After a certain point, the distinction between stupid and evil vanishes. "Young boys throw stones at frogs for sport. The frogs, however, die in earnest" is one good analogy. For the frogs, it doesn't matter whether the boys throwing the stones hate frogs or not.
So it is with conservatives. Take Jonah Goldberg. Is he stupid? Without a doubt. Only a man of towering stupidity could write a book titled "Liberal Fascism" and claim that Hitler's vegetarianism and the fact that the Nazi Party had "socialism" as part of its name proves that fascism is a liberal political movement.
Yet, from this magnum dopus has spring an entire new cottage industry of wingnuts waving Jonah's work around and calling every liberal thing fascism. Did you know that advocating for voting rights is fascism? Or believing that the police should not have the right to summarily execute citizens? And the only way to keep this fascism from taking hold of the country is to send in the military to massacre the protesters, or to have the FBI arrest those who would like to see every citizen vote.
Thus from Jonah's profoundly stupid book does profound evil grow. It perhaps started as a joke, but those using it now to bolster their arguments mean for real people to die in earnest.
In addition to evil/dumb, I add pandering to the ignorant and pathological. Then again, I am by training and disposition what you can call an infinite shades of gray guy.
As for modern conservative intellectual philosophy, well, there's none. It's just nihilistic desire for destruction.
As a whole the conservative movement is nothing but an infinite continuum of stupid-evil; you can only assign numbers to individual cases. I'm 99% atheist, but it fascinates me now how the so-called issues have become biblical. We are discussing some serious right v. wrong, light v. dark, angelic v. satanic stuff.
I have repeatedly challenged my tiny social media audience to name their own "mankind's greater and lesser angels" ("you can even use the 7 deadly ones!") to discuss them in terms of today's politics, political parties, and politicians, and nobody ever bites.
Resolved: the conservative movement in this country has become the home of mankind's lesser angels.
Mostly “types” of stupid. 1.) Just plain stupid. 2.) Pretend stupid to blend in with stupid. 3.) Stupid to think they fooled Jesus. 4.) Stupid to think they are untouchable. Feel free to state your observed types.
I remember that first Voice column, Roy! And you haven’t lost your touch.
This is a very hard call for me to make because I think the evil is stupid – for example, conservatives/GOP can’t knowingly impoverish and kill their own supporters, and gin up white supremacy while refusing to broaden their appeal beyond their shrinking white base, and still continue to win elections or turn a profit; I also think the stupid is evil – all the mutating conspiracy theories on the Right from QAnon to 5G to anti-vaxxers/and anti-maskers all at the very least make people distrust their neighbors and at the worst lead to suffering and death.
So maybe I’d say 5/5 but I’d prefer to ignore the laws of mathematics and say it’s 100% of each.
They’re all evil, some more banal than others. On the bright side, polling today showed a whopping 67% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of race and the pandemic. Sure ~80% of Republicans still say he’s doing great but, banality of evil, meet the culmination of 50+ years of American pseudoconservatism.
I'm gonna say about sixty percent stupid, forty five percent evil. I know that doesn't add up to 100, but conservatives will be the first to whine at you about how hard they have to work compared to those lazy affirmative action hires. But, that's mostly because I'm watching Washington Journal, and Grover Norquist seems to think people who disagree with him should all be calling in on the democrat line and that CSPAN should be demanding to see their voter registration card before putting them on the air. Meanwhile, random caller on the independent line is demanding to know why democrats are even allowed since "the Constitution guarantees a republican form of government".
Evil parading as stupid, and it's deadly effective.
Case in point: DJT tweets some awful policy his Nazis are cooking up but misspells a word. Molly Jong-Fast, Rick Wilson, and Steve Schmidt (and others) spend the rest of the day tweeting about how stupid the president is. The misspelling trends all day long. Evil plan wins the day. In five fucking years the mainstream has utterly failed to learn to focus. It's all about "own" and "destroys" and all that tired bullshit.
Another case in point: QAnon. Massive sophisticated psy-op that has turned an alarming swath of the population into an anti-liberal democracy army by getting to believe things even though those things will kill them and the ones they love. All of the byzantine intricacies are certainly stupid, but it has utterly evil intent.
Sartre once said something pungent about how inanity was the point of anti-semitic discourse because it can't be argued with, disproven. They just exhaust you and seem to win. Every day Roy and any other publicly progressive figure gets this from whatever direction. Talib Kweli is a frequent target. WOC in my field bear its burden.
All I'm saying is that unless there's a massive effort to expose all the lies and machinations that made the conservation revolution possible by the ruling party -- an effort that won't happen in any conceivable timeline, since it would implicate Dems, Dem donors, major media corporations, and others, we'll have Viktor Carlson as the GOP contender in 2024 and he may well the fuck win.
Especially since in my lifetime I have only seen mainstream Dems shoot themselves in the foot every time they get power.
Before the Trump years, I would have been more generous. Now I can only echo Nigel: it goes to 11. The bastards are absolute evil. But what I hate most is that this time has done that to me. Whether it’s warped me or just opened my eyes I don’t know, but the level on which I want to see them suffer scares me every time I stop and examine it.
On both the Stupidity and Evil scales: it goes to 11.
As for conservatives having occasional good ideas etc.: sure, sometimes it can happen. George W. Bush, for example, was apparently genuinely concerned to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa, even to the point of being wiling to spend (some) money on it.
And, occasionally, individual conservatives may prove unexpectedly compassionate on some given issue that is normally a subject of their Two Minute Hates: stem-cell research, for example, or medical cannabis. However, this is invariably because, on that one point, their own ox had been gored.
As for what conservatism is, though: I can recommend Corey Robin on the topic. Or, distilled even further down to its true essence, conservatism is as Frank Wilhoit once described it in a comment at Crooked Timber: The force of the law must protect but not bind US, and must bind but not protect THEM. I paraphrase, but do go and read the while damn thing:
The leaders of the movement are a 7/10 on the evil scale. I think there are those who try to be evil but are hindered by their own massive stupidity, like Matt Gaetz, yet more often you have vicious evil like Mitch McConnell or the "do whatever to keep money/power" evil that are most Republicans. Pundits and writers likely fall along a similar vein. A person like Laura Ingraham is smart enough to know the smell of bullshit, but I'm also willing to concede that these people get stuck in their own bubble and probably start to get high on their own supply. Bill Barr, for example, is a lunatic, but also smart enough to be effective. That Trump is the current leader of the movement is possibly a benefit, because he is a raging doofus. Conservatives used to be better at being subtle in their nefarious ways, but Trump is the kind of guy that just shouts the N Word and thinks he made a compelling case.
For the common people who consider themselves part of the movement (but would get pushed off a cliff at any moment if it benefited a millionaire), there is some level of evil - like laughing at someone getting hurt - but mostly they are just dumb. Dig up that video of a town hall with people ranting about masks, and you see they certainly have the courage of their convictions, but their belief system is no more grounded in reality than a 2 year old who thinks a fairy exchanges enamel for dollars.
People who consider themselves aligned with Democrats make up a wide, diverse population. Sometimes the Democratic Party seems a bit of a mess of ideas, but that's the beauty of a group of people testing various concepts and bringing different insights. The GOP has shed adherents every decade to the point its become an insular, incestuous band of anger, greed and racism.
Oh Roy. How to choose, how to choose. My wise mother often says "You can't fix stupid," but I fear that you can't fix evil either. And I honestly don't know which is worse, since the Evil Ones can get the Stupid Ones to follow them, adding the power of numbers to the power of E. Coincidentally, this terrific documentarian just died. Kevin Rafferty. He is best known for "The Atomic Cafe," but also did a one on neo-Nazis called "Blood in the Face" (from 1991). I just watched it last night on Kanopy. The sheer stupidity of some of these people is horrible and frightening -- and, yes, Evil with a capital E. Thank you for such a thought-provoking post
Evil as stupid. In the late '70s the most important revelation I gleaned from working in politics was that (at that time) almost no elected officials actually believed in God. But they all insisted they did. Calling someone an atheist always started a fight. Even obvious atheists in office had church affiliations.
If they lie about God, what won't they lie about? Of course the real tragedy is that we now have officeholders who do believe in a cartoon version of God. Which is worse: followers of a cardboard Jehovah or hypocrites proclaiming faith they don't have?
It's called pandering when politicians tell you what you want to hear no matter how stupid. We have a system based on pandering now, lying is encouraged. If you tell the truth the media will destroy you. I honestly cannot think of one single truthful politician who gets good media. Not one.
Limbaugh, Hannity, and their epigoni: pure evil. Rupert Murdoch and anyone he pays to make people stupid, or worse, dead: 100% evil. Anyone in government, media, or business who has downplayed the COVID pandemic, turned prevention and safety into political bullshit, and caused thousands of deaths: evil, with a frisson of monumental imbecility.
If "conservatism" was ever a "philosophy" of governance it mutated long ago into malevolent, willful ignorance, culminating in the present malignancy of Trumpism, which is evil, cruel, and stupid, in exponential quantities. Is it even a "movement" anymore, assuming it ever was?
Either way, I feel like a version of Evelyn in "Chinatown" -- "It's stupid!" (slap) "It's evil!" (slap) "Stupid!" (slap) "Evil!" (slap) "It's stupevil! Just stop hitting me!"
After a certain point, the distinction between stupid and evil vanishes. "Young boys throw stones at frogs for sport. The frogs, however, die in earnest" is one good analogy. For the frogs, it doesn't matter whether the boys throwing the stones hate frogs or not.
So it is with conservatives. Take Jonah Goldberg. Is he stupid? Without a doubt. Only a man of towering stupidity could write a book titled "Liberal Fascism" and claim that Hitler's vegetarianism and the fact that the Nazi Party had "socialism" as part of its name proves that fascism is a liberal political movement.
Yet, from this magnum dopus has spring an entire new cottage industry of wingnuts waving Jonah's work around and calling every liberal thing fascism. Did you know that advocating for voting rights is fascism? Or believing that the police should not have the right to summarily execute citizens? And the only way to keep this fascism from taking hold of the country is to send in the military to massacre the protesters, or to have the FBI arrest those who would like to see every citizen vote.
Thus from Jonah's profoundly stupid book does profound evil grow. It perhaps started as a joke, but those using it now to bolster their arguments mean for real people to die in earnest.
In addition to evil/dumb, I add pandering to the ignorant and pathological. Then again, I am by training and disposition what you can call an infinite shades of gray guy.
As for modern conservative intellectual philosophy, well, there's none. It's just nihilistic desire for destruction.
As a whole the conservative movement is nothing but an infinite continuum of stupid-evil; you can only assign numbers to individual cases. I'm 99% atheist, but it fascinates me now how the so-called issues have become biblical. We are discussing some serious right v. wrong, light v. dark, angelic v. satanic stuff.
I have repeatedly challenged my tiny social media audience to name their own "mankind's greater and lesser angels" ("you can even use the 7 deadly ones!") to discuss them in terms of today's politics, political parties, and politicians, and nobody ever bites.
Resolved: the conservative movement in this country has become the home of mankind's lesser angels.
Mostly “types” of stupid. 1.) Just plain stupid. 2.) Pretend stupid to blend in with stupid. 3.) Stupid to think they fooled Jesus. 4.) Stupid to think they are untouchable. Feel free to state your observed types.
I remember that first Voice column, Roy! And you haven’t lost your touch.
This is a very hard call for me to make because I think the evil is stupid – for example, conservatives/GOP can’t knowingly impoverish and kill their own supporters, and gin up white supremacy while refusing to broaden their appeal beyond their shrinking white base, and still continue to win elections or turn a profit; I also think the stupid is evil – all the mutating conspiracy theories on the Right from QAnon to 5G to anti-vaxxers/and anti-maskers all at the very least make people distrust their neighbors and at the worst lead to suffering and death.
So maybe I’d say 5/5 but I’d prefer to ignore the laws of mathematics and say it’s 100% of each.
They’re all evil, some more banal than others. On the bright side, polling today showed a whopping 67% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of race and the pandemic. Sure ~80% of Republicans still say he’s doing great but, banality of evil, meet the culmination of 50+ years of American pseudoconservatism.
I'm gonna say about sixty percent stupid, forty five percent evil. I know that doesn't add up to 100, but conservatives will be the first to whine at you about how hard they have to work compared to those lazy affirmative action hires. But, that's mostly because I'm watching Washington Journal, and Grover Norquist seems to think people who disagree with him should all be calling in on the democrat line and that CSPAN should be demanding to see their voter registration card before putting them on the air. Meanwhile, random caller on the independent line is demanding to know why democrats are even allowed since "the Constitution guarantees a republican form of government".
Evil parading as stupid, and it's deadly effective.
Case in point: DJT tweets some awful policy his Nazis are cooking up but misspells a word. Molly Jong-Fast, Rick Wilson, and Steve Schmidt (and others) spend the rest of the day tweeting about how stupid the president is. The misspelling trends all day long. Evil plan wins the day. In five fucking years the mainstream has utterly failed to learn to focus. It's all about "own" and "destroys" and all that tired bullshit.
Another case in point: QAnon. Massive sophisticated psy-op that has turned an alarming swath of the population into an anti-liberal democracy army by getting to believe things even though those things will kill them and the ones they love. All of the byzantine intricacies are certainly stupid, but it has utterly evil intent.
Sartre once said something pungent about how inanity was the point of anti-semitic discourse because it can't be argued with, disproven. They just exhaust you and seem to win. Every day Roy and any other publicly progressive figure gets this from whatever direction. Talib Kweli is a frequent target. WOC in my field bear its burden.
All I'm saying is that unless there's a massive effort to expose all the lies and machinations that made the conservation revolution possible by the ruling party -- an effort that won't happen in any conceivable timeline, since it would implicate Dems, Dem donors, major media corporations, and others, we'll have Viktor Carlson as the GOP contender in 2024 and he may well the fuck win.
Especially since in my lifetime I have only seen mainstream Dems shoot themselves in the foot every time they get power.
Before the Trump years, I would have been more generous. Now I can only echo Nigel: it goes to 11. The bastards are absolute evil. But what I hate most is that this time has done that to me. Whether it’s warped me or just opened my eyes I don’t know, but the level on which I want to see them suffer scares me every time I stop and examine it.
On both the Stupidity and Evil scales: it goes to 11.
As for conservatives having occasional good ideas etc.: sure, sometimes it can happen. George W. Bush, for example, was apparently genuinely concerned to combat the spread of AIDS in Africa, even to the point of being wiling to spend (some) money on it.
And, occasionally, individual conservatives may prove unexpectedly compassionate on some given issue that is normally a subject of their Two Minute Hates: stem-cell research, for example, or medical cannabis. However, this is invariably because, on that one point, their own ox had been gored.
As for what conservatism is, though: I can recommend Corey Robin on the topic. Or, distilled even further down to its true essence, conservatism is as Frank Wilhoit once described it in a comment at Crooked Timber: The force of the law must protect but not bind US, and must bind but not protect THEM. I paraphrase, but do go and read the while damn thing:
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progressives/#comment-729288
The leaders of the movement are a 7/10 on the evil scale. I think there are those who try to be evil but are hindered by their own massive stupidity, like Matt Gaetz, yet more often you have vicious evil like Mitch McConnell or the "do whatever to keep money/power" evil that are most Republicans. Pundits and writers likely fall along a similar vein. A person like Laura Ingraham is smart enough to know the smell of bullshit, but I'm also willing to concede that these people get stuck in their own bubble and probably start to get high on their own supply. Bill Barr, for example, is a lunatic, but also smart enough to be effective. That Trump is the current leader of the movement is possibly a benefit, because he is a raging doofus. Conservatives used to be better at being subtle in their nefarious ways, but Trump is the kind of guy that just shouts the N Word and thinks he made a compelling case.
For the common people who consider themselves part of the movement (but would get pushed off a cliff at any moment if it benefited a millionaire), there is some level of evil - like laughing at someone getting hurt - but mostly they are just dumb. Dig up that video of a town hall with people ranting about masks, and you see they certainly have the courage of their convictions, but their belief system is no more grounded in reality than a 2 year old who thinks a fairy exchanges enamel for dollars.
People who consider themselves aligned with Democrats make up a wide, diverse population. Sometimes the Democratic Party seems a bit of a mess of ideas, but that's the beauty of a group of people testing various concepts and bringing different insights. The GOP has shed adherents every decade to the point its become an insular, incestuous band of anger, greed and racism.
Off, that's a tough one. I think we're more 6+ though
Oh Roy. How to choose, how to choose. My wise mother often says "You can't fix stupid," but I fear that you can't fix evil either. And I honestly don't know which is worse, since the Evil Ones can get the Stupid Ones to follow them, adding the power of numbers to the power of E. Coincidentally, this terrific documentarian just died. Kevin Rafferty. He is best known for "The Atomic Cafe," but also did a one on neo-Nazis called "Blood in the Face" (from 1991). I just watched it last night on Kanopy. The sheer stupidity of some of these people is horrible and frightening -- and, yes, Evil with a capital E. Thank you for such a thought-provoking post
Overall, a solid 7 for evil, 3 for stupid. It's Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham over there at the 9.8 end that make me nervous.
Evil as stupid. In the late '70s the most important revelation I gleaned from working in politics was that (at that time) almost no elected officials actually believed in God. But they all insisted they did. Calling someone an atheist always started a fight. Even obvious atheists in office had church affiliations.
If they lie about God, what won't they lie about? Of course the real tragedy is that we now have officeholders who do believe in a cartoon version of God. Which is worse: followers of a cardboard Jehovah or hypocrites proclaiming faith they don't have?
It's called pandering when politicians tell you what you want to hear no matter how stupid. We have a system based on pandering now, lying is encouraged. If you tell the truth the media will destroy you. I honestly cannot think of one single truthful politician who gets good media. Not one.
Limbaugh, Hannity, and their epigoni: pure evil. Rupert Murdoch and anyone he pays to make people stupid, or worse, dead: 100% evil. Anyone in government, media, or business who has downplayed the COVID pandemic, turned prevention and safety into political bullshit, and caused thousands of deaths: evil, with a frisson of monumental imbecility.
If "conservatism" was ever a "philosophy" of governance it mutated long ago into malevolent, willful ignorance, culminating in the present malignancy of Trumpism, which is evil, cruel, and stupid, in exponential quantities. Is it even a "movement" anymore, assuming it ever was?
Either way, I feel like a version of Evelyn in "Chinatown" -- "It's stupid!" (slap) "It's evil!" (slap) "Stupid!" (slap) "Evil!" (slap) "It's stupevil! Just stop hitting me!"