“Smart v. Stupid” may sound a little pretentious in today’s wide-open marketplace of ideas. But current political debate is long on “noise” and short on substance primarily because stupid ideas go unchallenged.
We all remember James Carville's 1992 admonition, "It's the economy, stupid! He focused an entire campaign on what’s important, and in doing so won the White House for Bill Clinton. When he said it -- both to the campaign and to America -- he meant stick to substance; avoid sinking into protracted arguments about made-up issues.
Today, there is a different ethos to politics. During eight years of Bush the Lesser, we watched pandering-for-distraction reassert itself in a way that hasn’t been seen since the Republican’s now famous Southern Strategy. It relied on the tactic of race-blame and was used to elect every Republican president from Nixon to Reagan.
Here’s a bit of history: Reagan fans argue that candidate Reagan’s decision to give a states-rights speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi was just a coincidence. Philadelphia is where three civil rights workers were famously lynched in 1964. Near as I can tell, those were the only two events for which little Philadelphia, Mississippi ever made national news.
Reagan’s campaign strategist, Lee Atwater, admitted the racial pandering, after cancer caused him to reassess his own dark life. He also revealed the tactic of replacing racial epithets with code language like “states rights” to resonate with white racists.
Jump to today. The current version of the Southern Strategy works like this. Find the ordinary men and women who grew up truly believing that if they just worked hard enough they could be anything they wanted – even rich. Then give them an excuse for why it didn’t happen.
The excuse doesn’t have to be well-reasoned, or even logical. It just needs to relieve the pain of unmet expectations. It has to identify a villain that robbed these folks of the chance they’d worked so hard for. Blame liberals or poor people or educated people or socialists, or lately brown people. Blame anyone -- the operative notion is blame, not who. “Without [insert villain here] you’d be rich,” it goes (even if you never finished high school and can’t even spell “investment.”) Without [insert villain here] it would still be the happy 1950’s of our collective imaginations.
The party that formerly consisted of industrialists and bankers -- and relied on manipulating racists -- unlocked the key to recruiting the gullible segment of the middle class. Create a ridiculous straw man, coordinate by morning email, and flog that poor scarecrow to death. Then repeat.
Today, the battle for power isn’t between right and left, big and small, conservative and liberal or even Republican and Democrat. Today’s battle for power is between those who want to debate smart ideas and those who want to distract you with stupid ones. Stupid may be winning; Democrats are using it now and then too.
Many ideas (whether ultimately right or wrong-headed) are smart enough to be worthy of discussion. Others are utterly idiotic. We need to focus our time and attention on the smart ones.
“Obama isn’t an American,” is a dumb idea. Universal health care is a smart one. "Socialists are in the White House" is a dumb idea. How much to regulate commerce is a smart one. “Dumb ideas” are offered to distract and obscure and excuse. “Smart ideas,” whether you agree with them or not, have a logical basis upon which to disagree.
So what’s the secret to the power of these really dumb ideas? It’s only partly that someone who has had an unspectacular life is hungry to blame someone else. The other reason is liberal inclusiveness, the philosophy that everyone’s contributions are equal. Somewhere along the line, we decided fairness dictated dumb and dishonest ideas should be respected anyway. Even though they are dumb and dishonest, the logic goes, they are still ideas.
It’s stoner-logic, a dumb idea, a hippie-era notion of open-mindedness that leads liberals to allow stupid ideas to go unchallenged. That changes today.
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First published in Tucson Sentinel
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Jeanette DeMain
Cap'n Parrotdead
Jack Blackshear
Bob Calhoun
Steven Rockford
Kate Flannery
Salon.com
Comments
Every time that I listen to those in power today talk about why something is wrong from the oil spill to economics it blame President Bush. So who is it that is making President Bush the villain?
You go and find a picture of the really stupid among us. They are there and they always will be, but you used them here. The scum you dug up want to blame President Obama. President Obama is putting the blame on everyone else instead of saying this is my problem. When Nancy Pelosi was asked how long everything was going to be blamed on President Bush she responded something to the effect until everything is right. In other terms, forever. Congress has never gotten everything right and I don't care who is running things.
So with President Obama in office for about a year and a half, and Democrats running Congress for about 8 years now, I don't remember exactly what year they took over right now, the villain is Bush, the villain is the right wing, the villain is everybody BUT those who are currently running our government.
bless your little heart.
Thank you.
Indeed, there seems to be a collective neurosis on the part of those of us born in the 50s, we believe that the life we saw on "Ozzie and Harriet", "Leave it to Beaver", "The Donna Reed Show", and the rest were an accurate portrait of what life was like in our childhood. For most of us, it was accurate - at least in our little-kid world things were pretty uniformly nice for most of us; parents really did know everything, and the policeman really was your friend. And I can't remember how many times it was drummed in my little ears that you could do anything, if only you tried hard enough, or wanted it badly enough.
Then we had to get older and find out what the world was really like. The TV family sitcoms were a Potemkin village. Our parents were just winging it, hoping that they were doing it right (just like we do now). Effort does not guarantee results and results certainly do not guarantee reward.
I can understand why some of my contemporaries want to retreat to a past that never really was. And the current crop of ugliness and stupid ideas is popular with that set, because it's underlying message is "it's not your fault", which it may very well not have been. But that doesn't mean that the scapegoats are guilty.
I would however agree with you on the hypocrisy of the conservative side. Particularly on some tea party members. But I'd be willing to wager they're not the only guilty party in the crowd.
It might be a smart idea to want to provide a safety net for the needy, elderly and infirm. It is a flat out stupid idea to layer yet another social spending program with suspect actuarial forecasts on top of an already bloated and straining system replete with two social programs, medicare and social security, KNOWN to be actuarially bankrupt.
It might be hidden as the guise of a smart idea to implement popular elements of a program now and to not worry about the costs of it later as in around 2016 so there's a disconnect between benefit and costs. In the private sector or in personal finance it would be called a stupid idea, say, to agree to move into a house when acknowledging you will not know the true costs of the place until 2016.
When a thoughtful conservative seeks to highlight the intellectual arrogance of this kind of pious intonation about the rightousness of one side of the political debate over the other, they will be called stupid. But understand well, that such diatribes as this happens to be one of the more effective recruiting tool for the right. All they have to do is state the obvious which is that if you disagree with what the left wants done they will simply shake their head and patronizingly suggest the reason you disagree is that you are stupid and if you only knew better you would see it their way.
It is, after all, the justification for federalizing aspects of daily life previously left to the states to decide. It may be fine, it will be argued, to allow "progressive states" to do as they please, but less progressive states such as (usually) Alabama and Mississippi and (until Clinton arrived) Arkansas would not do it correctly.
It's the "bless their little hearts" patronizing strategy.
The general gist of this column have been around and trotted out for decades as a way to defend progressive ideas when they are not popular with the electorate. It merely suggests the right dupes the stupid, gets the votes, and, if the stupid were only smarter, they would realize how right the left happens to be. It's a nice rationalization to not have to admit to espousing political unpopular ideas.
That this diatribe garnered an Editor's Pick would seem to suggest the editors never discussed political science when they were filled with the hubris of youth as college freshman.
Our new health care plan is paying for insurance not health care, big difference in cost those two, I think we can afford it, we are the richest country in the world, right?
Not if we keep up spending more than we take in, bucko.
yeal, war ain't cheap. Take a look at where the money is going. Not to liberal-bleeding heart-whatever causes. Not even a close 3rd on the list.
Sincerely,
bucko
I don't doubt it, but he forgot its common use in Goldwater's 1964 campaign for president.
Here's an interesting tidbit from a Juan Williams piece for NPR:
"During the 1964 campaign, Reagan gave speeches in support of Goldwater and spoke out for what he called individual rights — read that also as states' rights. Reagan also and portrayed any opposition as support for totalitarianism — read that as communism."
Reagan giving a speech about states' rights in Philly Miss. was evil. (His worshippers were and are dumb...and some of them are evil too, if only by proxy. Evil at arm's length.)
GregC - "yeal, war ain't cheap. Take a look at where the money is going. Not to liberal-bleeding heart-whatever causes. Not even a close 3rd on the list." Right on. All this stuff about how y'all can't afford to take care of your own people (I'm a Canadian, with regulated banks and a universal health system) while you're blasting other countries to smithereens with the biggest military in the world (AND STILL LOSING!) is one of the BIG dumb things...and yet the military spending is sacrosanct...
This really is about the problem with the current political climate.
Stupid ideas are given all the time in the world and in process all the smart ideas are drowned out. Like you said it is becoming a bipartisan problem.
I think you're right Steve. Goldwater arrived at the transition from overt racist language to racial code language. He -- along with Strom Thurmond -- probably established the modern connection between white supremacist language and terms like "states rights." It would be a few years before the strategy was refined enough to prevail in a presidential election.
The strategy was invented, I believe, by a guy named Harry Dent, who was later peripherally involved in Watergate.
How many hippies and stoners are in the screaming mobs you see at tea bagger rallies? You were doing ok until you went off the rails with claims about people you obviously are not familiar with.
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Those are electrical symbols.
They represent resistance.
As a REAL American and one who has been around a sufficiently long time to be totally disgusted with all of these bastards in government, I do realize that, whatever they are labeled, they are one and the same, repiglicrats, etc.
The sons of bitches are in it ONLY ONLY ONLY for themselves.
If you have been sucked into believing that any one of these scumbags gives the tiniest turd about you, I can sell you anything.
Collectively the citizens of this country seem to have no long term memory, so they must be reminded again and again and again what happened the last time they voted stupidly - and the time before that, and the time before that, and...