would serve democracy, representatives answerable to the people

They might have SAID they were skeptical but action speaks louder than words and their BEHAVIOR supported the Administrations’s invasion plans. People like Clinton and Kerry might have FELT skeptical, but the only “poll” that MATTERED was their vote. Likewise, their constituents. Now some of those constituents are seeing their kids come home in boxes, and lots of voters who might PREFER that money be spent on stuff like healthcare, education, or Social Security, will be told that we can’t afford that stuff because we have to pay for the war, or the debt on the money we already borrowed from the Chinese to pay for the war.

Prior to the US’ little experiment in democracy in the 18th century, the widespread view in Europe was that democracy was impractical because the common people could not grasp the weighty and demanding issues and decisions that kings and nobles had to address, and that just earning their daily bread would prevent them from having the time time and energy to study them, and anyway they were too given to passions too easily stirred by rousers of the common rabble.

Today in places like China there are STILL many people who hold to those views.

And you, Potter, seem to be taking the same position as the monarchists of Europe or the leaders of the PRC – that democracy is a peculiar political affectation, and that it’s just not practical to expect ordinary people to have the commitment, the intellectual capacity, the clarity of dispassionate thought, and the other requirements needed to make wise decisions. Do you actually BELIEVE in democracy as a concept?

As I said in this post, MOST PEOPLE polled ( September 02- Feb 03) were not so sure we should be invading. There was a concerted effort to convince the public and the Congress that invading Iraq was necesssary. The administration held it’s evidence as secret only allowing as little out as necessary (Colin Powell at the UN). The bottom line was “trust us” we know what you don’t know. The bottom line is that people put their trust in their leadership as they went about their business, as they were urged to go about their business.The bottom line is that also the mass media was compliant and not diligent.

The bottom line is that MOST people do NOT read the esoteric journals, the right articles in low readership magazines ( like The Nation) certain web sites and special articles and STILL they were skeptical. There WAS a discussion going on and there was a difference of opinion between knowlegeable people. Even those citizens, who did read up and pay attention could have been either certain OR uncertain, skeptical. IN FACT THEY WERE SKEPTICAL by at least half their numbers. Check the polls. Read the questions and answers (the least due diligence required to presume to assign “ulitmate” responsibility).

And with all due diligence possible without priviledged information, what would it have mattered? Would it have mattered if the skepticism were overwhelming? What did it matter with a leadership hell-bent on war?

Still, EVENTUALLY, the public gets wise. It may take a while, it may take a steady stream of consequences: pictures of blood and violence on FOX and CNN, ABC/CBS/NBC, and on the front pages of the daily newspapers and weekly newsmagazines. And this was registered in the last election.

See The Most Astonishing Poll of All

The reason why it’s called “the media” and not “the medium is because media are plural, and so are news outlets. “The press” consists of THOUSANDS of newspapers and magazines, TV and radio stations, blogs, etc.

i didn’t have ANY DIFFICULTY WHATSOEVER finding news and information sources that exercised greater skepticism than the NY Times.

But even the NY Times’ main failing was to fail to question the Administration’s justifications for the invasion, and degree of planning and preparation for the post invasion period. Lack of skepticism on the part of the Gray Lady does not absolve its readers from the responsibility to be skeptical.

So excessive compliance by the Times and CNN, et al, should not have prevented any Americans from doubting it themselves. If someone is unsure whether the Administration has thought this through enough, it would be NICE if the NY Times demanded evidence that the Administration has actually thought it through. But in the absense of such demands or such evidence, there is NO LOGICAL REASON to just ASSUME that the Administration has it figured out.

So the bottom line remains that the ultimate responsibility for this mess is the failure of the American public to exercise due diligence and due skepticism, i.e., to perform their patriotic duty as citizens of a democracy. They cannot fob this off on their press or politicians.

But this tension between empiricism and fantasy; between being practical, fact-based, and realistic versus believing in something based on mere will or emotion is at the root of LOTS of things in our culture. America is a very religious country, but religion is certainly not empirically-based, for example. People will demand facts and empirical justifications for all kinds of things during the week and then on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, will go to a house of worship and imagine they are holding a conference with an omnipotent invisible being up in the sky.

Or consider capitalism. I’m an outspoken capitalist. But what drives capitalism has less to do with facts and empiricism and more to do with emotions. Take entrepreneurship: America is the greatest country in the world for entrepreneurs, and it is at the heart of of job-creation and our economic growth engine. I’ve worked for two start-ups and I’ve been friends with several entrepreneurs. And anyone who has spent much time around hard-core entrepreneurs knows that most of them are NOT empirically-grounded. They may have their empirical facts that someone made them write down on a business plan, but that’s not what drives them – They have a dream, a fantasy, and a belief that through sheer hard work and willpower they will succeed. They’ll sacrifice everything including their health and family’s savings by way of trying. And most of the time it turns out like Iraq – a failure DESPITE the empirical facts. The SBA says that 90% of small businesses fail in the first 2 years.

But we should be grateful that such anti-empiricists exist because millions of Americans work for companies today that started off in a garage or basement someplace and a visionary fanatic.

Likewise the stock market. A sage once observed that the stock market is driven by two things: fear and greed. All of us who invest in the market can line up LOTS of empirical facts : earnings, cash-flow, debt, revenue, etc. But the value of all that empiricism is doubtful: no one has EVER shown that there is any systematic way to use those empirical facts to actually pick stocks that will beat the market. If there was, we could all just plug our empirical facts into a computer program and always beat the market. Instead we just use those empirical facts to bolster what are basically emotional decisions.

I’ve beat the S&P500 every year for the last 10 years. (by contrast the average mutual fund UNDERperforms the S&P500 by about 0.3%) Sure, I have my empirical facts that I use to screen OUT stocks, but I still have to pick from what’s left. And I do that the same way we screwed up in Iraq – UNempirically.

So where does that leave us? Leaning on empiricism too much is ALSO hubris. Because it assumes we would have any idea what to do with empirical facts if we had them. I’ve been saying on ROS all along that there IS no science to human social behavior or geopolitics. We have no algorithm to plug those facts into. We don’t even know which facts matter. Ask 5 different people what the most important fact is that predicts whether a non-democratic country can successfully adopt democracy and you’ll get 5 differerent answers.

Suskind had figured a lot of it out: “A cluster of particularly vivid qualities was shaping George W. Bush’s White House through the summer of 2001: a disdain for contemplation or deliberation, an embrace of decisiveness, a retreat from empiricism, a sometimes bullying impatience with doubters and even friendly questioners.”

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That “cluster” is not idealism. In the current New York Review of Books, Mark Danner talks of a “war of imagination” that Bush and his advisers preferred to fight. The thing is, it takes a leap of imagination to realize they did it that way. As Danner puts it, anyone trying to understand how the current mess in Iraq started “has to confront the monumental fact that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, invaded Iraq with no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there, and then must try to explain how this could have happened.”

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And remember the British diplomat who in July 2002 took notes on the way it went down, so as to inform his colleagues: “The facts were being fixed around the policy.”

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Or consider Lawrence D. Freedman’s observation in Foreign Affairs (Jan./Feb. 2006) “It suited the White House to take at face value assertions from Iraqi exiles that solving postwar problems would be relatively straightforward.” There was no attempt to ascertain. Empiricism wasn’t policy. Those who would supply it had to learn about the absence of demand at the top, but word did get around.

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Now here’s what Glenn Kessler and Thomas E. Ricks reported in the Dec. 7 Washington Post: “The Iraq Study Group report released yesterday might well be titled ‘The Realist Manifesto.’” And I suppose it might. But what if our problems in Iraq are due not to a lack of realism, but to the total breakdown of reality-based policy making, a deliberate withdrawal from an empirical mindest in order to conduct abroad a war of choice and expand executive power at home?

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Ricks and Kessler drew me up short when they wrote: “The report’s description of the violence in Iraq, which amounts to an attack on the administration’s understanding of the facts on the ground, will likely set the new baseline for how the Iraq conflict is portrayed.” A new baseline for how the Iraq conflict is portrayed… How are baselines for description normally set? Who has the authority to do that and where do they get it? We’re deep into the reality-making machinery with that phrase…

You bet we’re deep into the machinery. What’s up with Ricks’ passive voice here? Who the heck are “the portrayers” that have previously been out of joint?? It’s the obsequious media. Rosen has an explanation for how this could happen (but I’m afraid it’s not very comforting):

If they tried to narrate the expansion of executive power (led by the vice president) through a revolt against empiricism (led by the chief executive) their story would be more accurate (to what happened) but less credible to more people. Because it sounds so extreme.

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This is in fact a way to discredit the press that the press has not fully appreciated. Take extreme action and a press that mistrusts “the extremes” will mistrust initial reports of that action— like Suskind’s. This gives you time to re-make the scene and overawe people. There are all kinds of costs to changing a master narrative that has been built up by beat reporters and career pundits. When the press can hang on to an old and proven one it will. The Bush people understood that. They knew they could change the game on the press because the press finds it hard to act in reply. Therefore it tends to behave.

OK, so maybe the media should stop futzing with the obsequious behavior and start reporting the truth? And it’s not that the “idealists” have had a falling out. We’re talking anti-empiricists, not “idealists.” They’re magical thinkers with Green Lantern power rings.