Fools or Tools: America’s Recurrent Failure to Think Critically at the Ballot Box

Feb 26, 2025

Americans really have little to fear from AI’s rumored capacity to cauterize critical thinking. If critical thinking means making the best decision based on available evidence rather than on emotions, history reveals a serious weakness already in our national critical thinking profile. We have little critical thinking to lose to AI.

Academic definitions equate critical thinking with Aristotelian logic and syllogistic reasoning, focusing on persuasive arguments rather than effective decision-making. There’s nothing wrong with Aristotelian logic—a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time—but it’s not in-the-pocket critical thinking.

Critical thinking’s purpose isn't winning debates or gaining approval—it's facing reality, weighing limited options, and choosing the best course of action under challenging circumstances. Whether others agree is irrelevant; what matters is making the necessary decision with the information at hand..

American politicians have relied on and abused the support of working voters since the founding, made possible by a typically American unwillingness to think critically about self-government. Time and again Americans choose to elect politicians who want only to build power and wealth for themselves and their allies. It’s a feature, not a bug, of American education and politics—to produce sheep.

Here are five clear examples from across U.S. history that illustrate the theme: Critical thinking is unAmerican.

Tammany Hall and Boss Tweed

In the shadow of Tammany Hall, New York's 19th-century political machine perfected the art of circumventing critical thought. Boss Tweed didn't just corrupt government; he corrupted decision-making itself.

The machine's currency was straightforward: jobs for loyalty, favors for votes, cash for compliance. What made this system so insidious wasn't so much its corruption but its recasting of democracy. Citizens weren't individuals with minds to engage but votes to be bought and paid for—political commodities whose value existed in their aggregate.

Particularly among immigrant communities, where immediate needs often overwhelmed long-term considerations, this transactional approach proved effective. Why deliberate over complex municipal policy when a ward heeler stands ready with a job offer?

The machine's magic lay in recognizing a brutal truth: critical thinking is a luxury when basic survival is uncertain. By positioning themselves as immediate problem-solvers, Tweed and his lieutenants exploited hardship and made independent thought—information access, freedom from coercion, opportunity for reflection—unthinkable.

Democracy requires citizens capable of weighing evidence, of seeing beyond immediate gain toward collective consequence. The political bosses understood this requirement all too well—and systematically dismantled it, one favor at a time.

Andrew Jackson’s Spoils System

"To the victor belong the spoils." With this battle cry, Andrew Jackson transformed American democracy into a marketplace where votes purchased positions and loyalty trumped competence.

Jackson's men wanted a revolution—not of ideas, but of personnel. While claiming to champion the common man, they institutionalized a system where critical thought dissolved to partisan fervor. Government positions—nearly 10,000 of them—weren't rewards for skill but payments for political devotion.

The machinery was efficient. Local party bosses delivered votes; Jackson delivered customs houses, post offices, and diplomatic posts. The transaction complete, governance itself became secondary.

Martin Van Buren, Jackson's political architect, understood that binding personal interest to party loyalty created a self-perpetuating machine that rendered critical thinking not just unnecessary but dangerous. To question was to risk exclusion from the patronage pipeline.

When Senator William Marcy proudly declared, "We practice what we preach," he revealed the system's true cynicism. Democracy had nothing to do with collective wisdom but collective spoils—a game where participation meant accepting rules designed to bypass judgment entirely.

The legacy? A political culture where loyalty outranked competence—and where citizens became not arbiters of good governance but cogs in a machine Jackson himself had built.

Nixon’s Inner Circle During Watergate

The men in the Roosevelt Room weren't idealists—they were mechanics of manipulation. Nixon's crew—Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell, Colson—didn't waste time on democratic niceties. They saw voters as statistics to be managed, not citizens to be engaged.

These weren't misguided patriots; they were operators who'd calculated exactly how much the public would tolerate. Their internal memos and later the White House tapes revealed a fundamental contempt for critical thinking. They spoke of "opinion control" and "message discipline" with the cold precision of market analysts.

Their playbook was ruthless and pragmatic. Why engage with complexity when you could bypass reasoned analysis and trigger emotional responses? Their approach to governance wasn't accidentally manipulative—it was deliberately designed to short-circuit independent thought.

The Watergate cover-up demonstrated this machinery in action. Ziegler's practiced non-answers. The calculated leaks painting critics as partisan attackers. The deliberate obfuscation labeled as "national security." Each move calculated not to inform but to manage.

When the evidence finally surfaced, what shocked Americans wasn't the crimes—it was seeing the cynicism with which they had been regarded. The tapes exposed men who viewed public opinion not as the voice of democracy but as an obstacle to be engineered around.

Nixon fell not because Americans suddenly became critical thinkers, but because the evidence of their manipulation became too blatant to ignore. The system these men built—designed specifically to circumvent independent judgment—eventually collapsed under the weight of its own contempt for the very citizens it claimed to serve.

Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” Comment

When Hillary Clinton uttered the phrase "basket of deplorables," she pulled back the curtain on American politics' most carefully maintained pretense. What cost her politically wasn't a tactical error but a momentary lapse into unvarnished elite perspective.

Behind closed doors, political strategists across party lines operate from a similar premise: large segments of the electorate aren't citizens to be reasoned with but voting blocs to trigger with simplified messaging. Clinton's sin wasn't creating this framework—it was acknowledging it publicly.

The true revelation wasn't about Trump supporters, but about the view of democracy shared across Washington's power centers. Campaign war rooms don't focus on nurturing critical thought; they segment voters into psychological profiles to be manipulated.

This bipartisan machinery depends on public unawareness of its own mechanics. Clinton momentarily violated this code of silence, exposing the cynical calculus at democracy's heart: citizens valued not for their capacity to think critically but for their predictable responses to carefully engineered stimuli.

The electoral punishment she received wasn't for the sentiment itself—which differs little from what strategists in both parties acknowledge on CNN and FOX—but for speaking aloud the uncomfortable truth that campaigning is built on a contempt for critical thinking. A system designed to bypass judgment can't survive when its architects admit that's precisely what they're doing.

Karl Rove’s Campaign Strategies

Karl Rove revolutionized political messaging by reversing critical thinking from asset to liability. As George W. Bush's chief strategist, he methodically engineered campaigns that rewarded emotional reaction and punished deliberation. "You don't win by debating policy details," Rove remarked to colleagues.

Rove didn’t believe in making a case through evidence. The famous "Swift Boat" campaign against John Kerry didn't aim to spark thoughtful consideration—it targeted emotions that bypassed critical analysis entirely.

Rove's special power lay in recognizing that elections aren't won by those who foster fresh thinking but by those who most effectively channel voter’s existing beliefs. His approach treated voter psychology as something to be exploited rather than engaged—simplifying complex issues into binary moral choices that required no intellectual heavy lifting.

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Since Bloom’s Taxonomy in 1956, the aspiration to teach higher-order thinking skills in public schools has been given voice in one way or another almost as the foundation of civic and economic engagement. Yet the algorithmic art of persuasion as it is taught in school—asserting a claim, marshaling evidence, providing rationales—isn’t anything like the political reality.

From Tammany Hall's patronage to modern data-driven microtargeting, the machinery of politics consistently treats voters as instruments rather than agents. The promise of representation masks the reality of manipulation.

The cruel irony persists: those most effectively used as political tools are often those most convinced of their independent judgment. Real democratic power requires recognizing these mechanisms of influence—questioning whether one’s strongest political emotions serve one’s actual interests or simply advance someone else's agenda.

When emotion overwhelms analysis, when grievance replaces judgment, the critical question remains unasked: Am I participating in democracy or merely performing as a fool or a tool in someone else's power play?

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