Stupid Vs. Ignorant Vs. Stupid Plus Ignorant

I like to distinguish between them. Ignorant is simply a lack of information or learning. One is not paying attention, or has never paid attention, beyond one’s own narrow concerns. That same person could be expert in other fields, including very complex ones. Stupid on the other hand is the inability to reason, or the habit of accepting on faith the most ridiculous notions. And then there is both. The sum of all these is the Republican electorate. Below I will touch on examples on the D-side.

Not a few absurd claims are motivated by bigotry of one sort or another. You don’t really believe immigrants are eating pets, you just want to defame them.

I’ve always thought that many who level ridiculous charges don’t actually believe them, but simply deploy them as insults, in response to substantive claims they dislike and lack the faculties to rebut, and therefore interpret as mere insults. For instance, as I described the other day, I simply proffered a simple fact about inflation, and my interlocuter said, well you’re a Marxist economist and you should be ashamed of yourself.

The first level of both is the acceptance of ridiculous claims that simply defy common reason. JFK Junior is alive and coming back. Somebody is fomenting hurricanes and aiming them at places where Republican voters live. Immigrants are stealing dogs and cats for food. A student can walk into school one day and come home after gender reassignment surgery minus his man-parts. Newborn babies can be murdered. Trump won the 2020 election. Trump is still the president.

Then there is ignorance about how the government actually works. The most pervasive delusion is that a president can do whatever he likes by proclamations. Trump implies this constantly about himself, on the strength of the fantasies from his TV show. He can wave his hand and tell a corporation not to relocate to Mexico. He can force foreign nations to pay tariffs. He can end conflicts in Ukraine or the Mideast because the parties at the other end “respect him” (really, are scared of him). This last incidentally was said to be important during the Nixon Administration, the ‘madman theory,’ that a U.S. president’s purported mental instability, coupled with command of a nuclear arsenal, could bend adversaries to his will. It didn’t work.

The flip side of this naive theory of U.S. government is that it is used as a basis for criticizing Biden and Harris. They have “been there and couldn’t get it done.” We won’t linger on what “it” is. Of course, they actually did things and failed to do others, but the failures at least on the domestic side usually stemmed from ordinary limits on the powers of the Executive Branch. In this respect, the criticisms apply even less to a vice president. To some extent, Kamala Harris opens herself up to this by aligning herself with the accomplishments of the Biden Administration.

A particular political problem with disaster relief is that it makes sense to prioritize where there are more people. In this regard, the tendency of Republican voters to be concentrated outside of denser population centers puts them at a disadvantage when a disaster strikes. There’s a price to be paid for living remotely, away from people, something I happen to appreciate myself.

The big exception to limits on presidential power is in foreign policy and especially quick decisions on the use of force, where presidents do in fact have much freedom of action. That does not mean they can always compel other countries to do as the U.S. might want them to do. Often they can.

A hanging, current question in this regard is the extent of leverage the U.S. might have over Israel. Cutting off arms transfers and other aid is usually proposed as a way to dial back the carnage in the Mideast, but it is less than a certainty. It’s certainly worth trying, if only as a political statement. In this last respect I would think it would have more political impact in Israel, rather than would any material shortage of munitions due to an arms cut-off.

One has to be a bit of a student of history to avoid swallowing Trump’s boasts of presidential divinity, but this is a question of ignorance, not stupidity.

Another field of ignorance surrounds a few economics premises. I’ve already mentioned one — the matter of who bears the burden of a tariff. The idea that a party that pays does not actually bear the burden is a little subtle for many folks. Another is a president’s ability to just shuffle funds around as he likes to do for whatever seems most pressing at the moment.

Shortly after the 2016 election I was still working at the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Without any other comments, the bosses circulated a memo reminding the staff of the Impoundment Act, a law inspired by the aforementioned President Nixon in 1974 that stipulates that funds designated by the Congress must be used for the purposes designated by Congress. I know, what a concept, but at the time it seemed to need saying. It may again.

So too with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. If the Budget of the U.S. Government enacted by Congress and approved by the president says such and such funds are for the relief of immigrants, that’s the law. That doesn’t mean FEMA has to run out of money for hurricane rescue. There is always more money available, though it might require an act of Congress. There is no trade-off, either with money for immigrants or aid to Ukraine and Israel. In fact, there is no meaningful fiscal constraint on all of these things, put together. Compared to the size of the Federal budget, they are trivial. Perhaps the most common ignorance is to exaggerate the proportion of foreign aid (or “welfare,” but see bigotry above) in the Federal budget.

By the way, here is a page from FEMA debunking assorted nasty rumors about hurricane response policy. The first on the list is that if you lose your house, FEMA hands over just $750. I heard this repeated by someone in my own family, though thankfully a little investigation proved it incorrect. But hey! If the only thing you can get from the Gov when you lose your house is $750, who the hell is responsible? The voters, son! In point of fact, there is other assistance already available from the Gov.

Do you like the idea of the government promising to buy you a new house, if you choose to buy or build on a barrier island prone to destruction from hurricanes? Or if you otherwise choose not to insure your own property? I sure don’t. Suppose your home is uninsurable, an increasing problem all over Florida. Well then, don’t buy property and go somewhere else if you want to be a homeowner. It’s funny how libertarianism becomes flexible.

National tragedies raise the priority of national, collective response. The climate deniers are correct. Climate change is a spur to bigger government. It doesn’t mean predictions of climate change are motivated by a desire to expand government, but it is true that increasing, worsening weather events will require greater collective readiness and response. That means expanding FEMA and higher taxes. A fascinating book called “Rising Tide” about the great Mississippi River flood of 1927 made this point. Incidentally, my recollection (I read the book some time ago) is that one of the useful leaders in that catastrophe was one Herbert Hoover.

Besides a bigger FEMA, there will be questions of modernizing infrastructure to be more resistant to adverse changes in climate. Where I used to live in Maryland, electricity was provided through wires strung along telephone poles. Naturally storms felling tree limbs could knock out power. Those wires should go underground. So too with infrastructure that needs renewal, such as water pipes. There’s a long list.

The libertarian school of thought, that there is no role for collective action even in the face of national crises, is not much subscribed to these days, perhaps least among Republican voters. Trump and his ignorant and/or stupid followers think problems will be dealt with because the government could be Trump at the head of a table of minions who can just be told what to do, even though he utterly failed to do anything about infrastructure, his purported specialty, when he had the political means.

I promised to delve into some stupid and/or ignorant from the left side of the spectrum. If you get into the further left (which means left of me, natch), there are many examples. One merely has to survey the speeches of RFK Junior, Jill Stein, and Cornel West.

The worst in terms of impact is that helping Trump become president is a blow against U.S. imperialism. This actually makes some sense. Trump would wreck U.S. alliances and give over Europe over to Putin. So one imperialism would cede territory and power to another. I hope this is not what our comrades want, but ever since the Ukraine affair jumped off, I’ve perceived the after-effects of U.S./Soviet Friendship Society thinking. Some Russian agents on the purported left have become pretty obvious. Even red-diaper babies need to grow up sometime.

I see fewer such lapses in what I would call the serious left, and fewer still as you get closer to the center. The lack of canards on our side stems from the way the goalposts have shifted. More of the RFK/Stein/West types are in the end zone, while the Qanon lunatics have made it to the twenty yard line.

Joe Biden used to be a fount of big whoppers while campaigning against real competition, but those have mostly abated along with his campaign. In trying to think of deceptions from the Harris campaign, the leading one is the pretense that the Biden Administration is doing something useful to dial back the violence committed by Israel. Another is that more gas production, which it boasts about, somehow provides longer-term relief against climate change.

Decades ago, the novelist Norman Mailer wrote, “The shits are killing us.” He had no idea.