Politicians who criticise Donald Trump or his supporters for being stupid have missed the point. Stupidity is not a failing; it is a social order.
When stupid people feel economic precarity, they intuit that any competition for scarce resources shall be won by people smarter than they. The only hope they have of winning is by being on a winning team and thereby benefit from group membership.
The USA was arguably at the zenith of its power in the years following WWII. It had imposed its unbacked currency as the world’s reserve currency. It set up the rules for international trade, much to its own benefit. The civil rights movement had not yet occurred and women were still second-class citizens. America was “great.” A white American male, even an assembly-line worker, could expect home ownership, healthcare, and a comfortable retirement. Being on the winning team matters.
The conclusion is that in times of precarity, stupid people must turn group membership into a crisis — whether being white, Christian, American, or European — individual competition for resources must be converted into conflict between groups. Jingoism, xenophobia, racism, culture wars, misogyny — these might result from stupidity, but they are stupidity’s smartest responses to precarity.
This is the reason Trump has never suffered political consequences for acts of stupidity. They are qualifications, not disqualifications.
Fascism is a natural ally of stupidity
Fascism is a natural ally of stupidity because it too is based on societal division. Most importantly, the single requirement fascism makes is the single virtue that stupid people offer: obedience. Obedience is the great equaliser. Where creativity and ingenuity is not required (or even tolerated), a stupid person has the same value as a smart person. Performance differences in following orders are smaller than for problem-solving. This is why it is impossible to talk a stupid person out of fascism, as long as precarity and eventual demise are the alternatives.
It is an irony that the political class [MAKE MORE CLEAR] most critical of Trump and his methods should be the class most responsible for his ascendency. By failing to restructure the financial system after the 2008 crisis, they husbanded a monster of such immense appetite that it is now cannibalising the civilisation that created it. The resultant precarity is feeding fascism.
Fascism is a natural ally of billionaires
Unfortunately for these elected politicians, the billionaires that they sought to protect have switched allegiances. They are now openly backing fascist candidates and methods. A fascist regime that billionaires hope to regulate through corruption is [TO THEM] preferable to a democracy that presumes to regulate them. Fascism is not the principal enemy of democracy. It is merely a preference of a rogue financial system and its billionaire overlords. Vast accumulations of wealth have always been inimical to democracy, although the manifestations (bribery, lobbying, rotating regulatory agency doors, propaganda, etc) vary. Is it a coincidence that billionaires and financiers cause the precarity that gives rise to fascism? Perhaps. Regardless of the origin of the relationship, the relationship exists.
The message to the last democratically-elected politicians is that their loyalties need no longer be split. Citizens prone to fascism do not want them; billionaires no longer need them. They must now accept the odd political reality in which elected politicians need be loyal only to those who elected them.
