If you are waking up every morning dreading turning on the news, if you can’t resist the sick temptation to click on whatever Mark Zuckerberg wants you to see on Facebook, if you wonder if your friends and neighbors have been mind-hacked or replaced by aliens, welcome to the club. The current insanity has deep roots in America — but lately it seems to have metastasized. For an illuminating foreshadowing of where we are, you could do worse than look at the following.
Back on November 1, 2005 Esquire ran an article by Charles P. Pierce with the title and illustration you see above:
Subtitled “The Flight From Reason”, Pierce would later expand it into a book: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.
The Fred Flintstone caricature refers to the opening paragraphs, wherein Pierce details a day at Ken Ham’s Creation museum, where one of the first things visitors saw was a dinosaur wearing a saddle.
It is an English saddle, hornless and battered. Apparently, this was a dinosaur used for dressage competitions and stakes races. Any working dinosaur accustomed to the rigors of ranch work and herding other dinosaurs along the dusty trail almost certainly would wear a sturdy western saddle.
This is very much a show dinosaur.
The dinosaurs are the first things you see when you enter the Creation Museum, which is very much a work in progress and the dream child of an Australian named Ken Ham. Ham is the founder of Answers in Genesis, an organization of which the museum one day will be the headquarters. The people here today are on a special tour. They have paid $149 to become “charter members” of the museum.
I am going to take the liberty of taking several more big quotes from the article because A) it is a long piece of reading, and B) the quotes have particular relevance to understanding just where we now are today, 78 days away from an election that is looking increasingly like some last chance before slipping into the abyss. If it seems like nothing makes sense, consider this:
The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.
In the place of expertise, we have elevated the Gut, and the Gut is a moron, as anyone who has ever tossed a golf club, punched a wall, or kicked an errant lawn mower knows. We occasionally dress up the Gut by calling it “common sense.” The president’s former advisor on medical ethics regularly refers to the “yuck factor.” The Gut is common. It is democratic. It is the roiling repository of dark and ancient fears. Worst of all, the Gut is faith-based.
emphasis added
Remember that when you see people attacking Dr. Fauci, or you hear people defending the idea of injecting bleach, or insisting that wearing a face mask causes brain damage. It’s right up there with the claims that tax cuts pay for themselves, clean coal, and big beautiful walls.
Further:
Hofstadter saw this one coming. “Intellect is pitted against feeling,” he wrote, “on the ground that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical.” The Gut is the basis for the Great Premises of Idiot America. We hold these truths to be self-evident:
1) Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2) Anything can be true if somebody says it on television.
3) Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it.
Example:
How does it work? This is how it works. On August 21, a newspaper account of the “intelligent design” movement contained this remarkable sentence: “They have mounted a politically savvy challenge to evolution as the bedrock of modern biology, propelling a fringe academic movement onto the front pages and putting Darwin’s defenders firmly on the defensive.”
Think about that for a moment.
A “politically savvy challenge to evolution” is as self-evidently ridiculous as an agriculturally savvy challenge to euclidean geometry would be. It makes as much sense as conducting a Gallup poll on gravity or running someone for president on the Alchemy Party ticket. It doesn’t matter what percentage of people believe they ought to be able to flap their arms and fly, none of them can. It doesn’t matter how many votes your candidate got, he’s not going to turn lead into gold. The sentence is so arrantly foolish that the only real news in it is where it appeared.
On the front page.
Of The New York Times.
emphasis added
Explains a lot, doesn’t it? One-hand-other-hand. Bothsiderism. Fair and balanced.
And…
This is how Idiot America engages the great issues of the day. It decides, en masse, with a thousand keystrokes and clicks of the remote control, that because there are two sides to every question, they both must be right, or at least not wrong. And the poor biologist’s words carry no more weight than the thunderations of some turkey-neck preacher out of the Church of Christ’s Own Parking Facility in DeLand, Florida. Less weight, in fact, because our scientist is an “expert” and, therefore, an “elitist.” Nobody buys his books. Nobody puts him on cable. He’s brilliant, surely, but his Gut’s the same as ours. He just ignores it, poor fool.
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That was 15 years ago; things have gotten much worse since then.
Pierce notes that America is a great place to be an eccentric and outright crank. But, he adds, it used to be harder to make a living at it. America’s historic embrace of freedom has left room for freedom to go completely around the bend. It can be entertaining. It can make room for needed change by expanding what is considered in the range of the possible — or at least permissible to think about. It can also take us to bad places...
Pierce recently revisited the book, via a weekly email that gets sent to subscribers to his shebeen. The entire thing is well worth a read, as is subscribing to Pierce, but this section is apropos to this discussion.
...So, in that book a decade ago, I tried to make the argument that conspiracy theories were a political tool and that, like any other tool, they could be put to good or evil purposes. (There’s an ax. You can be Paul Bunyan or you can be Lizzie Borden. Decide.) For example, the anti-Masons of the mid-1800s believed that which was plainly nuts, but following their fantasies led many of them—and national politics—ultimately in the direction of abolitionism, which was unquestionably a good thing. Conspiracy theories, I believe, properly disciplined and restricted in their compass, can be enormously useful to the political imagination. They can help us see beyond what seem at the moment to be the limits of possibility.
Of course, these days, when the President* of the United States simply makes things up as he goes along, and when the truly lunatic and completely amorphous QAnon theory has broken discipline and escaped all compass to the point where its believers are beginning to filter into the Congress, we can feel the darker momentum of that dynamic. Conspiracy theories can poison the present to the point where they weaponize the future against it. We attack imaginary threats now to avoid imaginary threats yet to come. The political imagination runs riot, melting into political psychopathology. The open mind becomes a locked ward. And all because God, in Her Infinite blundering, left human beings to run Her creation.
Read the article, read the book if you want more from Pierce on this.
For extra credit, take a look at The Long Con by Rick Perlstein if you want a look at how conservatism mines the oilfield of the placenta — political CT for profit — it’s still a must-read. The scams change (Pizza shop basement pedophile rings! FEMA camps! Antifa!) but they’re still scams. Perlstein is talking about Mitt Romney’s presidential run here, but the question still applies:
All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal aboutthem?
If you want an example of how this works, how people can be led to believe things that are absurd, Meredith Wilson’s take on it from The Music Man shows how people can be led to con themselves. Amp up the rabid fervor, take away any connection with reality (or boy’s bands), add more racism, a dash of fear, outrageous claims, some scapegoats, and you can see how a Trump rally works.
