The internet is used in lots of countries, not just the USA. I don't see how the internet alone can explain a USA-specific phenomenon. But is this phenomenon even USA-specific?
Perhaps the phenomenon is not USA-specific. We just notice it more in the USA, because we are Americans, or because the US has such a big global profile. (Consider the current Romanian election controversy, or the rise of AfD in Germany, or Brexit. What would the US equivalent be? Imagine Trump was barred from running, 20% of Congress was controlled by a party that wanted to rethink our interpretation of the Confederacy, or the US actually pulled out of multilateral orgs instead of threatening to pull out. Maybe we're not in such a terrible place after all!)
Perhaps the phenomenon is population-dependent. The US has over 3x the population of any EU country. Naively, this would give us 3x the odds of finding a figure like Trump. And if such wackos feed on one another, effects could be nonlinear. Furthermore, voters only have 1/3 the incentive to become informed in a democracy 3x as large.
US politics seems better to me at the state and local levels than the national level. If that's true, it suggests that dysfunction is not necessarily part of the "American national character" per se, and federal dysfunction should be seen as an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
US democracy seems dysfunctional, but the other large democracies also seem dysfunctional. If you look at the Economist Democracy Index for large countries, the US score is still relatively good. Going down the world's most populous countries, it's not until Japan that you find a country which outscores the US according to the Economist Democracy Index.
Perhaps it's not current-USA that's remarkable, so much as pre-2015 USA, for maintaining a relatively functional multi-ethnic democracy with such a large population for such a long time. 2016 onwards could be considered a regression to the mean.
I'm inclined to think of politics as a stochastic process. Stupid people have always been with us, and they've been voting for a long time. What really matters is the leadership, and that's pretty random. If smart people in the GOP had been willing to denounce Iraq and wokeness before Trump, maybe there would've been no niche for Trump to fill. And with no Trump niche, maybe there would be no education polarization, and both parties would still be lead by educated elites.
Those are reasonable points, but I think it's a mistake to focus too much on Trump. He's mostly a symptom. Elon Musk is a genius, but on twitter he seems like a moron. The issue is systemic. And I agree that wokeness is a part of the problem.
"But is this phenomenon even USA-specific?"
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the US cable news networks were far worse than those in places like the UK, Canada and Australia. Ditto for Scandinavia. On the other hand, I believe that some parts of eastern Europe have lots of problems in this area.
I agree that local politics in the US is much less dysfunctional than national politics. Indeed local politics is gradually becoming less corrupt, at a time when national politics is becoming more corrupt. Recently, the two lines have crossed on the graph.
I think Trump is both symptom and cause. He wouldn't have succeeded without harnessing anti-establishment energy. Yet he had a lot of latitude to direct that energy. I can imagine a world where the 2016 GOP primary has the same set of candidates, except Trump is replaced with "antiwoke Ron Paul", and "antiwoke Ron Paul" wins. That puts us in a rather different world. I imagine we would've seen less educational polarization in this world, for example.
(By "antiwoke Ron Paul", I mean a hypothetical version of Ron Paul that successfully baits the mainstream media into attacking him on issues where the majority of the GOP base is skeptical of the mainstream media. That seemed key to Trump's success, and I didn't see other candidates doing this until Trump proved that it could work. But voters wanted the genuine article, not copycats.)
Assuming your point about cable news is true, I think it also could fit into my population-based framework. I would expect cable news in the US is far more lucrative than cable news in Norway, since the US market has over 50x as many eyeballs. The US has 50x as much population, so the number of less-scrupulous individuals who will pander to the lowest common denominator in order to make a buck would also be expected to be 50x as large. Or to put an even finer point on it: The incentive for Rupert Murdoch to make it in the USA, as opposed to making it in Norway, is 50x as large.
Note that a 50x larger population does *not* mean the US has 50x *as many* cable news channels, since there are still only 24 hours a day in which to watch news. But it *does* appear to make the profit pressures for cable news 50x as intense. "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."
Then you get secondary effects. As the quality of the national conversation degrades, wiser individuals self-select out of the conversation in a downward spiral. Or, anger is contagious and affects even those who would ordinarily be circumspect. Etc. (When Europeans comment on US politics, they seem to me, if anything, *more* unhinged than the average American. Which underscores my previous claim that "national character" is overrated as an input.)
Good post. Re Elon Musk, I gave an OLLI talk on Trump's economic policy proposals and actions on Tuesday. When I got to DOGE and pointed out what I think are some of Musk's misunderstandings about the federal government, I stated, "I have no doubt that Elon Musk is way smarter than me. I also have little doubt that I know more about how the federal government works than he does."
My biggest problem with Musk's tweets isn't his lack of knowledge, it's the combination of a lack of knowledge as to how government works combined with a high level of either dishonesty or sloppiness on facts, and the childish immaturity of his taunts. I recall reading that Ramaswamy left early on because he saw that it was going to be a series of stunts, not serious policy reform.
And I say all this with the awareness that his entrepreneurial skills are second to none.
Musk is an amazing salesman and an incredible entrepreneur. I don't think that makes him a genius, however. Besides the fact that he is arrogant, dishonest, and childish, whenever he talks about a subject that one knows well, one discovers he is incredibly uninformed. From car engineering to constructing rockets to how government databases work to how the government functions to tactics for playing video games, experts have called him out on basically every single thing he tries to sound intelligent about. He's not that smart.
I don't think it is a question of Musk's intelligence of which none of us can really judge. What he has been good at is conceptualizing and idea (Tesla) or solution (Space X), putting together a team and getting a project done. Maybe he is the Albert Sloan of the modern day. Steve Jobs was a great industrial designer but a poor computer scientist (he designed the original Mac but relied on others for the hardware and software.
"I agree that local politics in the US is much less dysfunctional than national politics. Indeed local politics is gradually becoming less corrupt, at a time when national politics is becoming more corrupt. Recently, the two lines have crossed on the graph." ... interesting ... as you talk about graphs, do you have data on this? Or other evidence?
No data, it's just based on impressions. It seems like federal prosecutors police these things much more strictly than in the past, when cities were ruled by organizations like the Daley machine. There is still local corruption, but it doesn't seem as widespread as in the past.
>I'm inclined to think of politics as a stochastic process. Stupid people have always been with us, and they've been voting for a long time. What really matters is the leadership, and that's pretty random. If smart people in the GOP had been willing to denounce Iraq and wokeness before Trump, maybe there would've been no niche for Trump to fill. And with no Trump niche, maybe there would be no education polarization, and both parties would still be lead by educated elites.
I think the fact that education polarization is happening in many countries is pretty good evidence that there is an underlying, structural thing going on, and specific events in individual countries are largely epiphenomenal.
My opinion is that it feels like society in general is getting dumber, and political discourse in particular feels like it's getting dumber, across the West if not the world, for a few reasons:
1) As Scott alluded to, the culture gets dumber when per capita incomes rise faster than intelligence. It's not that people are getting dumber, but rather that stupid people have more money to spend on cultural products. Hence the Marvelization of media. What's interesting about this is that society hasn't stopped producing high quality culture - it's just getting crowded out by the slop.
2) The internet age leads to low barriers of entry in cultural production. You don't need a history PhD to make YouTube videos on ancient Greece. Any moron with a laptop and an internet connection can do that now. Same thing goes with the rise of podcasters like Joe Rogan and the declining influence of traditional, written & professional journalism.
3) Human capital polarization makes both the high human capital and low human capital factions dumber. The latter gets dumber for fairly obvious reasons. But the former also gets dumber because the lack of intellectually credible opposition promotes groupthink. It's psychologically stressful to disagree with the latest left-wing fad - and thereby dissociate yourself with the high human capital tribe - when the GOP is so anti-intellectual and seems to hold thinking itself in contempt.
***
To answer Scott's broader question, I think human capital polarization is a hot topic among elites for two reasons. (1) It's psychologically gratifying to dunk on the rubes. (2) Human capital polarization massively reduces the quality of government. When high human capital is in power, groupthink prevails. When low human capital is in power... *gestures broadly*
Now, inevitably someone will come along and point out that pre-human capital polarization elites made numerous blunders before Trump came to power. And obviously, that's true. But say what you will about George W Bush - the Iraq War didn't blow up NATO in the first hundred days, the 2008 crisis was caused by long-running & fairly esoteric regulatory failures and not a tariff/DOGE-induced own goal, and the GWB admin did lots of high human capital things, like PEPFAR, which Trump/Vance/Musk are trying to kill for basically stupid reasons.
>I think the fact that education polarization is happening in many countries is pretty good evidence that there is an underlying, structural thing going on, and specific events in individual countries are largely epiphenomenal.
Yes and no. What I was trying to get at is that we need to polarize around some axis. That’s how democracy works. In the past, it might have been religion, race, or ideology. Nowadays it’s gender and education.
Polarization, in a certain sense, is democracy working as intended. What’s the opposite of polarization? A “rubber-stamp” government.
It’s hard to control the axis of polarization though. It shifts over time, and the idea of educational polarization is not something you can define out of existence. The system should ideally be robust to the possibility of education polarization.
"Perhaps it's not current-USA that's remarkable, so much as pre-2015 USA, for maintaining a relatively functional multi-ethnic democracy with such a large population for such a long time."
Similarly, it is not widely appreciated (afaics) that the coincidence of democracy and capitalism (sts called the golden age of capitalism) from 1945 - 1989 is the exception, not the rule. I believe that much of what we see today can be understood as the moving apart of democracy and capitalism. It is not clear whether we can have both in the same nation state in the future, is it?
Writing well is hard work. Reading is hard work to fully comprehend a work of fiction, non-fiction, or even a newspaper article. Watching Tik-Tok or YouTube videos is not hard work. The world has changed, arguably not for the better.
“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”
It’s because we (yes we) have no spine. I’d offer the same reason I have proposed many times to you… we are relativists (subjectivists) now. There is really no objective wrong. No eternal father we have to answer to some day. So anything goes. A man with a spine is needed to act first. That man (or woman) does so even if they suffer for it. There is no reason to suffer today. Suffering is atupid. It’s gains nothing at great cost. Hence, we have no spine. We, today, would have lost WWII. We are weak men compared to our grandfathers.
Why are the elites suddenly interested in the stupidity of the masses? I think the obvious answer is that in liberal republican governments the elites now find that they are no longer able to control the political process such that choices such as Trump, Marine Le Pen, ADF and their like are disqualified. The wisdom of the masses was never allowed to operate in republican governments. The real question is what changed? Is it that elite policy became so intolerable to the electorate that a real democratic revolt occurred or is it that the elites just lost control by failing to appreciate the rapidly evolving information channels the electorate uses.
That may be part of the story. But any explanation also needs to account for the fact that the media actually has become far more stupid than in the days of Cronkite and Brinkley. You need to account for the fact that federal officials are far more stupid than in the past. Any explanation that doesn't acknowledge those facts is inadequate. It's not just "the elites have a different point of view on certain issues". That's too simple. Claiming a VAT is like a tariff is stupid, it's not a "different point of view". Fox News is stupid, not just conservative media like the WSJ. Etc., etc.
I grew up and lived most of my life in Illinois and in that limited experience, there is no way even with Biden and Trump that the federal government is more corrupt than the state and local governments here. Now living in Wisconsin where the mayor's son was able to sell municipally owned equipment and pocket the money. Prosecuted with a slap on the wrist from the local judiciary. The current Supreme Court election here is a circus of corruption by huge outside money and misleading advertising and journalism on both sides. The idea seems to be to deliberately keep people ignorant of the issues and candidates and rely for votes on party or tribal loyalties.
The topic is absolutely the message. The media is the connective link between events and the listeners and viewers, observers and commentators
McCluhan was was a Cassandra warning us of what should be most avoided: don't let the medium replace the subjective and objective or you'll lose both.
The most conspicuous events of the last 25 yrs are: 9/11 and aftermath, an uppercut delivered; 2008 Crisis, a left hook delivered; 2020 Pandemic, the coup de main. All happened but we're followed by unforced errors.
It make sense that we are dizzy. Without trust in institutions there is no medium to have any faith in
Knowledge is not possible without either learned or revealed faith
I’ve also come across a lot of ignorance discourse lately — prompted by worries (and a recent Microsoft paper) that AI is making us dumb. Just like Neil Postman for TV and Nicholas Carr for social media, there’s always a compelling argument that the latest technology is making us dumber.
A lot of what I see dressed up as “ignorance” is really a moral judgement with educated elites more focused on the total wellbeing of the planet, including future generations, and the larger public more focused on their paycheck, family, and country. Abandoning Ukraine doesn’t seem “smart” to me, but I can see it from the perspective of “why are they spending so much money on another country?”
I wonder what we can do about it. The policy I keep coming back to is open primaries, which can be implemented at the state level, and offer incentives for politicians to appeal to the interests of more voters — not just the extremes. Curious for your thoughts.
I doubt whether technical fixes like open primaries will solve the problem, although they might help. In the long run, the solution is likely to come out of left field. Perhaps AI makes up for the intelligence deficit in humans. Or perhaps policy failures lead the political pendulum to swing back toward expertise. (For instance, Jimmy Carter was elected partly as a backlash to Nixon corruption.)
I think changing the voting system from plurality to STAR or approval voting will help fix the problem. Remember, the fifth party system was inherently unstable, while the current one is extremely stable.
The real mystery, I think, Sumner, is why the Social Democratic parties in Europe collapsed c. 2008. Was it due to the Internet or the Great Recession?
"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."
Not quite, Sumner. Read the last chapter of Conscience of a Conservative; by any metric, it's completely insane (and helps make sense of why Goldwater Republicans tended to later be or give birth to Rubio Republicans).
Also, I'm pretty sure that map of the vote of college degreed voters is incorrect (Mississippi and West Virginia are obvious giveaways).
Cults, as I understand them, have the following characteristics. The leaders are usually narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths. Their followers usually aren't. Followers usually end up in the cult because of circumstance more than character. They encounter the cult during a time of transition or hardship in their lives. The leaders bring them deeper into the cult through a manipulative process that starts with love-bombing of recruits and continues with steps to isolate them and coax them into doing compromising things or revealing compromising information about themselves.
As a result of this process, the cult members essentially become stupider. They start to believe absurdities. They start to deny what seem obvious truths. They cut themselves off from rational people and sources of information.
In other words, some of the increase in stupidity that people are detecting may simply be an observation of the handiwork of a cult leader.
Your point about elite views on Ukraine and China goes over my head. I don't know how you feel about Ukraine, and to my recollection you seem "softer" on China (to oversimplify, I am sure) than the typical American. In both these examples, plus Iraq and Vietnam, is the elite position just "hawkish"?
Like the elite, I believe the US should provide support to Ukraine, but should not go to war with Russia. I don't view that as hawkish, but some isolationists might view it that way. I'm definitely less hawkish on China than the elite, although again I don't view myself as particularly dovish. I favor support for Taiwan, but oppose the US going to war with China and also oppose our trade war with China. I see myself as moderate on both issues, whereas the elite have radically different views on the two questions.
Both the wars with Iraq and Vietnam were elite enterprises (although both were opposed by some members of the elite.) I would say the Afghanistan War was not an elite enterprise. Once it was clear that Bin Laden was in Afghanistan, there was broad public support for an attack, at least initially.
I think the simple and correct answer to the surge of interest in voter ignorance is because the Democrats lost the election. Democrats, like many people on the left, consider themselves well educated and take pride in that. When they ponder why they lost the election, they see their opposite in the people who voted against them - an ignorant rabble.
I remember talk of voter ignorance in 2004 when Bush was re-elected - How could people be so dumb as to re-elect someone who makes up words when he talks?
I don’t recall much talk about voter ignorance in 2020 when Biden won. The right doesn’t take pride in formal education but in loyalty and nationalism. When they lose elections, they don’t talk about voter ignorance but instead about treasonous elites betraying the nation and rigging elections.
That's clearly a part of the story, maybe a big part. But a person would have to be blind not to notice the vast changes between 2001 and 2025. The media is far worse. Economists have been mostly expelled from Washington (even under Biden). The political climate is much more anti-intellectual. It's not just a replay of Bush's first year.
Trump has accelerated the stupidity of our era, not least by which causing Dems to respond to him by becoming dumber. Dems used to listen to their wonks and technocrats and at least put forward policy proposals that adhered to some threshold of internal logic. BBB was the end of that where they just stuffed their entire agenda into a bill full of gimmicks and phase outs, which would have been a disaster on its own terms if enacted. Manchin did them a favor indeed. The whole point seemed to be to do things just to say you had done them without any focus on the results.
"And consumers of news mostly do not want the truth; they want information that makes them feel good."
Mmm, not so sure. Don't they want "information" that confirms their beliefs? Which probably makes them feel more confident in those beliefs. But makes them feel "good"? More paranoid, angry, anxious, depressed, maybe good too. But not only "good".
"Thus some of the recent ignorance boom comes from the fact that the wisdom of crowds no longer applies in upper levels of government."
The wisdom of crowds is known to work when the sources of distributed intelligence are independent before they are aggregated. This may be relevant here?
The internet is used in lots of countries, not just the USA. I don't see how the internet alone can explain a USA-specific phenomenon. But is this phenomenon even USA-specific?
Perhaps the phenomenon is not USA-specific. We just notice it more in the USA, because we are Americans, or because the US has such a big global profile. (Consider the current Romanian election controversy, or the rise of AfD in Germany, or Brexit. What would the US equivalent be? Imagine Trump was barred from running, 20% of Congress was controlled by a party that wanted to rethink our interpretation of the Confederacy, or the US actually pulled out of multilateral orgs instead of threatening to pull out. Maybe we're not in such a terrible place after all!)
Perhaps the phenomenon is population-dependent. The US has over 3x the population of any EU country. Naively, this would give us 3x the odds of finding a figure like Trump. And if such wackos feed on one another, effects could be nonlinear. Furthermore, voters only have 1/3 the incentive to become informed in a democracy 3x as large.
US politics seems better to me at the state and local levels than the national level. If that's true, it suggests that dysfunction is not necessarily part of the "American national character" per se, and federal dysfunction should be seen as an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
US democracy seems dysfunctional, but the other large democracies also seem dysfunctional. If you look at the Economist Democracy Index for large countries, the US score is still relatively good. Going down the world's most populous countries, it's not until Japan that you find a country which outscores the US according to the Economist Democracy Index.
Perhaps it's not current-USA that's remarkable, so much as pre-2015 USA, for maintaining a relatively functional multi-ethnic democracy with such a large population for such a long time. 2016 onwards could be considered a regression to the mean.
I'm inclined to think of politics as a stochastic process. Stupid people have always been with us, and they've been voting for a long time. What really matters is the leadership, and that's pretty random. If smart people in the GOP had been willing to denounce Iraq and wokeness before Trump, maybe there would've been no niche for Trump to fill. And with no Trump niche, maybe there would be no education polarization, and both parties would still be lead by educated elites.
Those are reasonable points, but I think it's a mistake to focus too much on Trump. He's mostly a symptom. Elon Musk is a genius, but on twitter he seems like a moron. The issue is systemic. And I agree that wokeness is a part of the problem.
"But is this phenomenon even USA-specific?"
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that the US cable news networks were far worse than those in places like the UK, Canada and Australia. Ditto for Scandinavia. On the other hand, I believe that some parts of eastern Europe have lots of problems in this area.
I agree that local politics in the US is much less dysfunctional than national politics. Indeed local politics is gradually becoming less corrupt, at a time when national politics is becoming more corrupt. Recently, the two lines have crossed on the graph.
I think Trump is both symptom and cause. He wouldn't have succeeded without harnessing anti-establishment energy. Yet he had a lot of latitude to direct that energy. I can imagine a world where the 2016 GOP primary has the same set of candidates, except Trump is replaced with "antiwoke Ron Paul", and "antiwoke Ron Paul" wins. That puts us in a rather different world. I imagine we would've seen less educational polarization in this world, for example.
(By "antiwoke Ron Paul", I mean a hypothetical version of Ron Paul that successfully baits the mainstream media into attacking him on issues where the majority of the GOP base is skeptical of the mainstream media. That seemed key to Trump's success, and I didn't see other candidates doing this until Trump proved that it could work. But voters wanted the genuine article, not copycats.)
Assuming your point about cable news is true, I think it also could fit into my population-based framework. I would expect cable news in the US is far more lucrative than cable news in Norway, since the US market has over 50x as many eyeballs. The US has 50x as much population, so the number of less-scrupulous individuals who will pander to the lowest common denominator in order to make a buck would also be expected to be 50x as large. Or to put an even finer point on it: The incentive for Rupert Murdoch to make it in the USA, as opposed to making it in Norway, is 50x as large.
Note that a 50x larger population does *not* mean the US has 50x *as many* cable news channels, since there are still only 24 hours a day in which to watch news. But it *does* appear to make the profit pressures for cable news 50x as intense. "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome."
Then you get secondary effects. As the quality of the national conversation degrades, wiser individuals self-select out of the conversation in a downward spiral. Or, anger is contagious and affects even those who would ordinarily be circumspect. Etc. (When Europeans comment on US politics, they seem to me, if anything, *more* unhinged than the average American. Which underscores my previous claim that "national character" is overrated as an input.)
"I think Trump is both symptom and cause."
Yes, I agree with that.
Good post. Re Elon Musk, I gave an OLLI talk on Trump's economic policy proposals and actions on Tuesday. When I got to DOGE and pointed out what I think are some of Musk's misunderstandings about the federal government, I stated, "I have no doubt that Elon Musk is way smarter than me. I also have little doubt that I know more about how the federal government works than he does."
My biggest problem with Musk's tweets isn't his lack of knowledge, it's the combination of a lack of knowledge as to how government works combined with a high level of either dishonesty or sloppiness on facts, and the childish immaturity of his taunts. I recall reading that Ramaswamy left early on because he saw that it was going to be a series of stunts, not serious policy reform.
And I say all this with the awareness that his entrepreneurial skills are second to none.
Was Ramaswamy less interested in stunts than Musk?
Musk is an amazing salesman and an incredible entrepreneur. I don't think that makes him a genius, however. Besides the fact that he is arrogant, dishonest, and childish, whenever he talks about a subject that one knows well, one discovers he is incredibly uninformed. From car engineering to constructing rockets to how government databases work to how the government functions to tactics for playing video games, experts have called him out on basically every single thing he tries to sound intelligent about. He's not that smart.
Well said.
I don't think it is a question of Musk's intelligence of which none of us can really judge. What he has been good at is conceptualizing and idea (Tesla) or solution (Space X), putting together a team and getting a project done. Maybe he is the Albert Sloan of the modern day. Steve Jobs was a great industrial designer but a poor computer scientist (he designed the original Mac but relied on others for the hardware and software.
"I agree that local politics in the US is much less dysfunctional than national politics. Indeed local politics is gradually becoming less corrupt, at a time when national politics is becoming more corrupt. Recently, the two lines have crossed on the graph." ... interesting ... as you talk about graphs, do you have data on this? Or other evidence?
No data, it's just based on impressions. It seems like federal prosecutors police these things much more strictly than in the past, when cities were ruled by organizations like the Daley machine. There is still local corruption, but it doesn't seem as widespread as in the past.
>I'm inclined to think of politics as a stochastic process. Stupid people have always been with us, and they've been voting for a long time. What really matters is the leadership, and that's pretty random. If smart people in the GOP had been willing to denounce Iraq and wokeness before Trump, maybe there would've been no niche for Trump to fill. And with no Trump niche, maybe there would be no education polarization, and both parties would still be lead by educated elites.
I think the fact that education polarization is happening in many countries is pretty good evidence that there is an underlying, structural thing going on, and specific events in individual countries are largely epiphenomenal.
My opinion is that it feels like society in general is getting dumber, and political discourse in particular feels like it's getting dumber, across the West if not the world, for a few reasons:
1) As Scott alluded to, the culture gets dumber when per capita incomes rise faster than intelligence. It's not that people are getting dumber, but rather that stupid people have more money to spend on cultural products. Hence the Marvelization of media. What's interesting about this is that society hasn't stopped producing high quality culture - it's just getting crowded out by the slop.
2) The internet age leads to low barriers of entry in cultural production. You don't need a history PhD to make YouTube videos on ancient Greece. Any moron with a laptop and an internet connection can do that now. Same thing goes with the rise of podcasters like Joe Rogan and the declining influence of traditional, written & professional journalism.
3) Human capital polarization makes both the high human capital and low human capital factions dumber. The latter gets dumber for fairly obvious reasons. But the former also gets dumber because the lack of intellectually credible opposition promotes groupthink. It's psychologically stressful to disagree with the latest left-wing fad - and thereby dissociate yourself with the high human capital tribe - when the GOP is so anti-intellectual and seems to hold thinking itself in contempt.
***
To answer Scott's broader question, I think human capital polarization is a hot topic among elites for two reasons. (1) It's psychologically gratifying to dunk on the rubes. (2) Human capital polarization massively reduces the quality of government. When high human capital is in power, groupthink prevails. When low human capital is in power... *gestures broadly*
Now, inevitably someone will come along and point out that pre-human capital polarization elites made numerous blunders before Trump came to power. And obviously, that's true. But say what you will about George W Bush - the Iraq War didn't blow up NATO in the first hundred days, the 2008 crisis was caused by long-running & fairly esoteric regulatory failures and not a tariff/DOGE-induced own goal, and the GWB admin did lots of high human capital things, like PEPFAR, which Trump/Vance/Musk are trying to kill for basically stupid reasons.
>I think the fact that education polarization is happening in many countries is pretty good evidence that there is an underlying, structural thing going on, and specific events in individual countries are largely epiphenomenal.
Yes and no. What I was trying to get at is that we need to polarize around some axis. That’s how democracy works. In the past, it might have been religion, race, or ideology. Nowadays it’s gender and education.
Polarization, in a certain sense, is democracy working as intended. What’s the opposite of polarization? A “rubber-stamp” government.
It’s hard to control the axis of polarization though. It shifts over time, and the idea of educational polarization is not something you can define out of existence. The system should ideally be robust to the possibility of education polarization.
"Perhaps it's not current-USA that's remarkable, so much as pre-2015 USA, for maintaining a relatively functional multi-ethnic democracy with such a large population for such a long time."
Similarly, it is not widely appreciated (afaics) that the coincidence of democracy and capitalism (sts called the golden age of capitalism) from 1945 - 1989 is the exception, not the rule. I believe that much of what we see today can be understood as the moving apart of democracy and capitalism. It is not clear whether we can have both in the same nation state in the future, is it?
I see 1989-2007 as the golden age of capitalism and democracy.
interesting that peak Japan also ended around this time as Noah Smith points out here: https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/i-have-written-a-book?r=kzem&utm_medium=ios
Writing well is hard work. Reading is hard work to fully comprehend a work of fiction, non-fiction, or even a newspaper article. Watching Tik-Tok or YouTube videos is not hard work. The world has changed, arguably not for the better.
Interesting stuff. One comment:
“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”
It’s because we (yes we) have no spine. I’d offer the same reason I have proposed many times to you… we are relativists (subjectivists) now. There is really no objective wrong. No eternal father we have to answer to some day. So anything goes. A man with a spine is needed to act first. That man (or woman) does so even if they suffer for it. There is no reason to suffer today. Suffering is atupid. It’s gains nothing at great cost. Hence, we have no spine. We, today, would have lost WWII. We are weak men compared to our grandfathers.
Why are the elites suddenly interested in the stupidity of the masses? I think the obvious answer is that in liberal republican governments the elites now find that they are no longer able to control the political process such that choices such as Trump, Marine Le Pen, ADF and their like are disqualified. The wisdom of the masses was never allowed to operate in republican governments. The real question is what changed? Is it that elite policy became so intolerable to the electorate that a real democratic revolt occurred or is it that the elites just lost control by failing to appreciate the rapidly evolving information channels the electorate uses.
That may be part of the story. But any explanation also needs to account for the fact that the media actually has become far more stupid than in the days of Cronkite and Brinkley. You need to account for the fact that federal officials are far more stupid than in the past. Any explanation that doesn't acknowledge those facts is inadequate. It's not just "the elites have a different point of view on certain issues". That's too simple. Claiming a VAT is like a tariff is stupid, it's not a "different point of view". Fox News is stupid, not just conservative media like the WSJ. Etc., etc.
I grew up and lived most of my life in Illinois and in that limited experience, there is no way even with Biden and Trump that the federal government is more corrupt than the state and local governments here. Now living in Wisconsin where the mayor's son was able to sell municipally owned equipment and pocket the money. Prosecuted with a slap on the wrist from the local judiciary. The current Supreme Court election here is a circus of corruption by huge outside money and misleading advertising and journalism on both sides. The idea seems to be to deliberately keep people ignorant of the issues and candidates and rely for votes on party or tribal loyalties.
Wisconsin is one of the least corrupt states. Trump is far and away the most corrupt president in US history. Your comparison makes no sense to me.
I think Nixon was more corrupt, but Trump is probably within the top ten.
LOL, Trump is 10 times more corrupt than Nixon. Trump has more scandals in 2 months than Nixon had in 4 years.
The topic is absolutely the message. The media is the connective link between events and the listeners and viewers, observers and commentators
McCluhan was was a Cassandra warning us of what should be most avoided: don't let the medium replace the subjective and objective or you'll lose both.
The most conspicuous events of the last 25 yrs are: 9/11 and aftermath, an uppercut delivered; 2008 Crisis, a left hook delivered; 2020 Pandemic, the coup de main. All happened but we're followed by unforced errors.
It make sense that we are dizzy. Without trust in institutions there is no medium to have any faith in
Knowledge is not possible without either learned or revealed faith
We're losing it
I’ve also come across a lot of ignorance discourse lately — prompted by worries (and a recent Microsoft paper) that AI is making us dumb. Just like Neil Postman for TV and Nicholas Carr for social media, there’s always a compelling argument that the latest technology is making us dumber.
A lot of what I see dressed up as “ignorance” is really a moral judgement with educated elites more focused on the total wellbeing of the planet, including future generations, and the larger public more focused on their paycheck, family, and country. Abandoning Ukraine doesn’t seem “smart” to me, but I can see it from the perspective of “why are they spending so much money on another country?”
I wonder what we can do about it. The policy I keep coming back to is open primaries, which can be implemented at the state level, and offer incentives for politicians to appeal to the interests of more voters — not just the extremes. Curious for your thoughts.
I doubt whether technical fixes like open primaries will solve the problem, although they might help. In the long run, the solution is likely to come out of left field. Perhaps AI makes up for the intelligence deficit in humans. Or perhaps policy failures lead the political pendulum to swing back toward expertise. (For instance, Jimmy Carter was elected partly as a backlash to Nixon corruption.)
I think changing the voting system from plurality to STAR or approval voting will help fix the problem. Remember, the fifth party system was inherently unstable, while the current one is extremely stable.
More stuff on mental health and parenting please.
restacking and subscribing
https://substack.com/@healingjournalwithsophie
The real mystery, I think, Sumner, is why the Social Democratic parties in Europe collapsed c. 2008. Was it due to the Internet or the Great Recession?
"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."
Not quite, Sumner. Read the last chapter of Conscience of a Conservative; by any metric, it's completely insane (and helps make sense of why Goldwater Republicans tended to later be or give birth to Rubio Republicans).
Also, I'm pretty sure that map of the vote of college degreed voters is incorrect (Mississippi and West Virginia are obvious giveaways).
Cults, as I understand them, have the following characteristics. The leaders are usually narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths. Their followers usually aren't. Followers usually end up in the cult because of circumstance more than character. They encounter the cult during a time of transition or hardship in their lives. The leaders bring them deeper into the cult through a manipulative process that starts with love-bombing of recruits and continues with steps to isolate them and coax them into doing compromising things or revealing compromising information about themselves.
As a result of this process, the cult members essentially become stupider. They start to believe absurdities. They start to deny what seem obvious truths. They cut themselves off from rational people and sources of information.
In other words, some of the increase in stupidity that people are detecting may simply be an observation of the handiwork of a cult leader.
Your point about elite views on Ukraine and China goes over my head. I don't know how you feel about Ukraine, and to my recollection you seem "softer" on China (to oversimplify, I am sure) than the typical American. In both these examples, plus Iraq and Vietnam, is the elite position just "hawkish"?
Like the elite, I believe the US should provide support to Ukraine, but should not go to war with Russia. I don't view that as hawkish, but some isolationists might view it that way. I'm definitely less hawkish on China than the elite, although again I don't view myself as particularly dovish. I favor support for Taiwan, but oppose the US going to war with China and also oppose our trade war with China. I see myself as moderate on both issues, whereas the elite have radically different views on the two questions.
Both the wars with Iraq and Vietnam were elite enterprises (although both were opposed by some members of the elite.) I would say the Afghanistan War was not an elite enterprise. Once it was clear that Bin Laden was in Afghanistan, there was broad public support for an attack, at least initially.
I think the simple and correct answer to the surge of interest in voter ignorance is because the Democrats lost the election. Democrats, like many people on the left, consider themselves well educated and take pride in that. When they ponder why they lost the election, they see their opposite in the people who voted against them - an ignorant rabble.
I remember talk of voter ignorance in 2004 when Bush was re-elected - How could people be so dumb as to re-elect someone who makes up words when he talks?
I don’t recall much talk about voter ignorance in 2020 when Biden won. The right doesn’t take pride in formal education but in loyalty and nationalism. When they lose elections, they don’t talk about voter ignorance but instead about treasonous elites betraying the nation and rigging elections.
That's clearly a part of the story, maybe a big part. But a person would have to be blind not to notice the vast changes between 2001 and 2025. The media is far worse. Economists have been mostly expelled from Washington (even under Biden). The political climate is much more anti-intellectual. It's not just a replay of Bush's first year.
Trump has accelerated the stupidity of our era, not least by which causing Dems to respond to him by becoming dumber. Dems used to listen to their wonks and technocrats and at least put forward policy proposals that adhered to some threshold of internal logic. BBB was the end of that where they just stuffed their entire agenda into a bill full of gimmicks and phase outs, which would have been a disaster on its own terms if enacted. Manchin did them a favor indeed. The whole point seemed to be to do things just to say you had done them without any focus on the results.
Yeah, Biden stopped listening to economists.
"And consumers of news mostly do not want the truth; they want information that makes them feel good."
Mmm, not so sure. Don't they want "information" that confirms their beliefs? Which probably makes them feel more confident in those beliefs. But makes them feel "good"? More paranoid, angry, anxious, depressed, maybe good too. But not only "good".
Yes, that's a much better way of putting it. I should have said something like "makes them feel good about the preconceptions they hold"
"Thus some of the recent ignorance boom comes from the fact that the wisdom of crowds no longer applies in upper levels of government."
The wisdom of crowds is known to work when the sources of distributed intelligence are independent before they are aggregated. This may be relevant here?
Yes, it works better when opinions are independent. This is the problem with personality cults.