Against “The People”

Secret will be late again today. Sorry. To make it up for you, I’m ready to go full-Joker. Strap in.

1. Pity or Bigotry?

Listeners were not happy with me in the comments after Wednesday’s TNL. Many were upset that I spent part of the episode lamenting how unbelievably stupid some very large part of America is.

A brief précis of my case from TNL:

Americans do not seem to care much about the war in Iran. They do not seem to react rationally to inputs. Sometimes they are incapable of grasping object permanence. Other times they assign permanence to objects long after they have ceased to exist. Americans are stupid.

In response, many community members made a case that went along one of two lines. Here is the first:

FFS, Tim and JVL. The average American looks something like this: They’re a cashier at Aldi who drives for UberEats in their spare time to make ends meet. They’re at some form of work 10-12 hours a day and when they get home they’re physically and mentally exhausted. Their feet hurt from standing for hours and their brains hurt from dealing with frustrated customers who yell at them for store policies out of their control and don’t tip their delivery driver. They do not have the money for a NYT subscription, and their jobs don’t involve time when they can read the news even if they wanted to. All they want to do in the hour or two of real downtime they have between Job 1, Job 2, and chores (not to mention wrangling kids if they have them) is watch something brain numbing before they collapse in bed.

I too find the American people very frustrating at times, but as someone who also studies politics for a living (in a different context) I do also try to remind myself that a) I get paid to do it, and they don’t; and b) I have a reasonable white collar job that usually doesn’t leave me physically exhausted or require me to work an extra shift just to have money to pay for those eggs.

They know about the price of eggs because shopping for food is something they have to do to survive. Reading the NYT isn’t.

Here is the second:

When I hear people in the media (including you guys) talk about how uninformed Americans are, I feel it’s important to remind you that the vast majority of Americans don’t get paid to follow politics or foreign affairs. Their lives are hard. They have grueling jobs and kids and very little free time. They spend that free time on things that give them a bit of joy. One of the biggest problems we have as a society is that people on top have no sense whatsoever of how other Americans live.¹

Do not skip that footnote, please. 👆

Obviously there is some overlap between the two arguments and they both boil down to:

• “Normal people” do not have the resources needed to understand the world around them, either because of financial pressures, time pressures, or both.

• These constraints are imposed on them.

• To the extent that “normal people” choose not to engage with the world around them, this is a rational choice. Only people who are paid to understand the world can be expected to do so.

• None of this makes uninformed, or misinformed, or disinterested members of the public “stupid.”

I’d like to respond to these criticisms. Because maybe The People aren’t “stupid.”

Maybe what I should have said, more precisely, is: Something like a controlling plurality of Americans are rotten.

Allow me to explain...