Flagrantly insane election denialism is now mandatory for the entire Republican party leadership

Ah the old “a conspiracy so satanic that all evidence of it is therefore hidden.”

I’m so old I remember when this line of reasoning was more likely to be found in late-night Lyndon Larouche TV commercials than all through the top layer of one of the country’s two major parties.

I don’t for a second believe that Johnson believes his own bullshit, but that’s hardly relevant now is it?

Let me be even more frank: I very much suspect that you, gentle reader, really have no idea how dumb dumb is.  Yet as electoral politics in this country and around the world get increasingly manipulated by people who dedicate their lives to swaying the marginal voters who decide our elections, the decisive votes come more and more often from the most ignorant and confused members of the polity.

Consider, in this increasingly grim context, that two-thirds of eligible American adults vote in presidential elections, but only 46% of adults in this country read at a sixth-grade level or above.

A century ago, the irascible H.L. Mencken was characteristically blunt about this subject. “No one in this world, so far as I know,” he wrote,  “has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”  Nor, he noted, “has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

“The mistake that is made always runs the other way.  Because the plain people are able to speak and understand, and even, in many cases, to read and write, it is assumed they have ideas in their heads, and an appetite for more.  This assumption is a folly.”

Now there remains today, for understandable psychological and ideological reasons, tremendous resistance to this kind of insight.  Democracy, after all, hinges to some considerable extent on the idea that the views and opinions of the average person should not only be taken into consideration, but should be the decisive factor in regard to great questions of public policy, such as, to choose an example at random, whether a thrice-bankrupt reality TV star who at this point in his life appears to have some difficulty reading his own name ought to be president of the United States of America.

An important caveat to all this is provided by a friend after reading this passage:

“There’s a much more hard-headed, practical approach to the idea of democracy. It jettisons asides notions of the wisdom of crowds, good governance, and the legitimacy of the voice of the people for a purely functional argument: that providing a legitimate way to dissolve one government and form another without bodies hitting the floor is so enormously advantageous it drowns out most other considerations.

One of the big problems that authoritarian modes of governance have is that if you decide you do not like your current government, your options are to suck it up, or to engage in extremely high-risk behaviors that are necessarily very violent or have the potential for great violence. Authoritarian power structures, both pre-modern and modern, have a tendency to collapse into succession crises, civil wars, purges, counter-purges, all kinds of shit. To the extent there have been stable authoritarian polities on a long time horizon (and there have been some) it has often hinged on the finding ways to incorporate managed dissent, giving people an outlet for their grievances that doesn’t necessitate them stabbing someone to death.

The kind of stability democratic transfers of power provide is such a big deal (we have hadone succession crisis in a quarter of a millennium that led to armies marching; this would have been considered shockingly utopian throughout all of human history) that it kind of drowns out the fact that people are fucking morons.”

That said, Mencken in this regard, was still, it’s fair to say, a veritable prophet:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

That the majority of people are terrible at thinking is the kind of fact that pious paeans to democracy must tactfully overlook or ignore.   Yet the idea that the beliefs and opinions of the average person should decide anything important is obviously insane if you think about it for ten seconds, which is why nobody does.

Now this claim is, obviously, elitist – and few charges are considered more damning in our age of populist fervor than that one.  And here again, the problem, metaphorically speaking at least, is the absence of a scoreboard.

Suppose I were to get into a free throw shooting contest with Steph Curry.  We each take twenty shots and he, predictably enough, makes all twenty (For the non-sportsball reader, Steph Curry is the greatest shooter in the history of the game of basketball).  I, on the other hand, make a total of five shots, while shooting three airballs, and having several other efforts clang off the back of the rim, or barely graze the front of it.

Now an elitist, I suppose, would conclude from this little experiment that Steph Curry is pretty conclusively just a whole lot better at shooting free throws than I am.  But it is now standard practice in the Free Republic of the American People to deny equally obvious gaps in ability, if they should involve the value of the opinions of the plain people on matters of statecraft and public policy.

Yes, Steph Curry shot 100% and I shot 25% in our little contest, but what makes Steph Curry think he’s “better” than me at shooting free throws?  It is well known that you can prove anything with statistics, and who made you a so-called expert anyway?

Cognitive egalitarianism is a terribly false idea, but it is an idea that is implied to some extent by the very concept of democracy.  And it may be that a great deal of the backlash to liberal and progressive thought in the 21^st century is a product of the cognitive overload to which a large segment of the voting public is being constantly subjected. 

The mental demands and intellectual complexities of the world in which we now live are in many ways overwhelming  them.  They are, not to put too fine a point on it, too dumb for the type of society that has come into existence.  These people on some level sense this, while resenting and denying that same sensation.  Increasingly, such people are being organized into a powerful populist electoral army by other people, who for their own reasons hate contemporary society, even though that society has created all of the financial and technological power they now enjoy.

Claims like those made by the Italian economist Carlo Cipolla, that the distribution of stupidity is similar in all subgroups of society – he goes so far as to claim that the probability of a person being stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person, such as for example being a Nobel prize winner – are a form of charitable sentimentality.  What is fair to say is that the stupidity that exists as one goes up the social hierarchy will be much more destructive than that found among the common people.  (See, for example, the ironic title of David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, which chronicles how sophisticated idiocies emanating from the Harvard faculty lounge and the c-suite of the Ford Motor Company exacerbated the disaster that was the Vietnam War).

What we need, it would seem, is a special group of people – you might call them a vanguard or a set of guardians – who handle the thinking side of things, because they’re both interested in thinking and good at it, just like we’re more than happy to have LeBron James and Carlos Alcaraz handle the basketball and tennis stuff. 

From The Triumph of Stupidity