“When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent.” —Isaac Asimov
“Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.” —Shakespeare, King Lear
“How sad it must be—believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson
I could fill this column with quotes from the most educated and erudite people the world has ever known, but, sadly, the horse is already dead.
An unfortunate thing about democracy is that no progressive dream of building a better world can ever be fully realized; given its aversion to lying or cheating, and the grimy bones continuously demanded by howling conservative dogs, the left takes what it can get and cheers it on. More unfortunate, however, is that the converse doesn’t also hold; indeed, conservative dreams—always of tearing down—borne on the wings of money, propaganda, lies and even the tiniest fissures in the democratic bulwark, can be fully realized, resulting in a living nightmare for the rest.
And so, here we are. Again.
In the quantitatively largest example of mass-delusion and communal cognitive dissonance in the history of mankind, 74.3 million Americans voted not only for a brutal mass deportation of undocumented immigrants with the risibly deluded outcome of saving a few pennies on eggs or gas, but an ancillary contempt for climate policy, human rights and gun control, a national abortion ban, weakening of NATO, and an even more reactionary and biased Supreme Court under a government, as David Remnick of The New Yorker put it, “stocked with mediocrities whose highest qualification is fealty to the Great Leader.” Not surprisingly, given the level of engagement by the electorate (one to two issues for most), a vast majority of voters weren’t even aware of the malign parlay they made.
While the explainoverse busies itself with charts of county-by-county demographic breakdowns, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no excuse for what happened but that of a country—as Wade Davis examines with a pair of searing essays in his recent book, Beneath the Surface of Things—in serious decline. In a defector.com essay a few days ago, the always brilliant David Roth summed it in one astute line: “A healthy culture could not have produced a Trump, let alone elevated him in the way that ours has.”
A surprise victory in 2016 despite all that was known then was bad enough; eight years later, with a now unprecedented rap sheet for a world leader, what would it have taken to disqualify Trump in the eyes of voters? Not rape. Not a litany of felonies. Not blatant racism, misogyny, stealing from a charity or fellating a microphone. Trump’s supporters, at his clear behest, stormed the U.S. capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, supposedly in the name of “preserving democracy,” but when they had a chance to actually do this on Nov. 5, 2024, they failed to even recognize it.
It’s instructive to understand the collective cognizance at play here. In the 1980s, A&W launched a one-third-pound burger to compete with McDonald’s popular quarter pounder; the product flopped because most American consumers believed 1/4 to be a larger number than 1/3. Indeed, among American adults today: 40 per cent believe Earth is less than 10,000 years old; only 24 per cent accept the scientific theory of evolution; 54 per cent have less-than 6th Grade reading skills; 56 per cent think “Arabic” numerals should be banned from schools; 69 per cent believe in angels. Turbocharged by social media, it’s thus incredibly easy to manipulate large numbers of people—who self-affirm within their own family, school, work and online bubbles—to believe almost anything.
Yet, this isn’t a failure of individuals so much as current manifestation of long-running societal trends. As Isaac Asimov summed it decades ago, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
While you feel for people just struggling to get by who don’t have the wherewithal to sort farce from fact, it’s hard to have empathy for those who possess such capacity but are made wooden by their convictions, whether political, ideological or religious. Appealing to such dogma, the ground for this latest invasion of ignorance was softened considerably by a relentless online, television and podcast carpet-bombing of lies and disinformation about immigration, climate and the economy, as well as malign changes to a previously balanced Supreme Court that yielded rulings both usurping women’s freedom and favouring the unchallenged rule of a criminal.
Cooler, more-respected minds had no hope of prevailing. When venerated conservative organ The Economist endorsed Harris, it aimed squarely at readers “who see a vote for Donald Trump as a calculated risk. They may not see [him] as a person they would want to do business with, or any kind of role model for their children. But they probably think that when he was president he did more good than bad, and that in a second term he may do so again. We believe this analysis is recklessly complacent. It overlooks the tail risk of a second Trump presidency,” a risk detailed as no less than the end of much of world order.
While Harris offered stability, campaigning cautiously near the centre, The Economist averred, “you couldn’t imagine her bringing about a catastrophe.” Nor could we imagine how much promise for the world would be squandered in her defeat.
Which brings us to another thing about democracy: there will always be situations where nobody wins—even the people who think they did. On Wednesday, Nov. 6, 2024, the world staggered as if woken from a drunken nightmare only to discover it was all real. And so here we are. Again.
America has a habit of making history in all the worst ways, and so these coming years will be recorded much as 2016–2020 was: a devastating panorama of human folly and failure.
Just how bad is it?
For a so-called democracy, it can’t be any worse.
Leslie Anthony is a science/environment writer and author who holds a doctorate in reversing political spin.
