It’s the stupid, stupid
We’ve seen this show before. A white, male candidate from generational wealth is elected with the help of ultra rich donors, voters without college degrees, and a sketchy ruling(s) of a right wing supreme court. The candidate speaks in an affected way that shows they are anti-intellectual.
Once elected the president at some point does something monumentally and aggressively stupid. And that’s the point.
Whether it’s George W. Bush or Donald Trump, merely saying stupid things is not enough. Their base requires a stupid and preferably unilateral action on the level of an Iraq or trade war. They require them to “try” something without giving it any real thought. Another words one must be fully anti-intellectual in both words and deeds.
The appeal of anti-intellectualism for voters without college degrees requires no explanation. For rich donors stupid attracts for a different reason:
A metaphor these people used a lot — because most of them were noble horsemen — is that they wanted to ride the Nazi movement like a horse
Anyone normal elected to the highest position of a country is likely to be difficult to control. Someone both anti-intellectual and from generational wealth seems like the optimal candidate for the ultra-wealthy to back as their man in the white house.
The problem is that there has never been a successful American president that was both anti-intellectual and from a wealthy background. Anti-intellectual is toxic and trying to lead a country with no experience outside of a highly privileged bubble is toxic. The two toxins together create a chaos agent beyond anyone’s control.
So while there have been presidents born wealthy like James Madison or anti-intellectual presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower, the level of toxicity of Bush and Trump is new. Madison the intellectual endorsed progressive taxation:
The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.
Coming from poverty Eisenhower understood the importance of the New Deal and even expanded its programs.
Of course claiming that Bush and Trump level toxicity is new sparks questions like what about runners up like James Buchanan. Those are questions better answered in a book than a blog.
However, another point in defense of a new level of toxicity is that the idiocracy is beginning to build on each other’s stupidity. George W. Bush starts a war that lasted 8 years and wasted trillions that could have been spent on shoring up American manufacturing. That sets up Donald Trump to play make believe with tariffs not backed by government spending on manufacturing infrastructure.
America has suffered from wealth inequality before without electing anti-intellectual extreme wealth nepo babies. For instance the Gilded Age had Ulysses S. Grant (poor), Rutherford B. Hayes (wounded while fighting for the union in the civil war), James A. Garfield (poor), Chester A. Arthur (quite intellectual — see this speech), Grover Cleveland (poor), and Benjamin Harrison (served the union in the civil war). Note here it is assumed that nepo babies of high toxicity don’t actively fight in wars.
The frequently heard explanation of Trump that white America lost its mind after the first black president does not explain George W. Bush’s election. Bush’s presidency was also well before the rise of social media.
A better explanation of both presidents is the rise of anti-intellectualism and “truthiness” in general:
By leaping to conclusions based on what he “believes,” Bush avoids contemplating even the most obvious basic contradictions: between his policy of tax cuts and reducing the deficit; between his call for a humble foreign policy based on alliances and his unilateral assertion of American power; between his support for in-vitro fertilization (which destroys embryos) and his opposition to fetal stem-cell research (because it destroys embryos).
This surge in anti-intellectualism isn’t constrained to the less educated and represents some real break with enlightenment values. Of course anti-intellectualism isn’t anything new, but this level of it in America is.
The book Twilight of the Elites makes the argument that there was a backlash against the “cult of smartness” that failed spectacularly. However, the cited elite failures were all after Bush was elected. What could have happened in late 20th century America to make idiocracy like Bush desirable?
The New York Times has an article, “ IDEAS & TRENDS; The Intellectual Issue For the 1990’s Is Why America’s Intellectuals Have Faded Away”, written in 1990 with several theories on the decline of the intellectual. Sadly explaining why intellectualism faded is the sort of thing usually done by intellectuals.
What we can say for certain is that intellectuals, even right wing ones, were in the way of an America solely serving high wealth individuals. For instance the famous conservative philosopher Russell Kirk said
The enlightened conservative does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success; or enjoyment; or longevity; or power; or possessions. He believes, instead, that the object of life is Love.
We can also theorize that the near constant attacks by upper classes stooges on teachers and universities is not a coincidence. For instance Reagan said of teachers, “They insist on the right to strike and tenure at the same time, how can you do this?”
Unfortunately fully explaining the rise of anti-intellectualism is more complex. In his similarly titled blog, Grant Wyeth, essentially cites boredom as the cause:
In his much-misunderstood book, The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama recognised that there was something innate in humanity that needed a struggle. That rationality would never be satisfying enough for us. The book wasn’t triumphalism, it was a warning — something that has clearly come to fruition:
Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterised by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
Sure America, the richest nation in the world, might have some citizens bored at the end of the last century but anti-intellectualism rose in many countries and American states that were struggling too hard to be bored. Furthermore Fukuyama’s book was published in 1992, two years after the NYT article on the decline of intellectuals, so arguably he needed only read newspapers of the time to “predict” the fall of enlightenment values that was already underway.
Maybe the boredom theory can be patched up by the very long term trend of declining birth rates. At the beginning of the Gilded Age in 1870 the average woman was still having 5 children, total fertility rate around 3.5 as some children died. It’s difficult to be bored when spending so much time on procreation. By 1990 the average family had 2 children and perhaps one starts to have the time and reduced lack of purpose for thinking that presidents should just “try” something.