It’s the Stupid, Stupid

Originally published 11/14/24 at DavidNewhoff.com

“It is hoped when prejudice and folly have run themselves out of breath, we may embrace reason and correct our errors.” - Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, 1783 -

There is a rule in military strategy that one cannot kill an idea. Recognizing that it is possible to kill or capture operatives, but not the idea which animates those operatives, guides smart military doctrine, from boots on the ground to covert operations. An opposite question now faces the United States and the world, which is whether an idea can be revived from the brink of death. Because there can be no question that the idea of America has slipped into a coma.

I have avoided reading the analyses that try to explain what happened in the election because, odds are, none of those details matter. They’re just something to distract from anxiety, like magazines in a hospital waiting room. The simple truth, to paraphrase Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, is that it’s the stupid, Stupid. That’s the whole analysis. Across all the demographic breakdowns and exit polls weighing economic, racial, ethnic, gender, and age considerations, the universal constant will be raw ignorance of, or ambivalence about, the idea of America.

Because the only question that needs to be answered at this moment is not what happened in the general election, but rather, in the Republican primary—namely why an overwhelming majority of the American people did not disqualify Trump on January 7, 2021. If the party and the gettable voters were motivated by conservatism and a rejection of whatever is allegedly wrong with Democrats, then Chris Christie should have been the nominee as a return to reason. Instead, the electorate clearly comprises people who openly advocate authoritarianism and those who do not recognize authoritarianism when they see it.

“One of the reasons Hamilton found the word democracy so offensive was because he realized that the vast majority of American citizens had not the dimmest understanding of what he was talking about.”

That quote comes from Joseph Ellis’s book The Quartet (2016) about the four most important figures—Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay—who convinced post-revolutionary Americans to embark upon the great “experiment” by ratifying the most original (and now, the oldest) constitution in the world. And the point of this insulting essay is not that I can claim to define the idea of America, but rather will insist that far too many contemporary Americans have not the dimmest understanding of the nation’s history or how the Republic actually works.

I see a lot of comments anticipating schadenfreude, predicting that huge swaths of Trump voters do not understand what they chose and are, therefore, in for a rude awakening. This is probably true for many, though not all. The people who consciously voted against the Constitution—the Christian nationalists, misogynists, white supremacists, et al.—are those for whom the idea of America was already dead. There have always been factions who openly advocate authoritarianism according to one doctrine or another—and white, male, and “Christian” are common themes. But if those people do not comprise the plurality of winning votes in this election, then, yes, a reckoning for many may come more swiftly than they imagine.

That said, perhaps even more useless than the post hoc analysis of what did happen is the polyhedral dice game predicting what is about to happen. The only thing which is certain is chaos, and chaos defies specificity. The Covid-19 pandemic was a relatively modest experiment in chaos. Panic-buying toilet paper was a quaint joke compared to what will likely happen when the president-elect turns the administrative state into a Soviet style polit bureau. Because, of course, we will get Soviet style quality in oversight of the basic operations of the country, where failure of any one system can trigger civil unrest and violence.

A September blog post by the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College cites an essay about civil servants written by Michael Lewis, stating:

One big reason talented and unusual people did not gravitate to the government was that the government was often a miserable place for talented and unusual people to work. Civil servants who screwed up were dragged before Congress and into the news. Civil servants who did something great, no one said a word about.

Lewis describes an award called the Sammies, started by entrepreneur Sammuel Heyman to recognize public servants who anonymously and thanklessly save lives and defend the nation from within those departments now cynically called the “deep state.” Lewis compares these public servants to the “carrots” in the school play supporting the leads played by politicians, who take credit for the carrots’ good works or blame the carrots when things go wrong. The essay features the service of former coal miner Christopher Mark who, “Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States,” Lewis writes.

That’s an interesting example at this moment, not only describing a civil servant keeping faith with the idea of America by simply doing a good job, but also because it happens to be about coal miners. The Kentucky coal miner is an archetype of the working-class American who feels abandoned by both parties over many cycles, and thus, the criticism of Democrats in particular for being too elitist.

Although those analyses ring true, the flight to Trumpism elides the fact that beyond economic uncertainty and whatever cultural nonsense motivates votes these days, the miner likely does not want to suffocate in a roof fall. But the odds of that happening—or poison in the food supply or collapse of some critical supply chain—increase with the appointment of each unqualified toady to the new kakistocracy. Hence, the stupid to which this essay refers is not an elitist scorn for the coal miner who doesn’t read Ellis or know much about the Constitution but is instead a critique of a pervasive ignorance about the purpose and function of government, and which now rejects the common sense necessary to survive, let alone prosper.