The Idiot

The relentless hothouse blizzard of 2018-19 media has one large mystery in its sights, beside which all other political mysteries are dwarfed: the Trump voter. Who is this enigmatic nocturnal phantom mega-fauna?, so elusive pundits speculate endlessly about it and the remnants of its behavior rather than actually find it and do research first hand, so delicate we mustn’t risk offending it or even drawing conclusions about its anthropological nature, so potentially dangerous it’s treated with the deference of a polar bear or a Sasquatch, emerging from the wilderness only for the rare coffee-shop quip to the passing urban journalist and then to amass, chillingly, at one of those Trump rallies no one else seems invited to.

This particular homunculi is, indisputably, the problem at the heart of everything.

You may say, with some reason, that there’s no such thing as a single kind of “Trump voter” – that no one aspect or taxonomic category fits the paradigm. If this is your official position, then it makes sense that figuring out the eating and mating habits of these spectral beasts all but impossible.

But modern media strives toward decorousness, and so what essential realities we can readily glean about Trump voters, because they are Trump voters, go largely unmentioned. We truly don’t need to know more about them, even as our culture rips its hair out wanting to know more because of what they may or may not do, as a demographic, in the next election. But ipso facto, we know all we need to know, and possibly all we can know. And that is this: they’re idiots. They can be trusted in 2020 to do the wrong and stupid thing, and that’s it. How many of them there actually are is the more vexing question, but before the giant tech companies do manage to algorithmically foretell our actions, Minority Report-style, we can only make population guesses, as if these voters are endangered whales or okapis we’re never sure how to track.

The media calls this perfect American goat the “low-information voter,” one of the most delightfully plains-spoken media euphemisms I’ve ever heard. That journalists have come to this straight-in-your-face phraseology we can at least be thankful for. There are more inflammatory ways to characterize these pesky humanoids, and I’m not so certain inflaming their coddled, over-carbed, over-entertained sense of idiot pride isn’t exactly what’s necessary now, as the campaign season begins its way-too-early lift-off. As it is, “low-information” says a lot – it’s not a label you can co-opt and put on your t-shirt – but from here the stakes seem a little too high to leave it at that. It's clear that the 22% or so of eligible voters that voted for Trump, and the unknown smaller percentage who still, amazingly, make up his “base,” don’t have a cogent thought in their head, don’t have a 3rd-grader’s Schoolhouse Rock understanding of how government works, don’t have a lead pipe’s sense of how any economy functions, and certainly don’t possess the savviness of your average lap dog about when they’re being lied to, by someone who otherwise couldn’t sell a glass of whiskey to Steve Bannon. We don’t know that much about this chimera, the Trump voter. But this much we know.

Alas, “low-information,” for all its flatness, implies that information, if provided in sufficient amounts, is all we need to solve the problem. But we’re not at a loss for information, or opportunities to consume it. Given the evidence, it seems we’re probably looking at a nexus of intellectual anti-qualities here, a chunk of America revealed as being not only low-information (another way of saying Fox News), but low-reason, low-curiosity, low-retention, low-capacity, low-modesty, low-public-educational-standards, low-discipline, and low-empathy. Whatever evil qualities have rushed in to fill these gaps is where individual Trump voters would differ from one another – and how they differ in that regard is for our purposes entirely irrelevant. The vacuum of their skulls defines their significance to us.

Noam Chomsky has spent decades claiming that people can govern themselves perfectly well, thank you, and so should be given that opportunity. Any good radical/progressive would agree, in the ideal. But right now we're faced with ineluctable proof that perhaps a full quarter of Americans, one in every four adults, shouldn't be allowed to vote in their current state. They're not responsible for themselves, in their hick-caves built from guns, crucifixes and MacDonald's wrappers, and they may takes us down with them.