At Cato Unbound, Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics, and I have continued our debate over the impact of political ignorance. Sean contends that it is a less serious problem than I sugggest in my book and my lead essay at Cato Unbound. Here are Sean’s latest post on the issue, and my rejoinder.
One point from the exchange worth mentioning is that, although I believe that there is a good deal of evidence indicating that political ignorance has caused great harm at various points in American history, scholars have only begun to systematically study its effects on past policy decisions. The well-known cases that we already know about (e.g. – the impact of ignorance in promoting racist and homophobic policies) could well turn out to be just the tip of a much larger iceberg. At the very least, there is room for a lot more research on the subject by historians, political scientists, legal scholars, and others.