By Quin Hillyer at the Washington Examiner, March 7;
Mind-numbing ignorance. Severe moral confusion. Willfully blinkered (il)logic and (mis)judgment.
If poll results reported this week are confirmed in subsequent surveys, those descriptors above are the most accurate assessment right now of the cast of mind of half the American public. They are poll results we should not readily believe. But if they are accurate, they are results we must dedicate ourselves to reversing via a massive mobilization of reason, perspective, context, conscience, and truth.
The simultaneously depressing and enraging survey by long-established pollsters John and Jim McLaughlin, conducted Feb. 6-10, reports that an equal 46 percent of Americans agreed and disagreed with the jaw droppingly dishonest notion that “America is the source of most of the world’s ills: political, economic and environmental.” Again, these are the reported views not from around the Earth, but from Americans ourselves. Half of us think the United States is a malignant global force. Half.
This view is in direct and empirically obvious conflict with reality. Unless that 46 percent who are American detractors despise the spread of freedom and human rights, and resent the eradication of famine and disease, their moral reasoning is stupendously deficient.
Even if one posits, as the McLaughlins do, that leftist indoctrination from academia and media is causing anti-Americanism to spike especially high, 66 percent, among younger American voters, that’s no excuse. At some point, morally self-sufficient, reasoning adults must be held responsible for their own blindness and failure to avail themselves of readily accessible knowledge.
The litany of U.S. beneficence worldwide should be already familiar. It is indisputable that the successful American experiment in representative self-government inspired dozens of others to emulate it, and that human rights and dignity advanced multifold almost everywhere that inspiration took root…. [The rest of the column is here.]
