Wednesday, July 05, 2006

The Price Of Being Popular

Author and columnist Christopher Hitchens (a Brit) offers his take on world opinion polls, such as those we discussed earlier this week:

Nonetheless, and despite the absurdity and hysteria of much of what is said and believed, we seem almost ready for a poll of Americans on what they think the rest of the world thinks of them in opinion polls, where the "finding" would be that most of those Americans polled think that most other people polled think they stink.

There are several possible responses to this.

One of them -- no doubt to be found in the presumed "red states" -- is to say "who gives a flying flip?" Another is not to surrender to impressionism, and to do some work of one's own.

Large numbers in India, for example (another multiethnic federal and secular democracy), report highly favorable views of the U.S.

A very important poll in Iran (where polling is illegal) found that a huge majority of Iranians considered better relations with America to be the single most urgent priority. One of those who conducted the survey was a former American embassy hostage-taker, who was jailed for publishing his findings. ...

Which goes to show that you can't please everybody.

It also goes to show that you probably shouldn't try. A country that attempted to be in everybody's good books would be quite paralyzed. The last time everybody said they liked the United States (or said that they said they liked the United States) was just after Sept. 11, when the nation was panicked and traumatized and trying to count its dead. Well, no thanks. This is too high a price to be paid for being popular.

Measurements of opinion are in any event static, and they assume passivity, and a consensus upon knowledge. If you had asked people in 2001 whether they thought it was likely that Afghans and Iraqis would be holding free elections in a couple of years (not that any polling group ever did even suggest such a question), I doubt you would have got a very good response. And how, in any case, could people have known enough to know what they were supposedly talking about?

Or, as another Brit once said: "There is no such thing as public opinion. There is only published opinion." (But at least it's fun for debate; I've enjoyed the exchanges here over the past few days.)

P.S.: More here on a previous assessment of world opinions toward America.


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