A year ago, 27 percent of those
polled nationwide said they agreed with the
Tea Party, and 22
percent said they disagreed. Last month, according to the Pew
Research Center for the People & the Press, it was the reverse:
27 percent said they disagreed with the Tea Party, and 20
percent agreed.
Actually, that’s not such a big deal, is it? A 5 to 7
percentage point swing over a year: Is this the stuff of
counterrevolutions? If the
Tea Party folks wish to feel a bit
paranoid about the publicity this
poll got, when it was released
this week, they have some justification. It’s not that the news
media is biased against the Tea Party. We love the Tea Party;
it’s been good to us. However, we are biased in favor of change.
The story must evolve, even if that means moving backward and
repeating itself. Having built the Tea Party up, it is now our
job to knock it down a peg or two. Occupiers, don’t gloat.
You’re next.
In fact, what’s most impressive about these polls is that
both a year ago and now more than half the population declined
to express an opinion. They said they neither agreed nor
disagreed with the Tea Party. As it happens, that is the right
answer. No one could possibly have known whether he or she
agreed with the Tea Party a year ago, and it’s not a lot easier
now, because the Tea Party’s philosophy is largely unformed,
except for a general sort of self-righteous bitterness about
having a government.
The decline in the Tea Party’s popularity -- to the extent
that it isn’t an invention of the news media, just as the
explosive growth of the Tea Party was -- is caused by outbreaks
of specificity among Tea Party leaders. As soon as they get
specific, they invite opposition, because the numbers have to
add up and they can’t.
Courage to Refuse I salute anyone who says “don’t know” to a pollster. The
best thing, of course, would be if every citizen took the time
to develop an informed opinion on the issues of the day. But the
second-best arrangement would be a population with the courage
to refuse to express opinions on subjects they don’t know enough
about. Or on subjects, such as the Tea Party, about which no
thumbs-up-or-down answer is really possible.
The people I wonder about are the 5 percent or so who
changed their minds about the Tea Party over the past year. On
what basis did they reach the conclusion that the Tea Party was
not their bag? Did they spend the year studying Tea Party
manifestos, and then calculate the extent to which their own
views aligned with the Tea Party’s? Or did they just happen to
wake up feeling grumpier than they had felt the day the
pollsters called a year ago?
This is why I don’t write columns about the merits of
nuclear power or the future of the euro. Even though, like every
columnist, I get paid for pretending to be omniscient, and am
even given paid time to educate myself on topics I may be
ignorant about, I give myself a few free passes. Otherwise, I
might go mad with knowledge and find myself expelled from the
garden, like Adam.
Unfortunately (at least for me and my colleagues), the
pseudo-omniscient columnist is slowly being driven out of
business by “crowd-sourcing.” An answer about the euro or
nuclear power will emerge from the general conversation on the
Web -- blogs, comments, Facebook, Twitter, Economist articles
you used to read back when you had to pay for them, and so on.
This method is at least as likely to get the answer right as a
lone columnist pretending to know everything. In his classic
“
Public Opinion,” published in 1922, Walter Lippmann argued that
technology was getting too complicated for most people to
understand, and that experts were needed to make pivotal
decisions. These days, the decisions are too complicated for the
experts, but crowd-sourcing may come to the rescue.
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