This. Trump is the figurehead of The Patriarchy Strikes Back. Unvarnished, undisguised, blatantly so. Everything the feminists identified as representative of toxic masculinity and male chauvinism in its purest form.
I’m going to ignore the specifics and focus on this thesis.
Of course it is trite to observe that half of our citizens are below average. And definitely we regularly cock it up, by nature of the system even when the majority make the less stupid choice. Also smart people can act stupid.
And the fact that we are not actually a democracy but instead elect those who are supposed to be smarter than average to represent us and make decisions on our behalf is a good thing.
But I’ll take the circumstance of those I think of as very dumb having the same vote as those I think of as much smarter than I am over all possible alternatives.
I, for one, will miss you and the perspective you bring.
Seems like all of us are giving up @ulfreida for Kent.
The thing that has always best explained the election of Donald Trump to me is motivated reasoning. I think that a big chunk of the populace have good feels when Trump does what he does. (The tears of the libs are sooo sweet.) Even some of the people who know what he’s doing is wrong, bad, destructive, bad policy, etc. just feel good when he is hateful, belittling, egotistically confident, nationalistic, racist, cruel, etc.
Because it feels so good, they’ll adopt any “reasoning” available to justify supporting him. If that “reasoning” gets uncomfortable for some reason, they’ll just switch to another line of “reasoning.” I think this is part of what has fueled the disconnect between the right and truth. It’s not really that uncomfortable to them anymore to just adhere to an untrue narrative or set of “facts.” Once you do that, you don’t have to shift your reasoning nearly as often.
So on the OP topic, it’s a case of intelligence or capacity for reasoning not mattering. It’s pretty much not part of the equation for a lot of people. What matters is how motivated they are to reach a certain conclusion.
It is very much a common theme in fiction, largely based on reality, that probably 90% of people are effectively “dumb”. Sure, a lot of them lack the curiosity or intellectual horsepower to ever approach anything close to “smart”. But most people are simply “dumb” because they have a very small and narrow view of the world. Much of the world outside of what they can see are fed to them through media, which even under the best circumstances is filtered, biased, and sensationalist.
I will be very surprised if people understand what I am going to say here.
Consider a family. Eldest child is a great success, far beyond the expectations of the parents. They are also “good” and respected for how they interact with others.
Another child follows this child in the family. THAT child is unlikely to meet with the same level of success. So perhaps their lesser success is not seen as favorably. Maybe they are average, like the parents. But the first child is well above average, so the baseline expectations have been raised.
So perhaps that child seeks a different path. Becomes goofy, or a screwup, or “bad.” Because they have MORE OF A VOICE that way. Even if they are ostensibly a worse person. They have more identity that way than the “weak second” they might come across as if they followed a better path.
Now things don’t have to be this way. All of the children can be good in their own way. But that has to be instilled. We are all fighting a losing battle against time, some have more abilities than others but that is often a product of luck, none of us our perfect, the “stars” in life don’t deal with the local people on a personal level. In that way everyone can have a voice and be productive. But the “good” and the “stars” need to be put into perspective. I think that if you try to bask in the good too much, make it too universal, that increases the chance that people will start heading towards these bad ways, to have a voice.
I think Trump gives people a voice more than what else is out there. Whatever you think of it. It’s likely a bad voice. But people want something more than to be just a weak second. They want a voice and will seek it out. And sometimes, the more you pump you and yours up as good, virtuous, the more that these bad voices come up in response. You voted for Obama, hooray. How virtuous, how good you are. I think some of this on the left needs some deflating, some more human perspective. Not more cancel culture. More humility. Because there are always going to be other voices.
The above is the part I expect people not to get.
I’m not sure if I understand all this.
I do know that it’s a mistake to try and defeat “dumb” with logic and reason as your typically dummy won’t understand and will fight against it because they feel threatened. Look at the typical Trump supporter, for example. They strongly believe in the narrative that America is the greatest nation that ever was or ever will be. Comprised of hard-working Godfearing people with strong traditional family values willing to put in the hours or serve their country defending our way of life. The picture they see of the left consists of high taxes, welfare, lack of law enforcement, deprioritizing of traditional family structures, demonization of the white middle class (particularly men), globalism, wokism, and so on.
In other words, the left is fighting a losing argument by taking the position “here is our thoughtful plan on why these various concepts you hate or don’t understand will ultimately make society a better place” vs the right’s position of “America is the greatest country ever but these f*** on the left keep bashing it because they suck.”
I get everything except the part where the attention seeking siblings come to the family reunion and burn down the house with everybody in it including them.
For the most part I think you are right about Trump being the voice for a certain class of people who are feeling the need to act out because they are not being heard. The quibble that this group of angry straight white men have a voice and always have, but they are reacting to the fact that they are no longer the sole voice. Suddenly the culture is not all about them and they have to share with people of different race, gender and sexuality. Perhaps the family analogy would be the only child who is suddenly presented with a baby brother and finds that they now have to share their parents attention with this new outsider and so are throwing a temper tantrum.
More like the only child being presented with baby triplets and 11 months later a set of twins. But yeah, that is a great analogy.
The other critical thing is that they’re being told to blame their new siblings for things like the waning of lifetime employment, the massive outsourcing of semi-skilled good-wage jobs to China (or to automation), the general increase in the relative cost of medical care, etc. etc.
In your analogy, that’s a 4yo who now turns five and needs to go to school and somehow blames their infant siblings for this latest outrage.
Bottom line being that many aspects of both the social and the economic part of society worked for them while being largely unnoticed and mostly taken for granted. Until those aspects were gone or greatly diminished. That they noticed.
For all the talk that the white male (and even the white working class male) has had his voice listened to relatively above all others, there are many aspects of society in which that hasn’t been (much) true in an absolute sense for 40 years.
The fact the e.g. black working class male has had his voice listened to even less over that interval matters greatly to the black guy, but not so much to the white guy.
Bill Clinton famously said “I feel your pain” and a bunch of folks believed that. Disgraced ex president trump says a similar message but in a much angrier way that resonates much more after a further 30+ years of wage stagnation and social descent.
I agree. I’m not sure why I’ve been so focused on this of late, to what purpose. But it’s not to defeat it so much as to recognize it. When I hear politicians say things like, “The American people are smarter than that,” my reaction is “No, they’re not.” In this very thread it was suggested that a multitude of these salt-of-the-earth folks have a virtue and common sense far superior than us elitist Dopers, for example. Bullshit.
I also realize I’ve offered a very narrow definition of dumb: if you’re unable (or, frankly, unwilling) to reach reasonable, fact-based conclusions regarding matters that require such a thought process, then you’re in the chucklehead fraternity. It’s intentionally a specific and practical definition.
What usually triggers these thoughts are politics, the arena where dummies collectively have enormous power. It’s what gave us Trump. I get that voting for Trump satisfied a deep emotional need for many, and that they generally didn’t realize that in reality they were often voting at cross purposes with their own practical needs. Because they’re dopes. But everyone has paid the price for the imbecile who was elected.
Maybe I’m just really railing at the whole American exceptionalism notion, that our country is peopled by largely virtuous, high-potential regular folks, folks with an abundance of common sense. Nope. We’re mostly dummies. And the majority of nitwits form the foundation of our political system.
I for one will await your return, and appreciate your POV even if I don’t always agree with it. May you return when you’re comfortable.
And this is very true. The sense of belonging, of being part of something greater than yourself (or, from a different POV, something LESS) is incredibly intoxicating. There’s a trope with a greater or lesser degree of truth, in which the more “intelligent” (different definitions of which are part and parcel of this whole thread) feel lonely and outcast.
If you question everything, even rationally, you are likely to find yourself, or at least consider yourself an outcast, because most groups want a certain degree of like-mindedness. And as (arguably) inherently social animals (as a primate, many of which do form social groups) that’s very uncomfortable. Each individual of course has all of the above on different scales. Some value the group identity as key, some more so (fanatics), some less so. Same for valuing “intelligence” - lots of saws about well -educated- (as different from smart) persons who can’t accomplish anything practical - the professor vs the plumber.
And lastly, once again, at it applies to Trump, we’re leaving out the power of propaganda. If you’re told over and over and over again that one side is truthful, and the other is a liar, you’ll dismiss the “lies” and hold to your truth, especially when this is being shared with you by a person from a position you Trust. And once you’re in that position, speaking beyond things that are outside your personal observation range, you may never overcome that mindset.
This, IMHO, is distinctly different from:
Okay. I think that the left/liberals tend to see themselves as not having like-mindedness. Whereas there are many issues on the left where dissent is not really tolerated. Now maybe the left only tolerates the GOOD ideas, and the right only tolerates the BAD ideas. But I would say that enforcement of like-mindedness at this point is a wash at best.
Elections are not an intelligence test. Also, no system is fool proof. We started as a confederation of states. We ran into a problem when a group of states, sorted by geography, wanted a law to continue (slavery) that was causing a lot of problems and highly objectionable to everyone else. So just having areas or bits of land vote their own interest doesn’t always work.
We probably had more of a diversity of opinions in the political parties when there was less choice for each individual. If you wanted to get ahead, you probably had to join the dominant party in your locality, then work to make your opinions known and have impact within that party. It was a “forced” union, but people were required to learn how to get along.
Now we have a lot more freedom of choice in which party to belong to. No one seems to care about legacy and history. If all of the smart and virtuous join one party, there is still another party that will take the evil and stupid. And you still have elections between the two parties. And the evil and stupid may be stronger than you think, because you are massing them together and they are getting their ideas and opinions reinforced on a regular basis. And it’s harder to talk to them because we have no pretext of communication anymore, we’ve all mutually agreed to hunker down in these two camps. Whereas with the more separate models, separation not by choice, maybe there was some recognition that we were different and we had to talk to get along.
Now there were lots of times that didn’t work, nationalism, wars, etc. No one method is foolproof. But I think we are starting to see some serious downsides to the sorting we are doing right now. I’m not sure the satisfaction and feel goods anyone gets from being on the virtuous or smart side is worth it.
I did try to make the point that wanting to be part of a group was not automatically linked to any one philosophical or political belief. I’m not putting value judgements on it by saying that if you don’t share certain POVs with Democrats/Republicans then said groups will likely not consider you part of their mainstream, but may consider you “affiliated”. In the way we have various flavors of “liberal” politicians that caucus with Democrats out of such loose agreement. Or how you have (or, more recently -had-) socially liberal but otherwise traditionally Republicans who have now been outed by MAGA which has damn little to do with prior Republican agendas.
Anyway, @Jay_Z’s point is probably correct, that the political problems in the USA are made much worse (in all likelyhood) by our evolved two party system. Not that other, more representative legislatures don’t have their own problems, but the binary is very possibly the worst of all worlds. Because unlike a parliament where the need to seek alliances is often baked in, it’s a very stark US/THEM and only been getting worse.
Which, however, doesn’t have much to do with intellect. Tribalism seems to apply as a knee-jerk, often trained reflex that kicks in (for many people, myself included at times) before rational thought. And if one is intelligent, then it’s very easy to use said intellect to justify or explain your reasons for your tribal adherence. After all, you can almost always find -something- that supports your POV, especially if you stick to idealist versions (book version) of a philosophy and ignore how they work in almost all (or all, but I want to avoid nitpicking) real work examples.
Such as all our threads on Effective/Enlightened Altruism, or the current thread on the assumptions of extreme libertarianism/capitalism.
I think if you could somehow get the average IQ of each party’s members it would be pretty close. I can only find this as a source Cognitive ability and party identity in the United States - ScienceDirect which claims Republicans have a slight edge in 3 categories of intelligence. So, I don’t think calling people dumb to explain a particular election is helpful.
As Jonathan Haidt wrote in The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion: Amazon.com, lefties and righties are wired at least as differently as males and females. Each with large blind spots relative to the perceptions of the other. Righties are stunningly “dumb” on things that matter greatly to lefties that righties can scarcely perceive, much less think are important. And vice versa.
I personally lean left, so I think righties are “dumb”. Or at least hopelessly blinkered as to vitally important features of a viable society. They tend to think the same of me.
Not just that. When I was a kid racism was accepted - blatantly in the South, not so in the North, but it was still there. Plenty of people grew up with it, and even if they can’t be racist in public they can be at home, or by themselves. Trump says out loud the stuff they say in private and think. That validates them, and they figure he must be brave to be willing to say the “truth.”
The dumbest person I know - a flat earther, contrails believer, 9/11 truther, etc., etc. is exactly like this.
I’ve also noticed that these people refuse to admit they are wrong. I’m not sure they’re being obstinate, they just block any evidence of their being wrong, no matter how blatant. They’ll just move on to something else. That’s why dumb people don’t get science. Self correction is beyond their imagination.
I think this is utter nonsense in itself, and it’s also not pertinent to this thread. We are talking about the difference between people who love and hate democracy. Not every rightie, conservative, or Republican hates democracy, nor do all lefties, liberals, or Democrats love democracy. However, all MAGAts hate democracy and would see it done away with.
I totally agree that it feels like that to them. That much is obvious from the reaction. But all anybody is trying to get are equal rights. So the true situation fits the analogy of one new sibling. It’s just that a newborn requires an enormous amount of effort, care, and resources. And these guys don’t recall when all of those resources were devoted to them (or they didn’t notice) so it looks disproportional from where they stand. What do you mean I have chores and he gets a tit in his mouth? Waaahhhh!!! See?? I can scream too!!