Ignorance of Politicians

and does it matter

From time to time a politician is reported to have said something that is not true. Some such cases, such as Trump’s claims about the size of his crowds or the results of his elections or Obama’s claim that Obamacare would leave people free to keep their existing insurance, are pretty clearly deliberate lies told for political reasons. Others look like actual mistakes, evidence of a level of ignorance one would not expect of a high level politician or expression of views one would not expect such a person to hold. Some of those are real, other the result of reporters misrepresenting statements by politicians they disapprove of. Here are some examples.

Real Errors

Joe Biden is probably the chief offender among modern high level politicians. The most striking example is his statement, in a CBS interview, that:

When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’

The stock market crash occurred in 1929, FDR became president in 1933. FDR was the first president to appear on television but that was in 1939 to a very limited audience — there were about two hundred privately owned televisions in New York at the time.¹ The talk, opening the New York World’s Fair, had nothing to do with the stock market.

Biden has made several less striking errors. In the course of his vice-presidential debate with Sarah Palin, he said:

Vice President Cheney has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history. The idea he doesn't realize that Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that's the Executive Branch.

Article I of the Constitution deals with the legislative branch and describes the VP as president of the Senate. Article II deals with the executive. All it says about the VP is how he shall be elected, how he can be removed from office, and in what circumstances he becomes President. Biden’s view is consistent with the role of the vice president at present but not his role when the Constitution was written.

In an interview before the debate, responding to a question on the importance of the separation of church and state, Biden said:

The best way to look at it is look the every state where the wall's not built. Look at every country in the world where religion is able to impact ... the governance. Almost every one of those countries are in real turmoil.

A country where "that wall is not built" is a country where there is no legal principle of the separation of church and state. That would include England, where Anglicanism was the established religion when the Constitution was written and still is, also Argentina, Bolivia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Lichtenstein, Malta, Monaco, Vatican City and parts of Switzerland where Catholicism is the established religion, Denmark, Norway and Iceland where Lutheranism is the established church, Greece where the official church is Eastern Orthodox. This again looks like a case where Biden, needing a fact to support his argument, simply invented one.

Arguably the existence of an established church leads to less religion, hence less turmoil, than its absence. That was the view of David Hume, who argued in favor of establishment on the grounds that it “bribed the indolence of the clergy.” Their income depended on pleasing the aristocrats who controlled clerical positions, not on stirring up religious passions among their congregations. Hume’s view fits the modern evidence. Europe, where most countries have established churches, is much less religious than the U.S. and religion plays a smaller role in its politics.

Trump has probably told more obvious lies than Biden but the only ones I could find that betray historical ignorance are attributing the burning down of the White House during the War of 1812 to the Canadians rather than the British and repeating someone else’s story that General Pershing shot Muslim enemies (presumably in the Philippines) with bullets dipped in pig’s blood.²

Going one step down from presidents and vice presidents, Rick Santorum, in an interview some years back:

"Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships."

One can argue about whether or not any historical society had something equivalent to same-sex marriage, the context in which his comment was mostly criticized, but Santorum included in his description of what every society was based on "monogamous relationships." Polygamy was an accepted institution in the Islamic world, where it still is, and in China through most of its history — two of the world's great civilizations. It was also an accepted practice in Old Testament Judaism, the society on which all three of the major monotheist religions are based.

Santorum does not, however, have a monopoly on historical nonsense. Newt Gingrich, responding to a question from the audience, said:

"I think Jefferson or George Washington would have strongly discouraged you from growing marijuana, and their techniques for dealing with it would have been rather more violent than the current government."

Most politicians could be excused for that one but Gingrich, before he got into politics, was a professional historian and has  written alternate history novels set in 19th century America. Yet he apparently does not realize that marijuana only became illegal in the U.S. in the 20th century or that, in the 18th century, hemp was an important commercial crop and both Washington and Jefferson grew it.³

Alternatively Gingrich, like Biden, feels free to invent facts as convenient.

Unreal Errors

Sarah Palin may have been the modern politician most accused on the basis of things she did not say or errors she did not make. Two examples:

On lots of places on the web I found versions of the following:

"Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told ministry students at her former church that the United States sent troops to fight in the Iraq war on a "task that is from God.""

It is, to be blunt, a lie. The full sentence, which can be checked from the original video⁴ or any of lots of web pages, including the Huffington Post, was:

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

What she is saying is not that the war is a task that is from God but that her listeners should pray that it is. She even says it twice over. Asking people to pray that something is true implies, not that you know it is true, but that you are afraid it might not be. By snipping the rest of the sentence, the AP and lots of other sources converted "I hope this is true," which is what "pray that it be true" implies, into "this is true." It's a striking example of how a partial quote can be used to attribute to someone something she didn't say —in this case, something inconsistent with what she did say.

Reason magazine was if possible even worse. In a webbed "candidate profile" of Sarah Palin, they wrote:

Regarding the invasions of Iraq and Aghanistan, she said, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God."

During the 2010 elections, I found I had a new hobby—defending Tea Party candidates from claims that they were nuttier than they actually were. One pleasant surprise was the discovery that the Huffington Post, at least in the cases I looked at (example), was a reliable source of information, even when reporting on people whose views they obviously disagreed with. 

One unpleasant surprise was discovering on Reason.com words attributed to a candidate given in quotation marks, which the candidate had not said. The author of the piece had altered both words and meaning. That is fraud. When I pointed it out to him by email he defended what he had written. The misquote was only corrected after I pointed it out to someone else at Reason.

I find it unfortunate that the leading libertarian magazine is a less reliable source of information than a leading publication on the other side.

In a recent interview, Sarah Palin responded to a question about Paul Revere with:

"…he who warned the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh, by ringin' those bells and, um, makin' sure as he's ridin' his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we're gonna be secure and we were gonna be free. And we we're gonna be armed."

Lots of people online and elsewhere in the media responded by accusing Palin of gross ignorance of American history, since the purpose of Revere's ride was not to warn the British but to warn the Americans. They are wrong twice over.

To begin with, if you actually read (or listen to) what Palin said, the obvious meaning isn't that Revere was carrying a warning to the British but that he was raising the countryside against them and by doing so warning them that they would be facing armed resistance. 

It turns out, however, that Revere did warn the British in the literal sense of the term. In his ride he encountered some British officers, was questioned by them, and told them

"that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the country all the way up."

The quote is from Revere's letter to Jeremy Belknap, ca. 1798.

The first mistake of the people attacking Palin — accusing her of thinking that Revere was riding to warn the British rather than the Americans — is either careless reading or deliberate dishonesty. The second mistake, making fun of the idea that he warned the British, is historical ignorance. I am in a poor position to criticize that ignorance since, until the question came up as a result of Palin' comment, I shared it.

Very possibly Palin did too.

Does it matter?

Joe Biden does not know elementary facts of American history or what is where in the Constitution. Donald Trump is confused about who burned down the White House in the War of 1812. Newt Gingrich thinks Marijuana was illegal in the Eighteenth Century. Does it matter?

If they really believe those things it probably does not. Because we associate education with status we like to imagine that political leaders, at least ones we approve of, are well educated, but the facts of American history are of little relevance to the job skills important to a practicing politician. The deduction of political conclusions from historical data is complicated enough that a politician can reach the conclusions he likes, or thinks it prudent to hold, from almost any starting point.

It matters a little more if they knew that what they said was not true or did not care, were simply inventing facts that served their rhetorical purposes. That implies that the statements of prominent politicians cannot be trusted. All of us believe that about politicians we don’t like but it is useful knowledge about ones we do. Similarly, following distortions in the press can and should persuade us that it also cannot always be trusted. Even when it is on our side.

Two Post Scripts

1: The fact that we cannot trust what people, even presidents or reporters for respectable media, tell us raises the problem of how to figure out what is true. One of my previous posts discussed it. Rereading it, it occurred to me that I had left out one useful tool for evaluating a source of information: find an overlap between what it says and something you already know about, ideally something for which you trust your own expertise, and judge it by that.

For a real world example, I concluded that substack author Noah Smith could not be trusted after reading what he wrote about Adam Smith, whose views I have covered in courses I taught on the history of economic thought at three different universities. Details here. For a more extensive discussion of misrepresentions of Smith, see my article in the July issue of Reason.

2: A rebuttal by Emil Kirkegaard of arguments in my previous post. I don’t plan to engage with it, hope he offers his arguments to Chanda Chisala who I got most of mine from and who is better equipped to respond.

1. “these remarks were only seen on a handful of television sets at the fairgrounds, at NBC headquarters at Radio City and on some of the estimated 200 television sets in private homes in the New York metropolitan area at the time.” (Wikipedia)

2. According to the Wikipedia article on General Pershing, "Pershing wrote in his autobiography that ‘The bodies [of some Moro outlaws] were publicly buried in the same grave with a dead pig.’” That might be the origin of the story.

3. A summary of evidence on the early use of Marijuana by American presidents.

4. at 3:39