Informing Ourselves to Death: Trump's Win and American Stupidity (Part 2)
(Part 1 is here.)
We've seen definite signs of the abject stupidity of the American voter in 2024 in so many ways. There are the states where voters put abortion rights in their constitutions but voted for senators who want a national ban. The fact (and it is a fact) that searches for "Did Biden drop out?" spiked on Google on Election Day, as well as searches for "tariffs" and "who pays for tariffs?", may seem like small data points, but it points to a larger issue with deliberate ignorance. Apathy is one thing, as in "I don't care about politics," but that's not an excuse to be totally disengaged. I don't give a damn about football, but I know the Giants and the Jets suck because I pay attention to the world around me.
It's even worse when it comes to the things people believe that simply are untrue. For instance, a Gallup poll released this week showed that a majority of voters don't know what they're talking about. They were asked if "you believe the United States has made progress, stood still or lost ground in each during the last four years, since Joe Biden became president" on a variety of issues. A majority said we've "lost ground" on immigration (64%), the economy (59%), and crime (51%), among others. And that's simply objectively untrue. Immigration is under greater control than it's been in years, so much so that there isn't much for Trump to do at the southern border. The economy is doing great and crime rates are at historic lows.
I get that we face a flood of disinformation, and that the right-wing, especially the MAGA-in-chief, is responsible for it. Just about every word out of Trump's mouth hole during the campaign was a lie, and he continues to lie. And he'll change his tune the second that he's inaugurated and declare that he alone is responsible for every good thing that he's inheriting as he comes into office. Of course, the slavering hordes of idiots who hang on his every word believe him over anything their eyes or ears might tell them.
It's useless to get into the whole idea of how we used to gather 'round the TV and watch Walter Cronkite tell us what's what. It's useless to bemoan the end of newspapers and local media. It's useless to say that CNN used to actually care about that middle N, the one for "news," way more than it does now. It's useless to point out that getting your news from Facebook or Twitter is damaging what we used to think of as information. Every Pandora's Box around has been flung open and Hope had been beaten to death by the Evils in there.
But what I guess I'm getting at here is that while our access to information has blown up to an unwieldy size, so too, has our capacity for accepting facts and ideas that don't comport with what we desire to believe. And, again, I know that's not a new phenomenon, but, as I said last time, it's within the context of being able to challenge our orthodoxies. And that's disheartening.
To put it simply, we who do profess to care about politics and elections are consuming more information than ever. But we do it with such prejudice that anything that doesn't confirm a belief we already hold is dismissed out of hand. So, for example, it should have been an easy task to disabuse people of the notion that trans people are taking over schools or whatever nonsense the right was propagating. There are only 5 trans girls competing as girls in sports in K-12 public schools. And there are fewer than 10 trans athletes in all of college sports. Every uproar on this issue is over a group of students so small that it is statistically zero. And the number of students taking puberty blockers is also so much smaller in proportion to the outrage being expended on the issue. It was a failure of Democrats to not make this their top talking point on trans kids. But it was a failure of anyone getting enraged by the idea that their little cis girl was in imminent "danger" of playing soccer against a trans girl.
Instead, what the right especially is good at is flooding people with sources of information that all affirm each other, from Fox "news" and its devolved descendants to podcasts from verminous exploiters like Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro to other kinds of media, social or otherwise, so that people have the illusion of being informed because of this daisy chain of affirmation. You only need a couple of percent of people who aren't true believers to think that one lie or another is real and you've won an election.
We're moving into a government that is going to control the information it allows to be disseminated from the government. If one of the tenets of Trumpism is the need to deny that Trump lost the 2020 election, then any studies or research that could reflect badly on Trump will be, at best, suppressed, if not outright discarded, with the void filled with lies. This could be worse than the first Trump administration because at least there were career federal workers who would counter things like injecting bleach. If those workers are purged for loyalists, it's gonna be required that we all bleach our veins because dear leader said it works.
The entire operation of our federal system will be wholly based on lies and disinformation. We don't need Greenland, but you can bet we'll be hearing how the absolute most important thing we can do is take it if we can't buy it. The same with the Panama Canal. (The Canada thing just seems like a joke to piss off Trudeau, but who knows?) And a great deal of effort will be expended to not just do things based on lies, but to actually try to shift reality into the way that Trump and his MAGA freaks want it to be.
And the most aggravating thing about this is that, when asked about it, most voters do seem to have some concept of what's real. For example, a Wall Street Journal poll showed that 75% of people only want undocumented migrants with criminal records deported, with 70% want to "protect longtime residents from removal if they don’t have criminal records." I'd say to a whole lot of people in that poll that that's not what you voted for. You voted for the opposite. And it would have been ridiculously easy to find that out.
So the point to all this is that the information is there. It used to not be there. But it's all there. You can know what’s real and what’s not. You choose not to. That’s what makes you stupid. And that’s what makes you even stupider for electing Donald Trump.
That's my thesis for understanding 2024: the voters "informed" themselves to death, meaning they embraced false information and pretended it was real and didn't care when it was pointed out that they were objectively wrong. For whatever reason, racism or transphobia or misogyny or whatever, facts went out the window, and, frankly, you're just stupid if your prejudice matters more than the truth. Stupidity won, so we get stupidity personified running the joint.
