I've never trusted opinion polls and never ascribed much significance to them as a policy-influencing factor. Mind you, in the 1970’s, I was professionally involved in the task force on American public opinion and its polling, at my Institute for USA and Canada Studies in Moscow, where I was in a good position to learn how such polls work, and what their advantages and shortcomings are. The main thing I learned then, was that public opinion polls mostly serve not to reflect public opinion, but to shape it and to infuse it with artificial issues, over which the public is either divided or of demonstrably the same mind. This is done by carefully selecting the issues for polling, and by the specific ways in which the questions are asked, which in Perry Mason’s lingo is called “leading the witness.”
It is hard, of course, for the whole national society to be of the same mind about pretty much anything, and therefore, had national public opinion polls been allowed to be taken indiscriminately, they would have been quite disruptive to the conduct of state policy, and for this reason alone they cannot be allowed. What, then, is allowed is an illusion of a comprehensive national debate, where ‘safe’ issues have been carefully chosen and worded, so that the debate as such would not spill into such areas where established state policies allow no contradiction, for national security reasons, and must be protected from the perils of democracy.
The ‘state department’ responsible for forming and controlling public opinion in controlled societies can be called Agitprop, after the actual word used in the USSR during the Soviet era. The principal role of agitation and propaganda in all closed societies is not just to indoctrinate the public, but to make it crystal clear which stated positions on all matters of government policy are desirable as a reflection of the "collective will" of the people, and which ones (the opposites of, or deviations from, the acceptable ones) may put such individuals who espouse them on a collision course with the armored train of the “national will.”
Under such circumstances, it is quite understandable that all “public opinion polls,” or referenda, if you like, conducted in totalitarian or otherwise controlled societies, are designed not to inquire the public about what it really-really thinks, but merely to demonstrate a high level of national unity, by allowing the public to give an overwhelming endorsement of all such issues that are counted as matters of importance to the conduct of national policy.
Needless to say, in modern post-Soviet and post-Yeltsin Russia (we can call it “Putin’s Russia” for the time being) there is a well-established practice of returning to the principles of controlled society, while trying to appear “free society-like” to the West. Therefore the practice of national polling is designed to resemble the national polls conducted in the free nations of the West. Predictably, such “quasi-Western” polls are no less hypocritical than their Western counterparts, and many of their topics have a distinctive feel of being man-made, as if primarily intended for Western consumption. On the other hand, the real public feelings on such matters that reveal totalitarian and anti-American tendencies in Russian society are probably intentionally underpolled and underreported.
It’s time for us now to take a look at some specifics of American free-society public opinion polling, so that we could better understand how it functions, and why.
It would be ridiculous to deny the validity of our general argument of the first two paragraphs of the present entry regarding any government’s (both in closed and free societies) concerns about public opinion running amok and interfering with matters of state policy and national security. Besides, it is easy to see that as long as such a thing as official secrets exists (which means until the end of time), the public will remain basically uninformed, or most often underinformed, which is even worse, about effectively the whole list of domestic and foreign policy issues, and it is both unwise and clearly dangerous to ask the uninformed about what they think about any issue on which they are uninformed or underinformed.
Thus, ironically, the public opinion policy of controlled societies (whose citizens are well aware of the fact that they are being controlled) is in some sense more honest than the public opinion policy of free societies, where the majority of citizens are unaware of the similar fact. It is therefore mostly in free societies, where public opinion polling resorts to particularly intricate methods of manipulation and outright deception. The public debate is being infused with artificial, politically inconsequential issues, passed off as the issues of utmost public importance (such as, say, same-sex marriage, legalization of marijuana, and such, in America of the new millennium), while the issues of the truly greatest importance (such as all issues of war and peace!) are often downplayed, misrepresented, and otherwise disallowed from entering the area of legitimate and informed public debate.
What would be the rule of thumb, if such exists, in approaching these issues? Look at how the Democrats and the Republicans vote, how they argue, and once you see a disagreement between them, you can safely bet that such disagreements would be among the most active issues of public debate and public polling. But wherever the two major parties stand united in the proverbially bipartisan fashion, with each party trying to outdo the other in its own enthusiasm for the issue in point, the eagerness of the pollsters to conduct a poll of this nature may not be as forthcoming as in the other, safer cases. Some outrageous examples of this are in abundance. During the August 2008 war in the Caucasus, initiated by the reckless and despotic President of Georgia Mikheil Saakashvili against the South Ossetian autonomy, which he was planning to subdue in the same manner that he had subdued the Adjarian autonomy in 2004, but met a stubborn resistance, and had to retreat after the Russians came to the rescue of the massacred Ossetians, there was a blanket condemnation issued by America and the West, in support of the rabidly anti-Russian and self-servingly pro-American ex-Communist Georgian dictator, and no polls of dissenting public opinion were taken in America. Granted, had such poll been taken, most probably it would overwhelmingly have reflected the dire state of public misinformation on this issue, rather than a “fair and balanced judgment” which at that time was non-existent. (Afterword: four years have passed since then, and history has been somewhat sorted out as to who was the aggressor in that war, with the finger pointing at Mikheil Saakashvili. Yet, the American public seems to be unaware that there had been a rush to judgment back then in August 2008, no polls to that account taken, and no lessons learned.)
Another example comes now from the American domestic political scene. It is the ostensibly turbulent issue of healthcare, the cornerstone of President Obama’s domestic policy. There was and still is a sharp division on this issue between the defenders of “Obamacare” and its detractors, with countless public polls taken. But philosophically there is practically no difference between the Obamacare and its pseudo-alternative. Both endorse medicine-for-profit; both exclude the basic moral principle of free healthcare from consideration. Thus the Obamacare debate is in fact a shallow, grotesquely politicized debate that never even touches the core issue here, and no public opinion polling numbers can change the fact that no genuine debate on the future of healthcare in America is really taking place in this country.
Returning to the general issues of public opinion polling, it is important to understand that I am not advocating a drastic change in the existing practices. On the contrary, I do not see how the existing practices can be reasonably changed. After all, general public is like a large animal, which needs to be tethered, to avoid havoc in the household. But there is one comment that I am trying to make in this entry: it is about the hypocrisy of the whole thing, and I stand by it.
Finally, lest the reader assumes that I am an advocate of controlled society and a detractor of free society, it is not so. In fact, I still much prefer many aspects of free society over the parallel aspects of closed society. After all, didn’t Winston Churchill say (arguably and possibly spuriously, but se non è vero, è ben trovato!) something about “democracy being the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried”?
But, on the other hand, I know hypocrisy when I see it…
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