The Electorate’s Problem Isn’t Stupidity, It’s They Are Mollycoddled

Explaining Trump 2.0

Mollycoddled Americans

William Davies wrote an article in The Guardian that’s well worth reading. In it, Davies attempts to explain why, in the name of all that is holy, did the US electorate put Trump back in office. The well-read Davies points to the most common explanation that commentators have given for Trump and Trumpism: stupidity.

Davies agrees that Trump’s second administration is undoubtedly stupid, but he rejects the explanation for it that he calls the “social model of stupidity.” This is the idea that stupidity has spread throughout society, with people now conditioned by the social and political environment not to think critically but to instead wait to be told how to think. He observes that this model, despite having “a superficial plausibility as a depiction of contemporary authoritarianism,” misses an important dimension of current society. “Judgment,” he says, “was not replaced by dictatorship, but rather outsourced to impersonal, superintelligent systems of data collection and analysis.”

I will not repeat here the details of Davies’s solid argument that blames society’s current lack of judgment on the neoliberal (libertarian) thinking that dominates business and tech. “In a fully platform-based world,” he says, “everything shrinks to the status of…