I would just ask you, how (in what arena, in what setting) are these ideas weighed, and then based upon whatever weighing you or I might imagine goes on, decided upon?
ARE these ideas weighed? DO THEY GET weighed?
And my take is that ideas are very simply not weighed at all. They are instead welded to sources of polarizing energy to an extent that seriously discourages any sort of thinking. There is nobody out there telling you to “think for yourself”. People either do that, all on their own, having decided they arrive at better or more valid decisions using that kind of methodology...or they don’t. For every person who believes that “thinking for themselves” produces a better outcome, even if their conclusion produces some degree of pain or unpleasantness, there are probably three people who are so freaking concerned about what other people think of them that they only wish to think and feel and believe exactly how that mass of opinion dictates. They think they are out of it if they think Kim Kardashian is a fat-assed zero. They think they are out of it if they think Joe Biden says stupid things. They think they are racist if they don’t like something that 0bama comes out with *and they will work on their own attitude* and hammer it into shape until they can come up with some means of agreeing with what 0bama does because being a racist is the worst thing imaginable and anyone who does not like 0bama is automatically a racist.
This is the sheer genius and the present-day fruition of Alinsky and his ideas.
You and I think about “voter ID” and can’t even imagine how anyone could object to it. Never mind what we, you and I as individuals, might have running around in our individual heads in terms of history and how this race went and that race went. What is the big smelly deal about showing ID? I have to do it when buying a beer or cashing a check or buying an airline ticket or any one of a dozen other things. But the other side has taken this proposition of “voter ID” and SUCCESSFULLY invoked SLAVERY! and POLL TAX! and JIM CROW! and BURNING CROSSES! and FIREHOSES BLASTING BLACK FOLKS OFF THE SIDEWALK! And these images have been purposefully and diabolically invoked, over and over and over and what is the result? There isn’t any thinking going on, the welds have been made.
I think you're on to something there, about the decreasing percentages of Americans capable of thinking for themselves. (FR defies this trend.)
There are a few major reasons for this lack of capacity to think for oneself among the American population and the increasing decadence of the society and the body politic.
As kind of foreseen by Murray and Herrnstein in The Bell Curve, the population's average IQ is on a downtrend, because the dumber parents are having the most children (statistically) and because the newer immigrants as whole are statistically not as intelligent as the more established Americans. Then you have the decadence of education, especially in public schools, which is not as aimed at developing thinking processes as it once was. Add that to influences from the media and pop culture and you reap a witch's brew, generations each less equipped to think (with exceptions, of course) than the preceding one.
But it's largely about how youngsters are raised growing up. If they are exposed to good parenting and beneficent influences, rather that leftist propaganda, chances are they will not become mind-numbed leftist robots, and the more that happens, the better off the society will be.