Ay me! I see the ruin of my house.
The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind;
Insulting tyranny begins to jut
Upon the innocent and aweless throne:
Welcome, destruction, death, and massacre!
I see, as in a map, the end of all.
— Richard III, Act II, Scene 4
The reader may, perhaps, recall the answer given by Caitlin Upton, Miss South Carolina Teen USA, at the Miss Teen USA 2007 pageant in Pasadena, California, to a question posed by judge Aimee Teegarden: “Recent polls have shown a fifth of Americans can’t locate the U.S. on a world map. Why do you think this is?” Her convoluted response, which immediately went viral, was that:
I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because, uh, some people out there in our nation don’t have maps and, uh, I believe that our, uh, education like such as, uh, South Africa and, uh, the Iraq and everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should, uh, our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S., uh, should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries, so we will be able to build up our future.
Given the opportunity to revisit her answer the following week, on the set of The Today Show, Upton fared rather better:
Well personally, my friends and I, we know exactly where the United States is on our map. I don’t know anyone else who doesn’t. And if the statistics are correct, I believe that there should be more emphasis on geography in our education so people will learn how to read maps better.
There was always something gratuitous about the mockery to which Miss South Carolina 2007 was subjected in the aftermath of her shaky performance in Pasadena. This was a beauty pageant, after all, not the Athenian agora, and we have all been tongue-tied at some point in our lives, and, in any event, we must admit that there is something legitimately baffling about the American populace’s apparent inability to read something as simple as a map. Caitlin Upton’s infamous answer came to mind when I ran across a recent statement concerning Ukraine uttered by Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a political figure who has been described by Debra J. Saunders in these pages as one who “validates the sneering class’s poor opinion of conservatives.” Last week, she declared that House Speaker Mike Johnson is “a Democrat … There’s not even any daylight between him and Nancy Pelosi at this point,” as she threatens to seek his ouster and throw the republic into further paralytic disarray, antics that have prompted New York Rep. Mike Lawler to bemoan the “idiocy and the chaos that is totally unnecessary and does nothing to actually solve the problem.” (RELATED: Who Put Marjorie Taylor Greene in Charge?)
Addressing the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, Greene claimed that “our government is at the same time funding a war that most people do not support in a country that no one can find on a map, hardly.” Greene is no more a modern incarnation of Demosthenes than was Miss South Carolina in 2007, but we should still consider her words carefully. To begin with, the phrase “funding a war that most people do not support” is a curious one. People of good conscience do not “support” the war, insofar as they would very much like it to end with an immediate Russian withdrawal from Ukraine’s sovereign territory, with the cessation of Iranian Shahed drone, hypersonic missile, and glide bomb strikes against Ukrainian apartment blocks, kindergartens, and thermal power plants, and with an end to Russian depredations including cultural genocide, ecocide, and the mass rape of women, children, and men (including Ukrainian Orthodox priests). What they “support” is Ukrainians’ right to self-defense and national survival. Now there are some in our country who genuinely do support Vladimir Putin’s war, as was evident at the 2022 America First Political Action Conference in Orlando, held the day after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when organizer Nicholas Fuentes complained, “They’re going on about Russia and Vladimir Putin is Hitler — they say that’s not a good thing,” and asked the audience to “give a round of applause for Russia,” with ensuing chants of “Putin, Putin, Putin,” all before Marjorie Taylor Greene proceeded to take the stage.
It is safe to assume that what Greene really meant during her podcast interview was that “most people” — presumably most Americans — do not support Ukraine in its war against Russia or do not support further funding for Ukraine’s struggle for survival. This is demonstrably false, as recent polls make clear. While it is true that support for Ukraine has dropped since 2022 on the neo-isolationist right, we still see, in an AP-NORC poll conducted Feb. 22–26, 2024, that 60 percent of respondents agreed that United States spending on Ukraine is “too little” or “about right,” while 76 percent felt that stopping Russia from gaining more territory in Ukraine is “extremely/very important” or “somewhat important.” (READ MORE: An ‘October Surprise’ From ‘New’ Ukraine Is Possible)
Similar numbers supported providing military aid, and 63 percent remained in favor of economic sanctions against Russia. Unfavorable opinions of Putin were still high — 79 percent — although some 14 percent of Republicans gave him a favorable marks, and 28 percent of Republicans “strongly/somewhat oppose” the United States “deploying U.S. troops to defend a U.S. NATO ally if it were attacked by Russian forces.” Another survey, conducted around the same time by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Ipsos, found that majorities of Democrats (75 percent) and independents (54 percent) still favored providing military assistance to Ukraine, although the Republican number had dropped from 80 percent in March 2022 to 45 percent in February 2024. Nevertheless, it is hard to fathom how that those results could be characterized as “most people” having abandoned the Ukrainian cause.
Greene’s second claim, that Ukraine is “a country that no one can find on a map, hardly,” is likewise worth considering. Are Americans really unable to locate Ukraine, the second-largest country in Europe (if we must include Russia as a European country), 233,062 mi² in size, with a population of 40 million and an international diaspora of some 20 million, a country not infrequently in the news these days? Surely Americans generally possess some basic knowledge about Ukraine and its geographical and geopolitical situation. Yet here we must reluctantly admit that Greene may have the facts on her side. In late March 2014, in the aftermath of Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, political scientists Kyle Dropp, Joshua Kertzer, and Thomas Zeitzoff conducted a survey, fielded via Survey Sampling International Inc., that, among other things, asked Americans to locate Ukraine on the globe. Only 16 percent were on the mark, and the median respondent was a staggering 1,800 miles away, with a significant number of those surveyed mistaking Ukraine for Kazakhstan, and with others picking locales including Australia, the Falkland Islands, the American Midwest, Alaska, a surprising number in Greenland, and a few lonely dots even placed floating in the Bay of Bengal. The open-ended poll was designed to measure Americans’ knowledge of world affairs, given that, as the authors deadpanned, “[p]eople who believe Ukraine is in Eastern Europe clearly are more informed than those who believe it is in Brazil or in the Indian Ocean.” The results were not encouraging, though it is conceivable that the renewed Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 may have led at least a few more of our fellow citizens to try and figure out precisely where this mysterious nation of Ukraine might lie.
According to Miss South Carolina 2007, “some people out there in our nation don’t have maps,” but that doesn’t completely explain our predicament; the vast majority of Americans do have ready access to Google Maps or Wikipedia on their smartphones and computers, and two-thirds of Americans live within two miles of a library, which are full of atlases and other useful resources, but all the same, it appears that a vast swathe of the populace has little to no idea what the world looks like on the most basic level. One may question whether the 2014 survey was methodologically sound, as it is difficult to believe that there are so many Americans who think Ukraine is in central Africa or adrift in the Barents Sea north of Novaya Zemlya. Respondents may, for one reason or another, have been answering completely at random or fooling around. Dropp, Kertzer, and Zeitzoff’s survey may not be perfectly accurate, but there is no doubt that many Americans cannot identify the location of one of the world’s most prominent military, diplomatic, and economic hotspots.
It is not as if Ukraine is a unique lacuna in the average American’s mental map of the globe. Other studies in recent years have demonstrated that only 36 percent of American adults can find North Korea on a map, that only 34 percent of registered voters can find Taiwan on a map, that only 28 percent of registered voters can find Iran on a zoomed-in map of the Middle East, and that only 31 percent of respondents aged 18–26 can find Israel on a map. One expects these numbers to decline further. A GAO report from back in 2015 found that “only 17 states required a geography course in middle school,” that three-quarters of eighth-grade students lacked proficiency in geography, and that “half of all eighth-grade students in 2014 reported learning about geography ‘a few times a year’ or ‘hardly ever,’” and the intervening decade of societal decay cannot have improved matters much.
Whether any of this is surprising depends on one’s conception of the overall American intellectual landscape. Bear in mind that if we pierce the veil of supposed mass literacy, we find, as the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies survey of American literacy did in 2013, that that only 2 percent of the population can “integrate information across multiple dense texts; construct syntheses, ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence-based arguments,” while 10 percent can “perform multiple-step operations to integrate, interpret or synthesize information from complex texts, which may require complex inferences.” Those possessing intermediate-level literacy, some 36 percent of the populace, can “interpret or evaluate one or more pieces of information that require inference,” and those possessing basic literacy, some 34 percent, can only “find information that may require low-level paraphrasing and drawing low-level inferences.” The remaining 18 percent were limited either to being able to “read relatively short digital, print or mixed copy to locate a single piece of information” or managing to “locate a single piece of information in familiar copy.” It should not be terribly unexpected, then, that out of a random sampling of 2,066 Americans, only one in six would be able to pinpoint a distant country on a blank map.
That the majority of Americans are incapable of detecting Ukraine, Israel, or Taiwan on an unlabeled map is not, however, an argument for allowing Russia to pursue a genocidal campaign against its neighbor, withdrawing support for Israel’s existential fight against Iranian-backed Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations, or permitting Red China to threaten or conquer its democratic counterpart across the Taiwan Strait. Rather, the lack of geopolitical savvy on the part of what H.L. Mencken called the “great masses of the plain people” is really just an argument for a republican form of representative democracy.
Neo-isolationism has evidently taken root among a certain section of Republican voters, but the pursuit of autarky, energy independence, revitalized domestic manufacturing, and a secure border should not be confused with a precipitous and destabilizing abdication of America’s post-war role as the sole guarantor of international peace and stability. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, confidently described “a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence,” who would interact with the world “as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.” There are elements on both the political right and left that would sooner see America sink giggling into the sea than pursue its interests abroad. That this would give carte blanche to the worst actors in the world and would result in the most horrific injustices imaginable being heaped upon innocent, freedom-loving, formerly trusting allies is apparently of no account.
On Sept. 27, 1938, the arch-appeaser Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain notoriously referred to Nazi Germany’s designs on Czechoslovakia as nothing more than “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing.” American anti-war protestors paraded in 1941 with signs bearing slogans like: “Hitler Has Not Attacked Us. Why Attack Hitler?”; “Why Not Peace With Hitler?”; “Europe for Europeans, America for Americans”; “I Did Not Raise My Boy to Die for Great Britain”; and “Save Our Sons, No Convoys, No War, No Death for American Boys, Join America First Committee, Help Us in Our Fight.” We all know how that turned out, and how those ignorant attitudes would be viewed by posterity. Should the United States now willfully abdicate its profound international responsibilities on the basis that some of its citizens are unable to read a map, or that other countries are far away — “Who cares?” — or that Congress is perennially beset by idiocy and chaos, the consequences cannot be anything but catastrophic.