Political Meta-Cognition

Polls that indicate many Americans believe Obama to be a Muslim have the media agitated and self-critiquing, in a way that similar polls indicating larger numbers of Americans believed W Bush complicit in 9/11 never did.

Lapsed conservative, David Brooks, a-historically, sees contemporary culture as the problem:

...[contemporary] culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so... Issues like tax cuts and the size of government, which should be shaped by circumstances (often it’s good to cut taxes; sometimes it’s necessary to raise them), are now treated as inflexible tests of tribal purity.

To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit... Of the problems that afflict the country, this is the underlying one.

Strauss taught that there is a natural friction between philosophy (or "metacognition") and -- in particular, but not exclusively, democratic -- politics, ultimately symbolized by the political death of Socrates, the first philosopher. He was skeptical of liberalism on precisely this point: its faith in -- actually, its bet on -- the real possibility, or even the inevitability, of a rational, "enlightened", (democratic) politics. To his critics, this is evidence of his anti-democratic project.

On the other hand, there is no shortage of evidence -- these sorts of polls included -- of the correctness of Strauss' critique. Confronted like this, liberal commitment to democracy wavers:

Churchill said: 'The best argument against Democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.' That was England back in the 1940's. Tragically -in the USA of 2010 - that conversation would only need to be 30 seconds.....

Read carefully, Strauss provides an approach towards upholding democracy as it apparently is, and not as one may wish it would be.