Polls like these put a whole new twist on Hayek’s knowledge problem (hat tip: Yglesias):

Given a choice of three options, just 24 percent of voters can correctly identify the cap-and-trade proposal as something that deals with environmental issues. A slightly higher number (29 percent) believe the proposal has something to do with regulating Wall Street while 17 percent think the term applies to health care reform. A plurality (30 percent) have no idea.

Rasmussen isn’t asking how the program will be implemented, or whether permits will be auctioned or granted – they’re asking what folder to put the issue in. And almost a third are putting it with Bernie Madoff’s information.

There are two approaches to take here. One is absolute fretting and end-of-America prophesying. This isn’t used as an epithet, since it’s an entirely reasonable way to respond. This is still a democratically-based republic, one that has leaned closer to direct democracy than it has to a class-based system. If the vast majority of the country can’t even speak Wonkish, let alone understand it, what hope do we have of having any sort of democratic influence on policy? There’s also the issue of what wasn’t polled. This is an incredibly basic question, but sometimes it’s not the basic questions that matter. Sure everyone knows what “war” is – but do they know why, and what’s the reason how? It’s amusing that this tip should come from Matt Yglesias, as he has a predilection for flashing poll numbers as proof of the superiority of his policy stances. Frankly, at this point I wonder if I’d even want to have this polity on my side for anything. Increasingly, the government of this country is symbolic, and voting has more in common with wearing the team colors than it does with reflections on society

That being the case, there’s a more contrary approach: why should anyone outside of the Beltway care? After all, these are people with jobs and kids and mortgage payments to get in. Perhaps studying OMB reports isn’t exactly the best use of their time. The implications here are pretty troubling – if utilization tends towards individuals that make up, say, one percent of the population deciding one hundred percent of policy. This is why you have support for an awful, awful bill like CPSIA, which was cast as “keep lead of toys.” Never mind that the bill quite literally is putting small-sized retail shops out of business (and much, much more) – symbolically, it worked, and hence it got support. Legislators preached the cause, bootleggers and baptists wrote the legalese, and everybody got together for a nice photo-op and luncheon afterward. For all the Liberal – note that this is capitalized and that it is not “center-right” – tendencies of this country, it has a funny way of pivoting towards increasing intervention in fields domestic and foreign.

Whatever it may be, it should make someone slightly skeptical of deciding national – and, by imperial translation, international policy – on the basis of the masses. Yet if democracy is the least-bad option (if ol’ drunk Churchill is to be belived?), then what? Might we be bold enough to suggest that Thoreau had it right all along?

NB: One final question: how many of those polled were elected officials? I’m only half-kidding.

Via Deadspin:

This follows Al Franken‘s (hopefully!) failed Senate campaign, Charles Barkley’s jaunt at the governorship of Alabama, and Paris Hilton’s campaign ad — which, depressingly enough, was one of the more sane messages of the entire election season.

Sens. Alexander and Frist are smart guys as well. But what long-term gain could they accrue from a jokey candidacy like this one? Are they actually betting that Al Franken is a harbinger of things to come? If this is the case, and celebrity candidacies are on their way to become the norm, rather than the exception, then we are well on our way to Idiocracy.

Reporting from the nation’s top show
By Evan Lisull
Curtis James Jackson III seems prima facie to be a typical swing voter. He initially came out in favor of Hilary, citing his approval of her husband’s administration, but later switched over to Sen. Barack Obama. Except of course, that Mr. Jackson is more commonly known by his rap moniker “50 Cent”; and 50 is a convicted felon, and cannot vote.

I recount this Eight-Mile-infused election tidbit with my colleague, but his mind is elsewhere, a Cheshire cat grin breaking out across his face as his thought processes reached their apex. “Dude, let’s watch…the Dude!” I chuckle, and indeed, for it is an ideal hortatory for a haze-filled Tuesday night. The popcorn pops, and, for an all-too-brief moment, things are going well. Life might not be fucked, after all.

Enter John Goodman, in all his corpulence, playing “Walter Sobchak”, Vietnam vet. Only it’s not Walter; it’s John McCain – “Are you sure this is the right movie?” – and as Sir Chipmunk Cheeks himself begins his soliloquy, the planet shifts just slightly, just enough for me to realize that everything has gone wrong. “No, John, you’re not wrong“– John?!?– “you’re just an asshole.” I calmly get up, smile blithely, walk to a stranger’s bathroom, and vomit profusely. I cannot believe this.

These candidates: I look around and everywhere I see them, ghosts haunting the corporeal machine, lighting cigarettes on the stairwell and advertising Coca Cola. Forget niche culture; we’ve got the Great Vortex. The boundaries have been shattered, politics becoming movies becoming advertisements becoming disposable ink pens.

Once again, politics have ruined my life.

Right now, it is dead season in the Long, Long March to Pennsylvania Ave. (known aptly on the Daily Show as the Clusterfuck to the White House), but news anchors and their caustic blogging cousins are still in high drive, and like PCP users after getting the hit of a lifetime, they are read to fuck anyone up. Thus, anything is and has been fair game, from the candidate’s sartorial choices to the length of their toenails to their daughters (“How much? How much for the little girls? How much for your women?”). One daughter, in particular, brings the boys to the yard, and she ain’t in the dairy industry. She’s Meghan McCain, and she makes the Bush Twins look so 2007. She blogs, she’s sassy, she’s sexy (this is politics, remember– anyone thirty or under is automatically “hot”), and her luggage is carried by a Chinaman named Mr. Lee. She establishes her credentials amongst the will o’ the wisp known as the “Youth Vote” by listing Vampire Weekend among her favorite artists, and The Big Lebowski among her favorite films.

This led Jonathan Chait of The New Republic

A main character in the film is Walter obchak, a gruff, lovable, hot-headed, moralistic foreign policy hawk who’s often confused about the facts and constantly invokes his experience in Vietnam. I wonder what she thinks when she watches it.

As if this weren’t enough, we also had to kill Rocky Balboa, the much-loved boxer who may or may not have had a speech impediment. “Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common,” said Sen. Hillary Clinton at a Philadelphia rally in early April, “I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people. So when I see Rocky in his warmups, I can’t help but see a pantsuit…not really. But will I ever hear the lines, “I had no prime, I had nothin’!” and not consider the implications?

Of course, this is the same “Rocky” played by Sylvester Stallone, the HGH-pumping actor who endorsed Sen. John McCain for the presidency, a man who wants to ban the substance. McCain is also supported by Heidi Montag, who apparently is a “star” on the “hit show” The Hills, featured on MTV, the same network that hosted a debate with Mike Huckabee, who was supported by Chuck Norris, whose legends of powress have clogged the Internet tubes.

It’s like Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon on crack, only a lot less fun.

It would be one thing if this were a one-way, East-bound highway from LA to DC. But increasingly, politics is becoming pop. Already, Washington is known as “Hollywood for ugly people.” The chief executive spends three innings shooting the shit about baseball with Joe Morgan. Politicians (or their aides) have their own Facebook and MySpace pages.

This back-and-forth results a serious intellectual failure: for many, especially those among our generation, politics is merely a stem on the Great VH1-MTV-TMZ Tree of Pop. Political preferences are not based in philosophical consideration, experience, or empirical studies; they are based solely on personal preference. They are “supporters” of political parties and members in so far as we are “supporters” of Law and Order or the Dave Matthews Band.

Expect only drawn-out demise from such a state of affairs. A citizenry that cannot distinguish between entertainment and politics will soon learn that all roads lead to Rome, a Rome where intellectuals mock Emperor Claudius’ death on the crapper while the principles of the Republic are flushed away.