Worse than 1994

Moristotle's previous post ("November 2, 2010: 1994 all over again") excerpted Hal Crowther's 1994 article that The Independent had reprinted recently because of its aptness to both the 1994 and 2010 elections. When I mentioned Crowther's article on Facebook, my friend Ken commented that

Today's problems are a lot more dire than [those of] 1994. The "cheap entertainment" that the D's and R's are treating us to is costing us dearly.
    In a democracy, you get the government you deserve. Ultimately, the ignorance of the ...electorate is the problem.

Well, now The Independent has published Crowther specifically on our recent election ("Gone Missing: The Country's Conscience, Brain, and Heart "), and he seems to agree with Ken:

The midterms...mark the most successful manipulation of the gullible by the cynical that this deceitful republic has yet witnessed. Billionaires and "undisclosed" corporate donors poured kings' ransoms into relentless attack ads against vulnerable Democrats. Right-wing broadcasters circulated myths and lies that would have made Joseph Goebbels blush, and every racist and xenophobic impulse threatening to a nonwhite president was exploited without apology. The secret money served it up, and the logic-impaired tea party irregulars swallowed the poisoned bait with relish. The net result of the vaunted populist rebellion of 2010 was a sharp turn toward corporate feudalism, as the House of Representatives and many state legislatures and governor's mansions reverted to a rudderless but ruthless Republican Party that has never been less deserving of another chance.
    ...America will survive this election. It will not, in the long run, survive what the voting revealed about our political system.
    We've finally achieved institutional incoherence....
    ...
    ...[T]here was nothing much in this election cycle to inspire confidence in the American electorate or the candidates it produces and elects. And far less to inspire confidence in the media that egged them on, and not coincidentally milked them and their "undisclosed" cash cows for several billion dollars in venomous, repetitive, content-free attack ads.
    The one way the media blitz swayed me was to change my stance on immigration. Though easygoing Australians have always been among my favorite national types, in the future I vote to keep them out of America. If we could have stopped just one Aussie, Rupert Murdoch, from achieving naturalization, what a much kinder, cleaner, smarter nation we would be. If Rush Limbaugh deserved a lion's share of the credit for getting out the Neanderthal vote in 1994, we can thank Murdoch's Fox News and Fox Radio, the boiler rooms of neo-fascist reaction, for the triumphant return of the American knuckle-dragger in 2010.

Whew! I think that Crowther more than agrees with Ken. And more than agrees with me, too, when I commented to Ken on Facebook that

it may be even worse than you say, for even if the electorate could magically become informed and wise, the money system Senator Mitchell mentioned back in 1994 has become even more entrenched and would hinder [I should have said prevent] the electorate's exercising their new-found smarts. Of course, no such magical transformation is going to take place anyway. Ironically, the electorate's predilection for magical thinking more or less ensures that.

I haven't defined "magical thinking" lately, although I use the term frequently. Magical thinking, which has an entry in Wikipedia, is not a precise term. It has different senses depending on context and theorist. Rather than attempt to define it, I'll give some examples. The voodoo belief that a practitioner can cause someone pain by sticking pins in an effigy of the person is magical thinking. Thinking that a prayer or ritual can prevent a plane from crashing, a child from dying, a nation from declining (or anything else from happening) is magical thinking. I joke that as long as I own books I haven't read yet I won't die; that would be magical thinking if I actually believed it.
    I recently gave an example of political magical thinking: the belief that whoever you voted for this time will be able to fix things. In a very general sense, it's magical thinking to suppose (or wish) a causal connection between one thing and another without any evidence that there is such a connection.
    According to The Skeptic's Dictionary:

Dr. Phillips Stevens Jr. [writes that] "the vast majority of the world's peoples...believe that there are real connections between the symbol and its referent, and that some real and potentially measurable power flows between them." He believes there is a neurobiological basis for this, though the specific content of any symbol is culturally determined.

Cleaning up after breakfast this morning, I felt a sense of the miraculous (or the providential) that I should be privileged to live (and to have lived for almost sixty-eight years now) when children die young (of defect, disease, starvation, accident, mayhem), when one of the almost always two young Nazca booby hatchlings is pushed out of the nest by its older sibling ("It always dies," said the narrator of the BBC program about Galapágos), etc., etc., etc., to the countless gazillions of blameless creatures on the Planet Earth who don't enjoy a long, full life.
    I suspect that Dr. Stevens's "neurobiological basis" promotes a connection between such a sense and whatever can easily explain it. Only, Loving God's somehow protecting me (or the older Nazca booby hatchling) doesn't explain it. In fact, to me, the fact of all those unfair deaths rather testifies to the contrary. That's using critical thought to break the neurobiological tendency to establish a magical connection.

Crowther concludes:

Where's the country's conscience? Where's its heart? Where's its brain?

I think it's in its knee, which jerks predictably at the slightest magical provocation.