Walter Rodgers: Class warfare? What about the ignorance gap?

Walter Rodgers, a former senior international correspondent for CNN, writes a biweekly column.

...The class clash should not distract us from another great cleavage – the ignorance gap. That’s the difference between the learned and unlearned: those willing to listen and consider and those who refuse to do either. Ultimately, it plays out in American politics and decisionmaking – with potentially grave consequences.

Americans may spend more time consuming news than they did a decade ago (this thanks to digital delivery), but are they ingesting any real understanding? Are they looking much beyond weather, traffic, and breaking news – or their own political stripe of reportage? Meanwhile, the next generation of leaders is growing up on bite-sized tweets and text messages.

The world is an ever more complicated and interconnected place, from the imbroglio in Afghanistan to the euro crisis. Yet during the midterm elections of 2010, exit polls showed that foreign issues were an election concern to only 8 percent of voters.

Closer to home, 54 percent of Americans say the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) of late 2008 did not help prevent a more severe economic crisis. The program, drawn up by the previous administration, tried to thaw frozen credit markets by giving loans to troubled financial institutions. Economists on the left and right agree it helped save the US from the abyss. More basically, millions of Americans believe Medicare is not a government program....