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?
Targeted, systematic attacks on education, and a robust propaganda networks ran by billionaires.
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!
The short version is this - once politicians realized that human engagement was maximized by anger, a segment of politicians focused on making white christian Americans believe they were a minority group under attack and being disenfranchised by their country. The seeds of this have been getting sowed for decades.
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.
I think the same thing happened in the beginning of the 20th century and partly is the reason for the two world wars which makes me afraid of the future seeing the global development of increasing tension and rearmament.
There was a time when computers were designed to grow our culture:
https://www.quora.com/Who-invented-the-modern-computer-look-and-feel/answer/Harri-K-Hiltunen
This is very insightful.
Here in Europe we always used to think Americans were stupid.
And it’s not like it’s prejudice from people never leaving their hometown. Nope, actually TV shows and movies make Americans look way smarter than they are.
Nope, the conclusion comes from people that met real Americans, either in Europe or in the US.
Last time I saw an American in Paris he was asking for ketchup on top of his duck breast. The most barbaric thing I’ve seen in a while 😂
“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.
Which contemporary philosophers demonstrate this supposed shift in thinking?
Hmm, we’ve lost our philosophical heart. Interesting. I feel like I knew this in my gut but couldn’t quite put my finger on it. I like the way you phrased this, I’ll have to remember it.
Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture.
I feel like this is a common regressive take. The Right/anti intellectualist movement understood postmodernism as giving them the right to claim that facts don’t matter.
Post modernism itself is a way of interrogating frameworks we take for granted. It’s not saying “facts don’t matter,” it’s saying “how do we know those are facts”? There are valid questions to ask about science as a way of knowing - which epistemological frameworks we take at face value, and if we really can. Lolita is a postmodernist work, because it’s asking you to interrogate what a novel means (in the context of an unreliable narrator - HH is lying to you, but he isn’t real. what does that mean about what is being described in a novel? Is a novel a window into a different universe which has a reality to be described?)
The Right’s unreality is more of a Romantic one - none of those fuckers are reading Derrida or Deleuze. It’s more related to sexual insecurities and the death drive. I’m not a Freudian but I look at anti intellectuals and see deep sexual confusion and fear. If “male” and “female” are permeable categories, how does someone who defines their existence solely by their white masculinity going to police the boundaries of their own identity?
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.
“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.
The quote of Asimov is on point. As a non-American, I remember rewatching “Friends” after Trump came into office and suddenly noticed this subliminal anti-intellectualism even in this rather progressive left leaning TV show: Ross is often ridiculed as boring or arrogant when he talks about science or just trying to be factual, whereas the stupidity of Joey and the superstition and denial of reality of phoebe are glorified as funny and quirky and often shown as equal or even superior to Ross’ intellectualism.
the only reason their kkk ass didnt join the nazi german campaign is that the president realised a big ass war against the germans and rebuilding europe is a super great deal.
us school lack of worldwide geography and history lessons, keeping the kids stupid as fuck.
the 2 party system makes sure no other new ideology comes beetween their bew god: the lobby money from the top 1%.
answering your question: yes
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
This is the furition of things Reagan and Nixon put into motion. There’s been a concerted effort to attack our public education and stoke reactionary sentiment for the last 40+ years to bring us to this point, the dumbing down is deliberate
The truth is our stupidty is not unusual, it’s just a preview of what is coming down the pipe for some of you. Right-wing populist dipshits are gaining ground in a lot of countries. It tends to go along with economic hardship. People look for other people to blame for their problems. The real truth is that it’s not immigrants, or jews, or woke women that are ruining everything for everybody, it’s a very small number of inconceivably rich people. Sure, the economy looks great (historically speaking) but real measures of happiness, like the cost of medical care, education and household measured in working-hours has shot through the roof, something which “the economy” does not capture very well.
Tl:dr, shit is going bad almost everywhere, and if you don’t get the to root cause of the issue ( a few rich people owning everything) then the stupids in your county are going to elect right-wing dipshits too.
“My Chancellor said we should not indulge in superficial anti-Americanism now, but I assure you:
Mine is not superficial at all!”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.
I don’t fucking get the religious right in my country, all I can say is they’re so fucking gullible by the corporate mainstream media, facts and hit them in the fucking face and they’ll always move the goalposts. They form an opinion and never be swayed by it, despite the strong evidence against it. They picked a guy who cheated on every wife he has, a criminal past, massive security clearance violations, is the most un-christlike in behaviors… And they excuse it all because they don’t like being told they can’t do things that are harmful to ourselves, or they only like receiving socialism but don’t like the responsibility of paying into it. They’re selfish as fuck, and I’m sick of it.
