America without adult supervision

When the topic is the message

Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message”. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say, “The topic is the message”. If you know what people are talking about, then you know what they believe. I’ve recently noticed an enormous surge of interest in stupidity. What is that telling us?

James Patterson recently interviewed Mark Lilla. Here Lilla discusses the thesis of his new book entitled Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know:

Mark Lilla:

I try to suggest in the book that the struggle between wanting to know, curiosity, and wanting not to know, which is a resistance to knowledge, that those two forces are present in our minds all the time. And we go through life on the one hand, pushing on the accelerator, on the other pushing on the brake. And there are some good reasons for that that seem to be embedded just in the nature of human life and social life.

But there are also ways in which it becomes pathological and it becomes pathological if we are resisting knowledge that’s important to know to make public decisions, for example. And it also can be threatening if it leads us to entertain various fantasies of finding an alternative to reason and also the fantasy of going back to an older utopia or a forward utopia rather than to confront the present. So it begins with us and it begins with our struggle over recognizing what we ourselves as individuals are.

James M. Patterson:

On page 14 of the book, you have a great typology of these sorts of figures. You say that one such illusion is a secret, esoteric way of being in the world that gives access to previous truths. Another is the vain hope of preserving our original innocence. And a third is the scape of the historical present to an imagined past bucolic simplicity.

Lilla is a very thoughtful intellectual, and I’ve no doubt that his book on ignorance is full of wisdom. But I’m more interested in another question—why the sudden interest in ignorance? Why is this a hot topic?

Here’s another very recent example from Cyril Hédoin:

I've been exploring in this newsletter recently how people's growing inability to understand and control the institutions that shape their lives affects their political views (see here or here for instance). Two phenomena concur to produce this state of affairs. First, the social world is increasingly complex. Economies are more interconnected than ever, so much so that an American president can credibly threaten to shut down the entire economy of a neighboring country. Modern technologies have increased the speed and the amount of information that can travel from one end of the world to the other. However, information is not knowledge. Rather than empowering individuals, it can create confusion, deception, and either epistemic nihilism or naive credulity. As military threats and public good problems increase in scope, the world becomes smaller and all its parts highly interconnected. As the geopolitics specialist Robert D. Kaplan noted in a recent book, the world increasingly looks like a “global Weimar” with all the uncertainty and instability that characterized the interwar German republic.

The topic shows up in all sorts of forms, with increasing frequency. There’s an interest in who reads and who doesn’t read:

Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.

Poll results are analyzed from a sort of “stupidity perspective”. Here’s a comment by David Broockman, who is interviewed by Jerusalum Demsas in The Atlantic:

And the anecdote they told us is that in focus groups, people will say, Yeah. Housing sounds good. We probably need more of that. And then at some point, someone will bring up, Yeah. But housing’s built by developers. And then supposedly, people in the focus group say, Oh, yeah. Maybe it’s not such a good idea if developers are going to get involved.

And so we are able to replicate that anecdote experimentally, where we do this very subtle manipulation where we ask people: Would you support or oppose allowing new apartment buildings to be built in your neighborhood, or would you support or oppose allowing developers to build new apartment buildings in your neighborhood? So same question. We’re just either using the passive voice or making clear, yeah, developers build apartments. And the people who don’t like developers, when we remind them developers build new housing, become less supportive of new housing.

When it comes to the general topic of ignorance, the elephant in the room is politics. Thus election result maps are sometimes shown as if only college grads could vote (with many more “blue states”.)

This tweet brings together several different themes. Low engagement voters tend to support Trump. Low engagement voters tend not to read:

In a few cases the link is made explicit. Peter Miller does a bit of cherry picking to make Trump voters look dumb:

In summary:

White Trump voters are less intelligent than Clinton voters. The average difference is maybe 3 to 5 IQ points. Trump voters aren’t all stupid, but there are more stupid Trump voters. . . .

No one agrees how much of intelligence is the result of good schools versus something innate. A lot of people on the right, and especially the alt-right, think that intelligence is genetic. They think that some minorities do worse on tests because those groups are genetically inferior. Well… by that same logic, conservatives are genetically inferior to liberals.

Notice how he keeps conflating conservative Trump voters with white Trump voters. It is possible that Trump voters of all races are dumber than Clinton voters of all races, but the post doesn’t provide any evidence for that claim. On the other hand, the final paragraph is a clever troll of right-wingers, or would be if he’d said, “Well… by that same logic, white conservatives are genetically inferior to white liberals.”

I cannot imagine why anyone would want to compare the intelligence of just one race of voters, but then I also can’t understand why when I point out that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native born, conservatives reply, “Now compare their crime rates to white Americans.” What’s good for the goose . . .

In general, it is considered to be in poor taste to call Trump and his supporters dumb. Thus much of the discussion of the recent stupidity boom uses various euphemisms to get their point across. Here’s Jeffrey Bleher of the National Review:

I knew the Great Dealmaker had experienced a bit of a setback at the negotiating table with Vladimir Putin on Thursday merely because of the manner in which he awoke on Friday, bleating the following:

“Crooked Joe Biden got us into a real “mess” with Russia (and EVERYTHING ELSE!), but I’m going to get us out. Millions of people are needlessly dead, never to be seen again…and there will be many more to follow if we don’t get the Cease Fire and Final Agreement with Russia completed and signed. There would have been NO WAR if I were President. It just, 100%, would not have happened. Likewise, there would have been no October 7th with Israel, the pullout from Afghanistan would have been done with strength and pride, and would not have been the most embarrassing day in the history of our Country, it could have been a moment of glory. Also, there would not have been any perceptible inflation – Instead we had Record Setting, Country Destroying Inflation, like we have never seen before. Also, we would have had an impenetrable Border, with very few illegals getting in. Oh, what a difference A RIGGED & CROOKED ELECTION HAD ON OUR COUNTRY, AND THE PEOPLE WHO DID THIS TO US SHOULD GO TO JAIL! GOD BLESS AMERICA AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Get that? Putin doesn’t seem to be too terribly interested in a 30-day cease-fire after all — and why not, given that Donald Trump has already rhetorically taken his side in very public and propagandistically irrevocable ways? — and Trump is frustrated about it.

Bleher knows that he doesn’t have to tell his readers that Trump is acting like a baby, he merely has to point out that “others” might view this sort of tirade as dumb:

I don’t regard myself as a particularly old-fashioned person, so it’s not Trump’s affect — or punctuation, for that matter — that I object to. (Others can complain how Trump degrades the office of the presidency with his comportment; accurate though this is, that ship sailed long ago.) I object that he gives far too much of himself away to the rest of the world — including America’s rivals and enemies — by living his emotional life out loud on social media. . . .

It’s not that the man lacks a filter, it’s that he does not properly grasp the difference between what he says and what those statements reveal on a deeper level, independent of their content. The pattern is clear: Whenever Trump feels frustrated, or trapped by events, and is looking for some way out of his current political predicaments, he takes to venting on social media.

It’s the same with me. I don’t have say anything about the elite’s recent obsession with stupidity; it’s enough to note its existence. No matter how polite they try to be, when intellectuals talk about stupidity they reveal their disdain for the masses.

For Europeans, the subtext is that Americans are dumb:

Smith is only partly correct. Fifty years ago, Americans would have been outraged by Trump’s decision to vote with Russia, Iran and North Korea against a UN resolution condemning Russia for the Ukraine invasion. (Even China abstained.)

I don’t believe that Americans are any less intelligent than they were 50 years ago, at least in terms of a metric like IQ. But they are certainly far more ignorant of foreign affairs. For the post-WWII generation, foreign affairs was a serious business. The public got their information primarily from mainstream newsmen such as Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley. Voters may have disagreed over specific issues like the Vietnam War, but they shared a similar basic framework regarding America’s role in the world. There was a shared sentiment that the president must be a serious person, not an eccentric clown. Low information voters were mostly in the Democratic Party, which was dominated at the top by intellectuals. Voters mostly did what they were told (although rebels like George Wallace would occasionally attract a few votes.)

Now the public gets its information from the internet, and people mostly read what they wish to read. They end up believing what they wish to believe. Remember the movie “Home Alone”? You can think of the modern media environment as America without adult supervision.

I suppose you could argue that I am a member of this “elite”, the group that has recently lost power. So I can understand their frustration. Even so, we need to consider this issue in a non-emotional fashion. If we assume that the IQ of Americans has not suddenly plunged lower, then how can we explain the perception that the US is getting dumber?

Let’s start with the fact that we tend to notice adverse changes more than improvements. Thus people who complain about declining living standards might notice how today it is more difficult to afford a house in certain cities, but then overlook the hundreds of ways that living standards are far higher than in the 1960s.

Similarly, intellectuals complaining about the ignorance of the American public when it comes to foreign affairs might overlook the many ways that people are more intelligent than in the past—such as their skill in using computer technology. Average people focus on what seems useful. Given that WWII happened a long time ago, it’s not surprising that many Americans no longer view foreign policy as being important.

Second, our media market has become increasingly efficient at giving viewers what they want. And consumers of news mostly do not want the truth; they want information that makes them feel good. It’s analogous to the way that broad prosperity made the McMansions of the 2020s much uglier than the large houses built in the 1920s. Average people have worse taste than the elite. When elites lose control, things get dumber.

Third, our political system has become more dictatorial, less moderated by “the wisdom of the crowds”. America’s founders set up a system with checks and balances, to prevent mistakes by any one person from doing too much damage. Congress would set tariffs rates, after extensive negotiations. During the Biden administration, Joe Manchin prevented a bad piece of legislation from being even worse, by refusing to vote for as big a stimulus package as Biden desired. There was no “Biden cult” to force Senator Manchin to toe the line. (In the end, he did Biden a favor.)

Today, Trump has the power to force people like Thom Tillis to vote against their true beliefs. That power comes from the Trump cult, from Trump’s ability to persuade his supporters to “primary” any GOP obstructionists in the next election.

This is a classic collective action problem. As a group, GOP politicians would be far better off if they could all gang up on Trump and force him to be more reasonable. But no single member of the GOP is willing to take the risk, and hence they stand by helplessly when Trump flounders around, making it almost inevitable that the Democrats will do well in the 2026 election. Thus some of the recent ignorance boom comes from the fact that the wisdom of crowds no longer applies in upper levels of government.

One final point. I clearly have elite views on issues like Ukraine and tariffs. But nothing in this post hinges on those views being correct. (The elite got us into Vietnam and Iraq, and I have non-elite views on China.) The actual topic of the post is the recent surge of interest in voter ignorance, not whether elite opinions are better or worse than populist opinions. If you criticize elite views in the comment section, I’ll ignore your comment.

A number of commenters are close to being banned for making repetitive comments that are off topic. Remember, one sign of intelligence is reading comprehension. Stick to the topic.

PS. I bought this book 35 years ago, and it still sits on my shelf, unread: