Evil, corruption, stupidity

Here’s the Times’s summary of the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill:

The early morning vote was 215 to 214, mostly along party lines. The legislation would slash taxes, steer more money to the military and border security, and pay for some of this with cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education and clean energy programs, adding significantly to federal deficits and to the ranks of the uninsured.

Mostly along party lines is a pretty demure way of describing 100% Democratic opposition, with the exception of the dead reps who couldn’t vote because of their condition (whoops more ageism!).

I’ve been thinking about how the Trump era tends to confuse a lot of political realities, specifically:

The Republican party pre-Trump had horrible moral values, such as preferring tax cuts for rich people to funding food stamps and Medicaid. That hasn’t changed at all. This stuff goes in the category of mistaking evil for good.

The Republican party has because of Trump become extremely tolerant of certain things everyone, including its members, agree is wrong, such as Donald Trump taking bribes from foreign countries. This is different than the stuff in the first category because it’s not a disagreement about moral values: it’s just indifference to certain kinds of evil because it’s politically convenient to be indifferent if it gets you the food stamps slashing tax cuts for rich people. This is the corruption piece.

Then we have the stupidity piece, which is related to both the evil and the corruption in various ways. This piece is the valorization of stupidity via rampant anti-intellectualism generally, and religious fundamentalism and populist demagoguery in particular. Being stupid makes it easier to be evil and corrupt, because it makes it a lot easier to fail to recognize and/or care about the former.

Happy Thursday.