The War on ‘Stupid-ism’

We aren’t being smart. I want us to be smarter. 

You want to win the culture war? Make America smart again. 

Allow me to introduce “Smart-ism”—a cure to what Donald Trump so rightly named “Stupid-ism”  in his recent interview with the philanthropist Tom Klingenstein. Trump coined the term “Stupid-ism” while he and Klingenstein were trying to find the most fitting moniker to give to our left-wing opponents. 

Stupid-ism is a virus of the mind, but it is infecting the heart, body, and soul of America. We have a rapidly spreading infection that is seeping into our cities, government, schools, health care, and culture—an infection that we must address with swift and serious antiviral action. Unfortunately, this is an easily spreading invisible pathogen. 

In part, that’s because our political adversary is difficult to fend off. And that’s because they are usually very nice. 

David French, for example, is a nice man.

In fact, in his critique of French, Sohrab Ahmari went so far as to say in his piece Against David French-ism that it “isn’t easy to critique the persona of someone as nice as French.” French has been a constant critic and opponent of Trump in his quest to supposedly “Save Conservatism from Itself.” Once a former legal champion of religious liberty and conservative causes, proud pro-lifer, and evangelical Christian, French has caught the Stupid-ism virus. He is not alone. He and his allies—the Liz Cheneys, Mitt Romneys, Paul Ryans, John Boltons, Mitch McConnells, and Jeff Flakes—are so sick with Stupid-ism that they don’t understand the warmth they feel from the left isn’t admiration, but rather the feverish glee of discovering a useful idiot. Falling in and out of lucidity, they cheer with joy when the Steve Bannons are unjustifiably imprisoned and weep with sorrow when the assassin’s bullet misses a president’s head. 

This is a pandemic that kills virtue with politeness. It is reshaping our culture. Ahmari wisely adds of French’s niceness, “it is in part that earnest and insistently polite quality of his that I find unsuitable to the depth of the present crisis facing religious conservatives.” The trend of a certain breed of conservative taking a sharp left turn without common sense is clearly contagious.

Smart-ism is the cure.

The latest study shows that human IQ has decreased for the first time since they started measuring it in 1905. Our education system is abysmal compared to other developed countries and people spend an average of seven hours a day staring or swiping on a screen. The average student no longer wishes to answer questions in classrooms because they are so concerned about what others think of them. Psychology Today reports that students are “afraid of even letting themselves think out loud about a position that might land them in trouble through social sanctions and accusations that they are racists, fascists, bigots, or sexists.” 

The same article warns that if political science students become accustomed to having to keep their mouths shut, then it’s “only a matter of time until the mind shuts, too.” Our classrooms make things even worse. Twenty percent of adults in the U.S. can’t read a book written at a fifth-grade level.

These shocking literacy levels are important because uneducated citizens are unable to fully participate in a democracy. 

How can you make an educated decision about which candidate to vote for or policy to oppose if you can’t read? How can you be a productive citizen if you can’t comprehend anything above a ninth-grade level—like the 75 percent of welfare recipients? What are you contributing to society when the only thing you can understand is the number on your monthly check from the government? 

Being stupid makes you dependent upon the government. This the left knows well.

Heaven forbid we continue to read the old white men who taught us about the essentiality of tradition to human flourishing and created the foundations of Western civilization. Out with Plato; in with poorly-written postmodern queer, feminist, and minority fiction. Dead white men, after all, could be considered offensive. L’horreur! 

Instead, everyone should feel represented! Everyone should be comfortable! Everyone should win! That’s the nice thing to do, right?

And that’s the problem. Our culture of nice is making us dumb. 

That is why people are drawn to Donald Trump. It’s why they tolerate or even like the mean tweets.

He may not always be nice, but he’s usually right. Trump doesn’t confuse empathy with intelligence, as our Stupid-ism infected friends do. He doesn’t cower to the peer pressure of social norms if those norms are bad, unhealthy, or dangerous for America and its people. He runs on facts, not feelings.

Perhaps most importantly, Trump doesn’t care whether you like him. Elon Musk feels the same way, saying in a recent interview that wanting to be liked is a real weakness. He is correct. But it’s all anyone seems to value these days. We want to be liked. An entire generation has been raised receiving their affirmation and dopamine hits through digital “likes” via social media. Our neural pathways have been rewired to have an overwhelming desire for approval. We have become a society desperate for popularity. Which is stupid. 

Saturated in nice, we have been told that tolerating everyone and everything is kindness or empathy. Because Trump isn’t this empty brand of nice, because he refuses to go along with the absurd and ridiculous, the enemy depicts him as someone like Hitler.

Klingenstein remarked, “We have to understand, we’re in a war… and in a war, you play by different rules… there’s no basis for compromise.” 

Trump added “The Republicans have to get tougher…. They don’t fight like they should fight.”

He’s right. We don’t fight like we should fight. We’re too nice. 

We fight with rules. They fight with Rules for Radicals. We keep bringing knives to gunfights and expecting the other side to act honorably. 

They won’t. 

Even if Trump wins the 2024 Presidential election, unless we conservatives become willing to be perhaps a little less nice—fighting back against lawfare, dismantling the administrative state, reaching voters like college-educated women and GenZ, changing tactics, and invoking the courageous spirit of Sir Winston Churchill over that of appeasing Neville Chamberlain—we will lose the greater war. We must be courageous truth-tellers, championing tradition and virtue, not acquiescing to peer pressure. But we must also show up for each other, even if we don’t completely agree on everything. As Benjamin Franklin reminds us, “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

With Stupid-ism we are told to buy into the lies, the failed policies, the bad science, the outrageous government spending, the denial of the clear cognitive decline of a sitting president. 

But no more. This is where we make our stand. 

Help is not coming. We have to save ourselves from the infection of Stupid-ism. We must prioritize the harmonious health of our movement and act as one body. We must be unafraid to push back and reclaim our hitherto surrendered ground. 

To eradicate Stupid-ism and make America smart again, we must stop being so terribly nice. That’s the cure. 

It’s also how we win.