And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand.
(Judges 12: 5-6)
When I was younger, and made good-faith efforts to understand the conservative point of view, what really blew my mind was the sheer stupidity of what even conservatives whom I considered smart claimed to believe. It wasn’t until I was [REDACTED] years old that I realized that when people state their beliefs, what they’re doing quite often is making a loyalty statement. So when smart people voluntarily embrace stupid things, it’s for social advantage. In fact, smart people are extremely good at being stupid, and that stupidity has now made communication with Republicans impossible.
Before Trump, conservatives spoke with a variety of stupid voices. With Trump’s arrival on the scene, there has been a harmonic convergence on a specific set of very stupid beliefs. Some very dense people have interacted and merged, leaving behind a super-dense political party from which not even dignity can escape.
When I hear Republicans talk about “cancel culture”, “critical race theory”, “political correctness”, and so on, it’s clear that none of these phrases retain their actual meaning. They are spoken by people who don’t know what they mean, and don’t care. They are being said in a certain way to determine who is part of the tribe. I was reminded of the “shibboleth” story from the Bible: No one incapable of saying these words the right way is allowed to pass.
We humans have always prioritized social cohesion over truth-seeking. The GOP faced such a choice not that long ago. In the wake of its defeat in the 2012 elections, the Republican Party reviewed election data and saw a future in which it had to change its platform and reach out to minorities and immigrants in order to remain electorally competitive. Former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal called on his fellow Republicans to “stop being the stupid party”. This didn’t work, because stupidity continued to pay dividends.
Today, stupidity is being used as a shibboleth to weed out RINOs and other impure elements. Trump’s repeated lies—easily checked lies—cost him nothing. He lost no support. Instead, whatever he said became Party orthodoxy, no matter how bizarre, and Republicans had no choice but to fall in line or be declared RINO.
What we’re seeing on the Right is like a moral panic, with bizarre, blatantly stupid statements and actions that no one outside the conservative media bubble can understand. Communication has gone from challenging to impossible. Conservatives are no longer taking positions; the lack of a 2020 platform shows that the GOP’s message has been reduced to nothing but loyalty statements.
Here’s the problem it presents to me: To change their minds it’s necessary to offer them a better narrative than the one that currently guides their lives. But with stupidity as a shibboleth, I’m stuck. I cannot out-stupid them. I mean, I’m not smart, but I do read a lot, and at some point I’m bound to slip up and say something reasonable about, oh, critical race theory. At that point the conversation is over.
So what do I do? It feels morally wrong to write off two-fifths of Americans as unreachable. I can’t answer statements like “diversity is weakness”, “climate change is a hoax”, “BLM is coming for you”, “January 6th was a false-flag operation”, “January 6th was an overly-enthusiastic patriot tour group”, “Trump won”, “freedom means freedom to spread a deadly disease”. I don’t know what to do about people who prefer obvious lies to any available flavor of reality—even nominally conservative flavors.
GOP leaders created this problem, and are intensifying this problem. What we are seeing with adherence to election-fraud claims and vaccine-rejection and covid-spreading and kipper-throwing are loyalty statements, and Republican leaders will push them for as long as it’s beneficial to them.
So we have to make certain it’s not. Negotiation has been impossible for a long time, and accommodation would amount to surrendering the nation to an authoritarian ethno-nationalist movement. Even communication is now impossible. The only thing we can do is give them crushing defeats at the polls (perhaps by knitting together a grand coalition of vaccinated voters against pro-covid Republicans) until enough Republican leaders decide it’s time to stop being the stupid party.
Then, and only then, can we talk.