Polling Reveals Major Doublethink in America

George Orwell, in 1984, defined "double-think" as "[t]he power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them." I mean, he defined it in a lot more detail than that, but that's the typical canonical statement. Well, Kevin Drum brings up a recent Gallup poll that asked people whether they thought various different things would improve the quality of governance in this country. He's mostly interested in the fact that an overwhelming majority think having more businessmen in Congress would be an improvement. That's admittedly a somewhat disconcerting result (really, guys? 18% more people think having more businessmen in Congress would be an improvement than having more women? that's pathetic) but it's not the thing I find most interesting. Here's the chart summarizing the results:

Focus on the third and fifth entries. Apparently 63% of people think that we'd be better off with more people in Congress who will pursue compromise rather than sticking hard to their principles, and 56% think we'd be better off with more people in Congress who would stick hard to their principles rather than pursuing compromise. 30% and 38%, respectively, disagree. Eeeeexcept... uhhh... those numbers add up to 119%. That is to say, a minimum of 19% of the respondents in this poll said both that X was better than Y and that Y is better than X. ...yeah.

All of which is to say, this poll is yet another piece of evidence that people are just super unhappy about the state of the world right now, in general. They're not upset at anyone in particular; or rather, they're upset at everyone. So anything you present as an alternative to the status quo is going to sound good. (Note that every single one of these got a net positive response.) That's true, apparently, even if you present two completely contradictory alternatives! (Okay I suppose they're not necessarily 100% contradictory if there are some people who fall into neither of those categories; maybe what people just want is a higher concentration of extreme compromisers and extreme hardliners, with few people in the middle of that particular spectrum. But I'm not buyin' it.) I bet if they had stuck "men" in their poll as one of the things we might put more of in Congress, they'd have gotten a positive result for that, despite the fact that the "women" question is literally the inverse of that question. 63% of their respondents literally said something that is equivalent to thinking it would be a bad thing if we had more men in Congress, but I bet you that an awful lot of those people would have said the exact same opposite had they been prompted.

So don't take polls like this too seriously.