A repeated, plaintive question frequently haunts political conversation these days: “How could Americans have been stupid enough to re-elect Donald Trump?”
It would be reassuring to identify one simple factor that others have overlooked to explain the American mess that is unrolling before our eyes. However, seeking a simple explanation for an intricately complex cluster of events involving millions of forces is probably a futile quest.
Nonetheless, the question is an apt one, given the profound consequences of their electoral choice.
A recent opinion piece by David Brooks in the NY Times, "Producing Something This Stupid is the Achievement of a Lifetime," proposes intelligence as an explanatory factor in the puzzling drift to where America finds itself today. Brooks argues that Americans are losing their ability to reason.
His case is based on alarming statistics regarding education levels in the US. At virtually all levels from early elementary to graduation, students’ tested proficiencies are at their lowest in decades. At least 30 per cent of American adults are functionally illiterate.
A literature professor at an Ivy League university reports that in recent years his students have been barely able to complete reading one, or at most two, challenging novels such as Crime and Punishment or other classics in a semester.
Many students don’t bother with creating original work, but submit assignments written by A.I., suggesting that they have not listened to the lectures, done any reading, or thought about the ideas from their courses.
A recent guest on Bill Maher’s Real Time argued that if young people are going to succeed, they need to stop focusing on the “homecoming queen” and the status of the basketball team and its cheerleaders. Instead, they need to get to work on their academics, because for every one of them there are twenty or thirty hard-working youngsters in Asia willing and able to take the jobs and careers domestic youth might have had.
Just days ago, Ezra Klein interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning economist Thomas Friedman, who had recently been in China. Their discussion focused on economic competition between America and China. Friedman opined that a successful future will rely on high-tech industries, advanced engineering using A.I., self-driving vehicles, and cheap renewable energy.
What he sees in the US is a political administration preoccupied with DEI policies, racism, ideological “purity,” grift and corruption, incompetent Trump loyalists, a turning away from science, and returning America’s industrial focus to ICE vehicles, oil, gas and — gasp — coal! Friedman stated that if America doesn’t reverse course, China is going to “eat our lunch.” He further commented, “When you hire clowns, expect a circus.”
Culturally, keeping the populace bamboozled with professional sports, movies, television, Tik-Tok dreams, video games, social media, and no doubt other similar priorities distracts them from just how ripped off they have been; but not so much by invidious foreigners as by their own billionaire class.
We should be clear. The same factor applies to varying degrees in Canada, as well. So-called MAGA maple advocates here in Canada provoke the same worn outrage and phony solutions: lower taxes, more pipelines and plastic, and other forms of shilling for the oil-and-gas corporations (significantly American-owned) using the same playbook as Trump’s corrupt backers.
I guess how stupid we might be remains to be seen. The election will tell.
