Barack Obama on being politically "woke"

President Obama spoke at his Obama Foundation Summit about how young people are trying to be too politically pious…

“This idea of purity and you’re never comprised and you’re always politically woke. You should get over that quickly. The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws...

[For example], if I tweet or hashtag about how you didn't do something right or used the wrong verb then I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself. You see how woke I was! I called you out! Let me get on TV and watch my show. That's not activism. That's not bringing about change.”

I don’t agree with Obama on much, but he’s 100% correct.

It’s disturbing a former president even needs to spend his time saying such trivial things. It’s like if Stephen Hawking had to spend his time explaining how the Earth rotates around the Sun.

It would say more about the ignorance of the listener than the intelligence of the speaker.

Unfortunately, too many people view politics like they do a superhero movie.

(Although as our politics become more fake it seems our superhero movies are becoming more real.)

But our political system is much more complicated than that. So many people overestimate their own knowledge because they don’t know what they don’t know.

And the reason why they don’t know what they don’t know is because they think the mainstream media is all that is “fit to print” and so assume that after watching a few hours of CNN or FoxNews that they now have a good handle of current events, but that’s like sitting in the ER and then excusing the doctor because you feel like you can take it from here, doc.

Here is a quick way to actually gauge how much you know:

What are the 3 branches of government?
Can you name 10 U.S. Presidents?
For every 10 pieces of content (articles, videos, books) that you agree with, how many pieces of content do you read or watch that you disagree with? Even the politically knowledgable should seek at least a 10 to 1 ratio [don’t just follow the people you agree with] because it’s easy to fall into the mental trap that “the other is stupid, racist, evil.”
Roughly how many non-fiction books have you read in the last 3 years? You can’t replace long-form with soundbites.
And then the better you are able to predict the future, the better your grasp of current events are. How often do you accurately predict future events?
These are 5 straight-forward questions that based on your answers would help me gauge your level of political expertise.

Most people don’t know much…

NEWSWEEK gave 1000 Americans the U.S. Citizenship Test--38 percent failed.

A survey by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni found that “more Americans could identify Michael Jackson as the composer of ‘Beat It’ and ‘Billie Jean’ than could identify the Bill of Rights as a body of amendments to the U.S. Constitution.”

And so it is the ignorance of the many that is the true cause to our broken political system.

Simple minds like simple answers.

But the fact is that in a functional democracy there cannot be simple answers.

America is split 50/50.

This means for our democracy to truly be a democracy the government should produce compromise solutions that no one loves, but enough like.

But instead, we get people on the far-left or far-right who are so ideologically driven that they want 100% of their version of their side or else they will protest and vote NO on whatever is being proposed no matter how many concessions and compromises are in the bill.

This is why little gets done.

Nowadays a political candidate has a much better chance at winning reelection if they have a long record of doing nothing due to their ideological purity than to have a long record of legislative deal-making that actually gets things done to benefit the day-to-day lives of the average person.

As long as being pure is more popular than being pragmatic then expect little to get done.

And the longer little gets done the more likely people’s impatience will give way to supporting a political tyrant who can do all the thinking for them.