ANOTHER DAY OF INFAMY

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time - Abraham Lincoln

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public - H.L. Mencken

The Lincoln quote is usually cited as reassurance that in the end the American public will get it right; it turns out he got it wrong.  He should have stopped after the second clause.  Mencken got it right.  As the recent election proves, you can indeed fool the American public, or at least a majority of it, which is all that counts in politics, all of the time. 

The post-mortems and accompanying blame games are still going on.  Some of it is very sophisticated stuff, based on polls, statistics, breaking the electorate into endless categories, etc.  The truth, it seems to me, is a lot more simple - the American electorate is just plain stupid, however you may define stupidity, i.e., willful ignorance, lack of ability to exercise reasoned judgement, intellectual laziness, and endlessly gullible.  It shows a profound indifference to, or ignorance of, facts.  Voters seem to be victims of ADD, Attention Deficit Disorder.  Or they may just have been living under a rock or in a cave for the last few years, including Trump's four years of malign incompetence as President during which not once did a majority of Americans approve of the job he was doing (this was true of no previous president in the era of polling).  Trump left the White House with an approval rating of 34%.

Good illustrations are found in the answers Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez received to inquiries which she made to constituents in her district as to how they could vote for both her and Trump (Trump cut his loss margin from 55 points to 22 points in her district).  For example, "It's real simple. ... Trump and you care for the working class."  If that's their level of thought, American voters deserve what they're going to get.  Most frightening is what it implies about the democratic process for selecting leaders and what it portends for the future.  

Those who place their faith in younger voters will be disabused of that notion after reading the NY Times post-election interview with 13 Generation Zers in the November 13 opinion section.  In 2020, five were too young to vote, five voted for Biden, two voted for Trump and one for Romney.  In 2024, two voted for Harris, seven voted for Trump and four voted for third party or write-in candidates.  This after the most successful administration domestically since Lyndon Johnson and the chaos of the Republican controlled House.

In a NY Times Letter to the Editor, the writer (presumably a Trump voter) argues that the economy for the last four years has been disastrous, that he has faith in Trump's ability as a businessman and a leader to turn this around, and refers to Trump's proven track record of dealing effectively with other major world leaders.  Take your choice, rock or cave?

Of course, there is also racism, misogyny, ethnocentrism and the like, but those people were lost years ago and remain a fixture in our society.  However, it turns out that the centrists, independents, moderates, whatever, are just as flawed in their own way when it comes to making rational choices of policies. 

Those at the so-called progressive end of the spectrum are little better.  Although they may have voted for Harris, or didn't vote at all, they demonstrated a different form of stupidity.  Maureen Dowd was right on point in a recent column.  She argues that the Democratic Party "embraced a worldview of hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation, and it supported diversity statements for job applicants and faculty lounge terminology like 'Latinx', and 'BIPOC" (Black, Indigenous, People of Color)."  This alienated half the country, or more.

Dowd  cites a Financial Times chart that shows that white progressives hold views far to the left of the minorities they champion.  She quotes James Carville, calling "defund the police" the "three stupidest words in the English language."

One pollster has pointed out that the vast majority of Americans do not believe biological males should be playing in women's sports, or that taxpayers should be funding sex-change operations for prisoners or that you need to suggest that there is a pronoun to be used for both men and women.

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A further observation as Trump unveils his cabinet and other Administration nominations is the parallel between Trump and Justice Thomas of the Supreme Court.  Trump's nominees thus far are so beyond the pale historically and on the merits (and/or are genuine nut jobs) that one can only believe that they are being proposed not so much to advance his capability to promote his policies (which are not really policies but only extensions of his destructive twisted personality), but to act as a swipe in the face of the establishment (whatever that is) which he feels has never treated him other than as an interloper, a "wannabe", from Queens.  Justice Thomas, in his reactionary decisions and theories of Constitutional interpretation, is also expressing his anger (in his case probably justifiable) at the treatment he received as a young Black man in the South.  They are both damaged goods determined to get even by attacking the system.  The irony that this is the same system has elevated them to its highest rungs, in spite of them being undeserving, doesn't seem to have occurred to them.  Or perhaps it is the recognition that such elevation doesn't in itself bring with it the recognition of any merit that keeps them so angry.