The Idiot
The fact that you know who I'm talking about means we have work to do.
This week Robin Whetstone offers another chapter from her Moscow memoir, Red Ticket, in which she watches a Mexican telenovela with her Russian boyfriend’s mother and gets a lesson about how to be a good housewife. Josh Berthume, our dark prince of dystopia, is back with “Nine True Things.” And “You’re on Mute” finds me in conversation with New York Times-bestselling author and old friend Robert Draper, whose latest work, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration took America into Iraq, is available for pre-order now.
And as always, we remember who we’ve lost and offer recommendations on what to do, read, watch, and listen to.
But first, did I tell you about the time a Republican sought absolution from my wife?
My wife, Sonia, whom you see lurking over my shoulder in the photograph, is a Democratic political consultant, which means she has a lot of work friends who are Republican political consultants. Sometimes they work together on non-partisan races. Sometimes they buy her drinks at conferences. Sometimes they seek absolution.
She has a friend who is reading John Bolton’s White House tell-all, The Room Where it Happened. And people, he cannot buh-leave what has been going on. Trump, he has come to find out, might not be the sharpest knife in the light socket.
This is when Sonia’s head exploded. Normally, I would worry about bits of brain being strewn across the room, but her head comes with a nifty safety valve called her mouth, and, being born in Boston, she knows how to use it. I am paraphrasing for the sake of clarity, length, volume, and delicate ears, but she questioned why he had not accepted all the other evidence in the public domain proving, over and over again, the emperor’s nudity.
“The New York Times and the Washington Post tell me that people who believe what I believe are stupid,” he responded. “They tell me people who are from the part of the country I’m from are stupid.”
Whether or not this is true is immaterial, as are questions about whether he fairly lumped liberals in with the news media, Hollywood, secular culture, and now corporate America. He saw all of this as one, giant scold telling him that he was a dumb-dumb.
And then Donald Trump descended the golden escalator, called Mexicans rapists, and has been in turn getting called an idiot ever since. Trump’s mastery of “person-woman-man-camera-TV” and his contention that he is "like, really smart" notwithstanding, we’ve all been clear from jump about what gray matter the president’s working with. It is a matter of public record that an analysis of his speech patterns reveals that he would probably get all the references in Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Donald Trump is either the greatest actor in the history of the world, or who he has consistently shown himself to be: an idiot, full of sound and fury. This is a humiliating time to be a patriot.
But that didn’t matter as much to Sonia’s Republican friend as our gleeful embrace of this knowledge. Being a liberal means we think the fight over right and wrong has everything to do with facts. We believe we can win people over by convincing them that they are wrong, and the fact that this rarely works, and even then accidentally, somehow does not lessen our faith in the Enlightenment. And if we can dunk on someone we can all agree is ill-lettered and probably laboring under deep psychological challenges, all the better. We do so love being right, but we love our enemies being wrong even more.
Consider how this looks to Sonia’s Republican friend. How do we look when we chortle because the President of the United States speaks English in a way that seems wholly comprised of false starts, parentheticals, and tangents? It probably looks about as awesome as when we make fun of the way his butt looks in an awkward pose or the way a photograph clearly shows the visible line where his orange face toner ends and his naked skin begins, or when his hair looks especially dumb. I have taken so much pleasure doing what must have looked so ugly to others.
Even when we’re not making low sport of mockery, we can come across like patronizing elitists as Barack Obama did when he tried to explain anti-progressive views of Pennsylvania voters to a roomful of California donors.
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
(As an aside, Elizabeth Warren is the only prominent Democrat I’ve seen recently who can say largely the same thing and come across as wise and sympathetic, primarily because she shares the concerns of the economically downtrodden and does not, as I have done a million times, fallen into the us-versus-them trap. To empathize with the downtrodden pulls back the emotional insulation of being a know-it-all smartypants. Warren grew up poor and has studied how economic forces impoverish Americans. Her intellect has drawn her closer to them.)
And so Sonia’s Republican friend, who thinks you win when you’re right on values and not on facts, identified with Trump, who was facing the same treatment from society that he was getting. Trump’s voters have been told by liberal society (media, brands, news, academics, popular opinion) that they are wrong, dumb, and unwanted. They see themselves under constant and universal assault by the world. They are in this world and not of it. The bunker mentality is central to their worldview.
And they — white Evangelicals, mainly — came to believe that Trump was ordained by God to vanquish their enemies. Jerry Falwell Jr. produced a documentary called The Trump Prophecy that cast Trump as a latter-day King Cyrus, a secular leader who freed Jews from captivity in Babylon. The Netflix documentary (Stanford’s First Law of Newsletters: The longer a newsletter, the more likely that it references a Netflix documentary) The Family depicts a “secretive group of conservative Christian power brokers” that teaches that Trump is the “wolf-king,” a Goliath sent this time to slay the Philistines.
As their hero he could not be of low intelligence. The Emperor not only is wearing clothes but was a “great student” at the “Wharton School of Finance, the toughest place to get into.”
“I know words,” he said. “I have the best words.”
Polls show that some people still believe this crap. The latest Fox News poll asked, for the first time, whether voters thought each candidate “has the intelligence to serve effectively as president?” Biden, whom Team Red has labored for years to depict as dumb, was judged by 51% as smart enough to be president.
Trump? Not so much. A 52% majority thought his intellect lacking. The groups most staunchly supporting the President’s intelligence were people who approve of the job Trump is doing (86%), Republican men (86%), Republican women (79%), and white evangelicals (68%). Surprisingly — to me, at least — white men with college degrees were more likely to think Trump was smart enough to be president than were white men without degrees, but what we talk about when we talk about Trump’s intelligence has never really been about whether Trump is smart. Rather, it’s about what side you’re on.
We’re going to have to tell a new story about America that allows both liberals and conservatives to exist in the same reality — one in which we have consensus that climate change exists, that masks work, and income inequality does not reflect personal virtue. We have work to do, but first we all have to be on the same page. This does not mean that we have to agree with each other, but we do need a common story that is big enough for everyone, argues George Monbiot in — I know, I know — a terrific TEDTalk recommended by E.H.:
The only thing that can replace a story is a story. You cannot take away someone's story without giving them a new one. …
In fact, we could go as far as to say that without a powerful new restoration story, a political and religious transformation might not be able to happen.
For her part, Sonia isn’t quite willing to let her republican friend of the hook just yet. Disbelieving the truth because the truth-teller has also been telling you that you were wrong isn’t a good enough excuse for her. And besides, she’s in the middle of the war, sitting on conference calls all day while they plot air strikes with television commercials and fact check poll questions “within an inch of their lives,” as she says.
The funny thing is, Republicans were wrong about one thing all along.
“I never thought they were stupid, just cruel,” she said.
Red Ticket: My Second Mother
by Robin Whetstone
Every weekend we serialize Red Ticket, Robin Whetstone’s memoir of her time in Moscow in the early ‘90s. This week, Robin watches a telenovela with her boyfriend’s mother.
Valentina blinked. “What?” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“Condoms,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
Nine True Things
by Josh Berthume
My old friend Josh Berthume (pictured, right, in better times) is back after freaking us all out with “7 Hours in November,” his pre-dystopian analysis of Election Night. This week, he checks in from Denton, Texas with nine true things.
If you’ve been wondering when you should finally get worried about all of this, we’re there. The time has come.
“You’re on mute” with Robert Draper
This week I got to talk to my old friend Robert Draper, a New York Times-bestselling writer and author of the upcoming To Start a War: How the Bush Administration took America into Iraq which you can pre-order now. As in, right now. He is one helluva reporter and a winning writer. An excerpt, “Colin Powell Still Wants Answers,” recently ran in The Sunday New York Times Magazine.
A. I'm among those may be among the few of those who who believe that. President Bush was not deliberately lying, not deliberately misleading. I think that he made a bunch of misleading statements that was not his intention. I think he truly believed Saddam had weapons. He truly believed that Saddam was so crafty and so nefarious. The poor hapless Hans Blix and the rest of the weapons inspection team would never be able to find it.
Q. So the fact that the weapons inspectors didn't find weapons was proof that they're really good at hiding the weapons.
A. That's right.
RIP
How we’re getting through this
Searching the AIDS quilt
Pairing Cheez-Its with rosé
Looking for the next comms director for Greg Casar
What I’m reading
Axios: “Exclusive poll: Coronavirus sinks GOP governors in hard-hit states”
Nate Cohn: “Big Polling Leads Tend to Erode. Is Biden’s Edge Different?”
…the fight against coronavirus has the potential to define American politics the way an armed conflict might: It poses a threat to the health and safety of the public, and voters support the effort to defeat it even at a significant economic cost.
Sadie Doyle: “Gwyneth, Ivanka, and the End of the Effortless White Woman”
Harry Enten: “Trump's handling of the coronavirus is the only election issue that matters”
Dave Grohl: “In Defense of Our Teachers: When it comes to the daunting question of reopening schools, America’s educators deserve a plan, not a trap.”
Ryan Holiday: “The Best Career Advice I’ve Ever Gotten”
Forget credit so hard, they said, that you’re glad when other people get it instead of you.
NYT: “Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus”
Tejal Raso: “Oysters: A Love Story”
Nathan Ryan: “Election Day In Texas: Civics, Not Politics, Is Key Inside Polling Places”
As I sat at the check-in table, I reflected about how we fundamentally misunderstand the difference between politics and civics. Civics is what we do as a society, politics are how we talk about what we do. While voting may be a political statement, it’s primarily a civic act: talking about candidates is politics, casting your vote to elect a candidate is civics.
Curtis Sittenfeld: “Finally Write That Short Story”
Doug Sosnik: “The 2020 Coronavirus Election”
Dana Stevens: “Held back: As parents realize how badly the U.S. botched the next school year, we’re furious”
The implicit bargain of the spring was that if everyone complied with the shutdowns, the isolation, the social distancing, the working-while-parenting disasters and the rest, the government would use that time to build enough testing, tracing and public health infrastructure so that students could safely go back to school in person in the fall.
Texas Monthly: “The Texas GOP Held Its Convention on Zoom—and It Was a Comic Disaster”
WaPo: “‘No mask, no entry. Is that clear enough? That seems pretty clear, right?’: Lori Wagoner, retail clerk, on trying to enforce a state requirement to wear masks”
WSJ: “WSJ Journalists Ask Publisher for Clearer Distinction Between News and Opinion Content”
What I’m watching
E.H. recommended this TEDTalk by George Monbiot, which taught me something about storytelling and world views. This was 15 minutes well spent.
Y’all, the new Viagra ad tells an emotional story about intimacy. Really.
My favorite thing I watched this week was Netflix’s Straight Up, a queer-friendly rom-com that doesn’t land predictably.
What I’m listening to
My wife went on Oppo File, a podcast about opposition research. She’s so cool.
Sparkle Division’s new issuance would be great background music if you were a lot cooler.
I was a huge fan of Troye Sivan’s 2018 songs, especially the infectious “My My My!” which was as good a soundtrack to falling in love as you’re ever going to hear. He’s still in love now, he says, in “Easy.”
What do you think of today's email? I'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback. I might even put ‘em in the newsletter if I don’t steal it outright.
Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can sign up here. Unless of course you were forwarded this email, in which case you should…
Want a way to send gifts and support local restaurants? Goldbelly’s got you hooked up.
I used this to order scotch delivered right to my door. Recommend.
Thanks to Noom I am down to my college weight, and haven’t had to cut out any foods. Noom is an app that uses psychology, calorie counting, and measuring activity to change your behavior and the way you think about food. I’m stronger and healthier than I’ve been in years. Click on the blue box to get 20% off.
Want a way to send gifts and support local restaurants? Goldbelly’s got you hooked up.
Currnt is a cool new platform where you can get paid to share your expertise on online panels. It’s LinkedIn for introverts.
I now offer personal career coaching sessions through Need Hop.
If this newsletter is of some value to you, consider donating. Honestly, I’m not doing this for the money. I’m writing this newsletter for myself, and for you. And a lot of you are contributing with letters and by suggesting articles for me to post. But some of you have asked for a way to donate money, so I’m posting my Venmo and PayPal information here. I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is some of the most fun I’ve had. Venmo me at @Jason-Stanford-1, or use this PayPal link.