Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.
That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”
Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?
Probably? I haven’t been very impressed with American adult society since I was in high school witnessing how easily they followed Bush II into war.
“My Chancellor says we should not indulge in superficial anti-Americanism now, but I assure you: Mine is not superficial at all.”
This is not about intelligence. People, in general, are really fucking smart. Think of the dumbest person you know, who is not cognitively disabled. I’d bet they are intelligent enough to hold down a job and live a meaningful life. Of all the things I’ve seen that hold people back, lack of intelligence doesn’t even rank.
I think high levels of bias are to blame. Current media and culture encourage the embrace of bias because it makes people easier to sell to; more suggestible to marketing. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, if your navel feels good when someone sings your tune, you’ll believe whatever they tell you. Especially if you aren’t even making an attempt to understand your bias tendencies.
Advantageous geography has allowed the US to fall upward in success throughout its existence. It’s as simple as that, no joke. By sitting on a mountain of natural resources and having no formidable enemies in the western hemisphere, the US was the default player to take center stage post WW2. Europe was decimated and America funded the war. Bam, the US gets success in spite of its thoroughly racist and regressive culture. Their position (and hubris) became too entrenched for there to ever be a legitimate contender. We might get to witness a changing of the guard now though, we’ll see how much damage 47 does.
FDR era is an incredible circumstance though. The past North’s failure to reconstruct the South led to all kinds of strategic chess moves that ultimately saw the D and R parties swap. The liberals had to put aside the racism problems for a bit so they could unfuck the economy. It was probably the best that the progressives could have hoped to achieve given their challenges.
All said as an American. So we’re not all morons. But it’s a sticky, uphill battle. I’m not sure if it’s fixable without a big change to the world order. Thanks for the question!
America had an election and made its choice. Democrats want to transform America into Europe 2.0 but most Americans do not want that. We have a binary political system so that only leaves one other choice. It is what it is.
That’s wildly misrepresenting the mainline Dem platform.
Bernie Sanders would be a centrist or social democrat in a general European perspective and most Dems are to the right of that, in some cases very much so.
There was definitely a time when people were smarter. I read a comment on r/xennials that stuck with me. They were lamenting the loss of a the culture of their youth. I’m not sure I can rephrase it as well as they said it.
Basically they were describing how it used to be about how we questioned things. Like the show The X-Files. It was about seeking the truth. They noted how that show was reflective of how reality was. There was this common mindset that the answers are out there. That we can work together even to seek the answers and we will find them inevitably.
You see that doesn’t make much sense in 2025 because everyone has the answer to anything and everything. Except it’s their own answer. Not the answer. More than ever their answer is one which is derived from their internet / social media bubble.
There is no longer some big unknown out there full of mysteries to unravel. Not anymore. The zeitgeist right now is that I have my own world view and that’s the one. I know how the system works. I know the way. It’s the way I see the world. So why doesn’t everyone else come join my world view??? Are they stupid?
In the past we didn’t know everything. Nobody knew anything. Nobody had any illusion that they did. Nor could they whip out their pocket rectangle and find answers immediately.
In the past people had to be more open minded. They had to be honest about not knowing. Without modern media they had to be seekers of knowledge. As opposed to over confident purveyors relying on a quick internet search (these days a simple GPT query). The modern zeitgeist is one where everybody talks. Nobody listens. 8 billion deaf ears listening and learning nothing. Just waiting for their turn to talk. Everyone learned everything and they’re so damn sure of it.
Stupid people think they know it all. Smarter people are unsure of what they know. Of course there were stupid people before. But they knew they were stupid. Today the stupids can mask it by repeating words from the podcast, the tiktoks, the youtube videos they just watched.
It’s not uniquely an American problem. The American symptoms are quite a sight to beheld though.
So our technological progress has brutally outgrown our cultural one. I think you’re right.
That’s exactly it. Our biases and community instincts (for lack of a better word) can’t keep up with the firehose of information and direct communication with so many people and from so many sources.
In the past, small societies sort of kept things in check. You knew the people around you and everyone sort of found a common ground to share. Like when I was a kid in the countryside, I made friends with the other kids on our road because of proximity, not because we had tons in common. But we became friends despite being different and gained new experiences and built common ground through that. We learned to compromise and solve differences or issues.
Today you can find community anywhere online, so you’re less likely to have your “rough edges” smoothed out a bit.
Not that life in small societies is perfect, Svante described the Jantelov for a good reason, some small villages communities can get very insular, xenophobic and oppressive of anyone slightly off from the standard mold.
But I do think our range and speed of communication has outpaced our instincts and reference frames.
This is very insightful.
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
– George Carlin over 30 years ago
"The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”
– (source unknown, but sometimes mis-attributed to Churchill)
As much as I love these quotes, I think it’s important to qualify them:
Everyone is born stupid, but people can be educated. If we want an educated populace, we must put in the work to create functional systems of education, and celebrate intelligence as a society. It’ll be hard work, and there are plenty of people out there who would prefer to see the masses remain stupid.
“The way Americans regard sports heroes versus intellectuals speaks volumes” An article by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
“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.” ― Isaac Asimov
Not to be a jerk, but I’d argue everyone is born ignorant due to an inherent lack of knowledge. Ignorance can be rectified through education. I would also argue that everyone is born with varying levels of intelligence and ability; so not everyone is stupid but there are those who are, unfortunately. Stupid and ignorant mean very different things, even though they get colloquially misused often.
You’re not being a jerk, you’re being pedantic.
Ignorant is absolutely the better word, and I should have used it.
I think, however, that people are far more capable of gaining intelligence than we give them credit for. I don’t believe that IQ is assigned at birth, and it’s been shown that the entire idea of IQ testing is extremely flawed.
There are people born with learning disabilities, of course, but that’s a whole other conversation.
Miss Cleo was big in the 90s. And she wasn’t even the dumbest one. Americans have always believed in stupid bullshit. The CIA used to hire psychics too. Go back to the 1920s, and Americans pretty much took it for granted that fairies are real.
What’s changed recently is that the news media went from being a mostly curated place where completely lunacy was hard to find, to a right wing clown show led by con artists. When I was a kid news was for nerds only, now it’s more like the national sport where everyone has their team. And don’t underestimate the degree to which this was done deliberately - Elon buying Twitter was a pretty clear example of the billionaire mafia taking a platform that was sort of trying to be more attached to reality and making it a lot dumber and more right wing.
Here’s an honest response.
Grew up in South Florida. Shit was pretty liberal back then. Moved to a much more “conservative” state and found the same brain drain happening. At first it was fairly liberal, but has become less so.
Maybe we deserve it. Maybe we don’t.
The one thing I know is not to rely on your fellow human to do what is right.
They were pretty stupid back in the 90s and got worst over time. Obviously this is a generalization as there are some non-stupids too but judging by the election results they seem to be the minority.
What had happened is nothing new.
Thing is, USA never had a pure dictatorship. Or were affected by imperialism. People in Europe take to the streets far faster because there are generations that remember the boot of russia. Or were under imperialist rule. See again russia and/or nazi germany.
And while what had happened is nothing new, propaganda fuel hate circle had happened in such a short timespan and force humans has never seen before.
Further more. Explaining lies takes way longer and much more effort than spreading them around.
The south was always this racist, they were just isolated.
When social media unleashed their filth upon the nation the billionaires realized they had the ultimate weapon: a political bloc that voted purely on emotion, especially hate.
Add internet to fuel the fire
“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.’”
-Isaac Asimov
Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture. Or call it ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. Community has been replaced by an atomised screen time facing our individual echo chambers. Decades of neoliberalism has impoverished swathes of the population, materially and intellectually. There are many chickens coming home to roost.
I don’t think postmodernism had much to do with it. Go ask your average MAGA racist if they even know what that term means and they’ll shrug their shoulders. Similarly, the research does not show that your echo chamber theory holds water, and in fact it suggests the opposite. In the days before the world wide web, people were actually stuck in echo chambers, that being the communities where they lived.
It’s not that the MAGA voter is debating merits of intelectual movements, but a change in mindsets.
the shift from philosophers wondering “why are we here?” to “doesn’t matter why, what do we do now?” removed a sense of duty or obligation to less individualistic moralities drom the way people thought.
Billionaires are extracting all the wealth from this country and convincing the idiots that Maria from El Salvador with 2 dollars to her name is the problem.
so, the 1940s were a result of what happened in the 20s and thirties. and america almost went nazi. like, we almost had a nazi president elected instead of FDR the first time, and the business plot almost worked. would have, if they hadn’t chosen a military leader who’d turned socialist since retiring.
the 1960s… honey. do you really believe america was leftist? there were some kids who were. the anti war movement was pretty big, and they all had to be okay with lefty tactics, but it’s not fair to say ‘america was leftist’. richard nixon still got elected the first time.
americans are traiend to be cattle. this is true. and yes, the techniques for that training are better than they used to be.
look up what happened in the late 70s and 80s. it kiiiinda started under carter, but you get the sense he would have pulled back once he saw how it was going, and also tried to do good stuff (it just literally all got stopped). look at the career of newt gingrich. plus, ronald reagan and it’s consequences have been a disaster for humanity. they set in motion subtle sabotage of society that devastated the potential of future education or anything becoming less awful, while most of the cool people around at the time were exiled locked in deep dark cages or straight up assassinated by feds.
funny you should mention ‘social order’ though. the wealthy and powerful still do care. their version just isn’t the same as yours. have you ever read ‘a handmaid’s tale’ or ‘the turner diaries’? because those are the books they jack off to.
who is the Nazi that was almost president instead of FDR?
lindberg; guy who famously killed his own baby. apparently pretty good at planes.
What’s the evidence of Lindberg being behind the kidnapping? I’ve read something about a eugenics angle, that the baby possibly had some deformity. Is this what you’re referring to?
when a fascist accuses someone of something; they’re always guilty of the thing themselves.
