Those who do not know their history, can not avoid their future. Something about, doomed to repeat the same mistakes, over and over...
This is your point?
Yet, intelliegent people learn from their mistakes, which goes back to the subject of the column, no republic can survive an ignorant electorate...
It's not that they're ignorant--the electorate has always been ignorant.
The problem is not knowledge at all--never was.
The problem is Americans became too successful, the public got fat and happy and lazy and spoiled and decadent and soft and demoralized.
You could give them all the knowledge in the world and they will still make stupid decisions, because being fat and happy puts people out of touch with the reality of life and what is most important to us.
And stupid decisions will almost always result.
Hence, decline and fall.
To reason, one starts from a belief, even in the face of facts, and arrives at a conclusion consitant with having started from that particular belief.
So no matter what the facts are, belief will trump them anyway.
Take global climate change--where reason takes you regarding that, rests on whether you emotionally want to believe in global climate change--
And that belief has nothing to do with logic--it has everything to do with emotion.
A society and its members struggling to survive, will "reason" about an issue to a certain conclusion,--
While a fat and happy society will "reason" using the same set of facts to a different conclusion.