December 17, 1997
Last September, the National Constitution Center conducted a survey to determine just how much Americans know about our Constitution. The news wasn't good. It turned out that only 5 percent of Americans could correctly answer ten simple questions about the Constitution. For example, only 6 percent could name all four rights guaranteed by the First Amendment (freedom of speech, religion, press, and assembly). Almost one-quarter could not name a single First Amendment right. The survey uncovered some strange beliefs like: the Constitution was written in France, one of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment is “freedom from fear,” the first ten amendments to the Constitution are called the Pledge of Allegiance, and the Commander-in-Chief is Norman Schwarzkopf. Despite gross ignorance, 91 percent of Americans surveyed said the Constitution is important to them.
My question is, How can the Constitution be important to us while at the same time we're so ignorant of it? As a college undergraduate, I majored in social psychology before I discovered it was a vacuous science and switched my major to economics. Anyway, I retain enough social psychology knowledge to render an expert opinion on why Americans are ignorant about our Constitution. Simply put, it's the way we avoid cognitive dissonance. To maintain sanity, people try to have their beliefs, perceptions, and behavior logically consistent. When cognitive dissonance, or lack of consistency, arises, people unconsciously seek to restore consistency by changing their behavior, beliefs, or perceptions.
Suppose Americans were aware of the limitations the framers imposed on Congress through Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, permitting taxing and spending only for national defense, coinage of money, establishment of post offices, and a few other things? Suppose Americans knew the Tenth Amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
If Americans knew about these limitations, how could we possibly accept Congress's spending billions of taxpayer money on education, health care, or midnight basketball, when not even the words (education, health care, and basketball) appear in the Constitution, while at the same time profess love and respect for our Constitution? If we knew the letter and spirit of the Tenth Amendment, how could we support the growing consolidation of power in Washington? If Americans were constitutionally aware, we'd be a cognitive dissonance-suffering nation. Therefore, since we're not likely to change our behavior, we must maintain an ignorant or warped perception of the Constitution.
But let me stretch my social psychology expertise a notch further for my conspiracy-oriented friends. Suppose I was a tyrant seeking to control a constitutionally dedicated people, what might be my strategy? I'd know it's hard to teach an old dog new tricks, so I'd focus my energies on the young. I'd start out in elementary school teaching kids that the federal government's duty is to make sure income is distributed “fairly,” take care of the poor and aged, and do anything that a majority of Congress decides is good for us. To protect my strategy from scrutiny, I'd hide the Constitution from the kids and keep it hidden throughout high school and college. If some wise-cracking youngster raised a question about constitutional authority for this or that, I'd say, “It's covered under the ‘general welfare’ clause.”
My grandmother had it right when she said ignorance is bliss but she forgot to point out that it is also a way around cognitive dissonance. It took studies in psychobabble for me to discover that.