Never Let Anyone Tell You Americans Are Intelligent

There's an ongoing category of posts in the liberal blogosphere that hypes up the underestimated intelligence of Americans. When Obama was elected, it was hailed as a sign that Americans weren't dumb enough to play into the same old Rovian games. When the Big Three were "raked over the coals" on Capitol Hill while Wall Street got to "run the show," bloggers proclaimed it "obvious that Americans see what's going on now... they're attuned to the game." Whenever a gay marriage poll reflects more people voting to support it, this is trumped up as a sign that modern Americans are totally plugged in to the goings-on of their local governments and care deeply about the issues.

Even if any of that were true, this chart alone should be evidence enough that the majority of this country is dumb as a fucking post. (Via Yglesias.)



To be fair, this is not a unilateral fail. The marketing geniuses behind the "cap and trade" slogan are... not marketing geniuses. The term is totally amorphous and only further confuses people on a topic they know fuckall about to begin with. How about "carbon emissions policy"? Wasn't that hard.

But that shouldn't absolve American citizens. This chart would be horribly depressing if I were the type to place any faith in the people that live in this country. I don't, so it wasn't. But man--cap and trade has been a hot-button issue for years, and it was talked about quite a lot during the campaign. And the question isn't "What's the limit the government should impose on carbon emissions, and why?" It's "WHAT DOES THE FUCKING TERM MEAN?" And nobody has nary a goddamn clue.