Letters From A Stupid American

An apologia for dumb folks

It’s Liberation Day (week?) and Donald Trump’s tariffs are taking the world by storm, with gale-force winds of uncertainty blowing around securities valuations like so many cows in Twister. Naturally, many people are quite put out by this. One might expect that progressives would take umbrage at anything the president does as a matter of political expediency and mental illness, denouncing Trump both for being the slave of billionaires and for laying waste to the stock market. But as usual, there are people on the right who are shocked and appalled that the president is doing what he’s been saying he’s going to do for a decade or so. This time though it’s a bit different. This time the people coming at him are smart.

Nathan Cofnas

, who has a job as a “philosopher of biology” at Cambridge- so pretty dang intelligent- wrote the following last week:

Historically, the American right was better than the left on economics. But as the Republican Party degenerated into a low-IQ cult of personality, this was unsustainable. The benefits of free trade are counterintuitive, and require a certain degree of intelligence to understand. On average, people who believe in capitalism have higher IQs. If you chase all the smart people away from your movement, your economic policies will come to reflect the intuitions of below average people who think that trade is inherently exploitative and only workers who make physical objects add value. The base will demand that we return to a simpler time when Americans worked in factories, life was easier to understand, and we didn’t have so many vaccines.

Trump was elected largely because he was the anti-woke candidate. His executive orders on DEI were a cause for celebration. But the point of fighting DEI is to pave the way for something better—not merely to attack leftists for its own sake. If we destroy America and go back to living in caves, then we will have “won” the war on woke, but that’s not the kind of victory that we should aspire to. The goal is to bring about a better world.

Elaborating on the theme, he then noted a few days ago:

Was it a mistake to vote for Trump?

If I'd known that MAGA would become a poverty cult obsessed with bringing Chinese sweatshops to the US, I would have supported DEI Kamala. However, as far as I am aware, no one (including [Anatoly] Karlin) anticipated that Trump would declare war on every other country on earth and tank the economy for no reason. Given the information available on November 5, 2024, I think a Trump vote was reasonable. Should we not attempt to win because it's possible that we will fail?

But there are lessons.

The problem isn't Trump. It's that the American so-called "right" has become a coalition of stupid people from across the political spectrum. At the lowest IQ levels, the left and right converge on fascism. They favor a controlled economy over the invisible hand, wisdom of the "volk" over universities and book learning, and thuggery over due process. Trump wouldn't be able to get away with this if he didn't have an army of Catturds with the same dumb intuitions cheering him on. His future torchbearer will have to be an idiot in order to keep the MAGA coalition together, so he'll be no better.

All over the world, almost everyone with more than half a brain is looking at the disaster of Trump (along with Putin, Yoon Suk Yeol, et al.) and drawing the very reasonable conclusion that right-wing, anti-woke parties are incapable of effective governance. This is also my conclusion. The right in its current form attracts such low human capital that it is counterproductive for it to actually take power. What happens when a dog catches the car it's chasing? It looks confused, jumps around for a minute, and pisses on the wheel. That's anti-wokesters taking over the government.

I've been arguing that the right needs to focus on winning the battle of ideas and bringing the elites to our side. The way to do that is to refute the false empirical belief that underlies the ideology of wokism (the equality thesis). But I lost the battle to set the agenda for the right. Instead, it was decided that the only thing that matters is taking power and trolling leftists. Trump won the election, issued some executive orders, and anti-wokesters declared victory. But we are seeing the fruits of this strategy: a right that is on track to be totally discredited and cede power back to the woke.

It is still theoretically possible to turn this around. The Republican-controlled Congress should invoke the 25th Amendment, carry Trump away in a straitjacket, revoke the tariffs, and spend their political capital (which would be soaring) on important issues like deporting illegal aliens. But this is the kind of action that would be taken by smart people, not Republicans.

If you want the right to prevail in the long run, you should do everything you can to prevent right-wing political parties from gaining power prematurely. All focus should be on the Hereditarian Revolution, which we fight for in the realm of ideas, not (yet) in the ballot box.

Now, obviously, I’m not as smart as Cofnas. My high school wasn’t exactly known for producing scholars; I graduated from a series of state universities, and I teach schoolchildren instead of philosophizing about biology. But that’s not to say I have nothing to add to the conversation. As a stupid MAGA voter who’s also a writer, I’m well-placed to offer some insight into why this disaster has unfolded. See, that Dunning-Kruger Effect works both ways. I think Cofnas might just be too intelligent to know what’s going on. He’s elite human capital and spends his life talking to other elite human capital, such that he doesn’t have the time or the framework to effectively ponder why the dumbs do what they do. So allow me to fill in some blanks.

The thing about us people on the port side of the bell curve is that, the dumber you are, the scarier life is. You know there are people much smarter than you, but you lack the imaginative faculties to really comprehend what that means. If your IQ is 85, someone who’s a 100 sounds pretty much like someone who’s 120, and so on. You don’t think about the details. You just know that there are a bunch of people who wear ties and work jobs where people care what they think, and they have an outsize influence on your life, one you can’t really fully grasp.

That is, unless you get Algernonpilled, anon.

That lack of understanding is the root of the apprehension with which you approach things outside the cognitive demands of box scores. At the restaurant where I used to work, there was a guy who must have gotten at least one traffic citation every week. His windows were too tinted; his music was too loud- and he was usually speeding in case he wasn’t attracting enough attention already. He would rail about the police and the courts as one might expect, which once prompted a coworker to ask him who he thought made the laws. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know the answer. The question itself made no sense to him. Laws were just there, and getting tickets and being thrown in jail were just things that happened, like bad weather.

When you’re in the service industry, people are constantly testing your gangsta. It’s best practice to open fire at the first hint of disrespect. Why take chances?

It’s an extreme example, perhaps, but illustrative. People on that level- my people- live in a world where everyone is trying to get over on them. The dumb are on the receiving end of every scam possible: payday loans, rent-to-own furniture, OnlyFans, seed oils, etc. They know their fellow idiots are out to get them, and that’s bad enough. But they also know that the smart folks want their money and energy, and unlike with their peers, clever schemers are both unpredictable and unfathomable.

We all remember this documentary.

Thus, being dumb means that one must cultivate a- as smart people might say- heuristic in dealing with elite human capital when it comes around making offers. You can’t simply take these people at face value without risking your money, your credit rating, your health, or your freedom. Whereas for people like Cofnas epistemology is largely based on reasoning from abstractions- a matter of having the right ideas- for the dumb, knowing things is experiential and inductive. You look at your life before the smart people affected it, then after, then draw conclusions.

Cofnas claims the smarts are doing a bang-up job running things, that the Biden economy was doing great, etc., before Trump came in and tanked everything. He offers as evidence for this that per capita GDP is up and that workers generally have it better than ever if you do the math right. Understanding the benefits of free trade seems to require a lot of such math, since to stupid people it really doesn’t seem that great when you look around and recall the course of your life for the past thirty years, but since you have to be smart to understand it, perhaps you missed something.

So you start to weigh the evidence from your own experience. Looking at that thirty-year span, you can remember a whole bunch on times when the smart people went on TV and assured you that X would happen, with Y following instead every time. Many dumbs were sent to war by smarts, the latter of whom spent their time quite far from the sandier areas of Earth, mostly on news shows assuring the former that any day now a great reason for the conflict would emerge, that we had to fight them over there so we didn’t have to fight them here, so that we could preserve our freedom and way of life. The result of this was mass government surveillance and the importation of tens of millions of unvetted foreigners, all of whom the smart people assured the dumbs were adding GDP to that wonderful economy. Housing got incredibly expensive, but smart people like Alan Greenspan said the market had no where to go but up, so you took out a mortgage in 2006, just like they said. How’d that go? The smart people, to a man and woman, told you that Donald Trump,- who said that all of the above policies represented failures on the part of the smarts- would never be elected president. They whiffed that one too. The end of his first term coincided with a Biblical plague the smarts assured people would kill untold millions from all walks of life, which necessitated unprecedented lockdowns that could only be broken for reasons more important than dumb people’s parents’ funerals, like Democrat leaders getting hairstyled and race riots, the latter of which the smart people thought were just great. The one time Trump listened to the smart people was in his advocacy for a “vaccine” that doesn’t really do anything to prevent infection or transmission of the underlying virus. To dumb people Joe Biden really looked senile and out of it, but the smarts were always there to debunk that Russian misinformation, and to drive home the point, started censoring everything.

This voice still echoes through the nightmares of the average stupid voter.

At this point, as a dumb person, you really have to start interrogating the whole concept of smart. If your claim to authority is expertise, and you are repeatedly shown by events to be either wrong or lying, then it hardly stands to reason that people should keep listening to you because you wave around your standardized test scores. Perhaps there are other factors in decision making apart from g that are just as important, factors that the current crop of smart people lack. Perhaps they’re misguided in a way they don’t themselves see.

There’s a tell in Cofnas’ piece, when he mentions that “on average, people who believe in capitalism have higher IQs.” Maybe. But in the Soviet Union, all the smart people believed in Marxism, and for the same reason. Now, granted, Cofnas seems to be conflating capitalism- the economic system- with the policy of free trade and the ideology of neoliberalism. Otherwise he’d be making the argument that Donald Trump was opposed to free enterprise in itself, which I don’t think he means to do. But all of these things are abstractions, and to smart people they represent two things. One, they are a kind of higher reality to which the material world must be brought into alignment, and two, they are class signifiers. Smart people like Cofnas benefit from the existing order, and thus they defend it, their arguments a public declaration of alignment with the regime of managerial rule. The Soviet form of that system failed, and Cofnas, with all the insight and instincts of his peers, seems to miss that the liberal version is itself dying out.

Cofnas has a very large and very conspicuous emotional investment in the idea of his being a member of that aforementioned elite human capital, and is deeply frustrated that the rest of the population is too f****** stupid to appreciate the benefits of being ruled by people like him, despite their stupidity being wholly in keeping with the ideas he advances and thus shouldn’t surprise him. He believes- good liberal that he is- that all human traits are quantifiable, and that the math just adds up to smart people control being awesome, despite recent history telling a very different story. He doesn’t see the rise of Trump as being an indictment of the kind of Mandarinism he supports, but the result of a flawed human nature correctable with better policies.

I should mention that Cofnas voted for Trump three times, in his telling largely because Trump opposed DEI policies. Trump does in fact oppose those policies and has moved against them. But Trump’s economic policies are just as longstanding as his rejection of race grifting. Why would Cofnas support Trump confident that he would keep one set of promises while rejecting another? He claims in fact that Trump was mostly elected due to his being “anti-woke” and his rejection of DEI, when it was more likely his economic positions, all of which, again, are of long standing. Why would Trump pass on implementing the core of his mandate when he has every opportunity to do so?

Not pictured- woke as a major issue with voters.

The very fact that Cofnas thinks that Trump’s opposition to DEI is the core of his appeal is another tell. His world is that of niche dissident within academic wokespace. So far as he is concerned, the most important thing that Trump could do is create a purer instantiation of meritocracy throughout the managerial system, purging it of affirmative action deadwood. He seems to think that the main problem with the current system of producing elites is that it isn’t g-loaded enough. Smart people are who matter, and giving smart people like him more power is what voters should want.

But this is just a variation of the same progressive scheme that’s been around arguably since the Wilson administration. Technocratic governance on the part of credentialed test-takers was supposed to make life better for everyone. Smart people like Cofnas still think it’s a great idea. Dumb people look back at its greatest hits- Vietnam, race riots, de-industrialization, etc., and see a system that’s mostly benefited a small caste of wealthy people and a larger strata of their administrators, while creating anomie, instability, and impoverishment for everyone else.

Dumb people understand that smart people like Cofnas hate them, and whatever potential the latter have to make their lives better is outweighed by their sneering need to differentiate themselves from their lessers with preening appeals to their own intelligence and sophistication. Note the contrast between people with university educations and thuggery in his screed. Dumb people sense that there’s a hollow insecurity at the root of it all, an instinct for conformity and consensus, that a man who’s centered his life around passing tests is a man whose outsourced his sense of worth, and needs to constantly signal against others with a completely unmerited arrogance.

In the Golden Age of Elite Human Capital, the whiz kids were far more efficient in packing off the dumb to grisly fates for nebulous reasons. Stupid Americans should take heart that though the commies in Vietnam won the war against the US military, they were subsequently flanked and routed by Nike.

I say unmerited because what is he actually holding out as better than what the dumb people want? Thirty years ago the smart people were promising that incorporating China into the emerging globalist order would make them more like us; the opposite is what happened instead. America’s industrial base was sold off in the name of efficiency to a nation that is now our chief rival. Cofnas thinks this is great because of that aforementioned per capita GDP, but to us dumb folks that really just looks like someone took all the money being made in America and divided it by the number of people. If I walked into a party with a hundred guests and gave one of them $1,000 and then announced that the room was now $1,000 richer, that would be true in a sense, but would be a bit misleading. Cofnas wants more of this, and thinks you’re an idiot for not wanting more of it as well, because capitalism (as he understands it) is the in-thing among the high IQ set.

Lafayette Lee

put it well:

Nobody trusts experts anymore because enough experts proved themselves to be untrustworthy and just as prone to ordinary temptations that afflict the ignorant that the entire knowledge economy went into a recession. As the experts say, I hope that helps.

Cofnas thinks tariffs have tanked the economy. They haven’t. He thinks that rightist political movements are being rejected the world over, when they are plainly in the ascendant, such that the elite human capital currently running things has to keep arresting the opposition. He thinks Congress invokes the 25th Amendment (it’s the Cabinet). He thinks MAGA is led by morons on X when the leadership of the movement has better credentials than he does- Trump and JD Vance are Ivy League graduates; Scott Bessant, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, is a Yale-educated former hedge fund manager, and Stephan Miran, the architect of Trump’s tariff policies, is a Harvard PhD. As a dumb person, I’m supposed to believe that these men, with decades of experience in high-level competitive environments- are a bunch of childish dolts, while the people we should be listening to are the people who think globalization is really awesome if you’re smart enough to look past your perceived immiseration to its actual theoretical brilliance.

Stupid MAGA voters are people who feel the reality of this chart in their bones,

that amusements and distractions have gotten cheaper while the stuff of life has grown more dear. This chart comes from AEI, which, like Cofnas, advocates for more of the same. We dumb people might not get all the nuances, but we know we don’t want more of that. Elite human capital had its day, one upon which the sun is thankfully setting.

Christopher F. Rufo

sums all this up better than I could, so I’ll leave you with his take:

I'm sorry, but the "trust the experts" argument is dead on arrival. The political program of "the best and the brightest" has consistently failed to deliver results since it was launched in the 1960s. This is the heart of the conservative critique, from Nisbet to Sowell.

The key political virtue is not knowledge, but prudence. The "credentialed experts" at places like Columbia's Middle Eastern Studies department are rabidly anti-Israel, but their position within the institutions doesn't mean they're right.

The problem with the entire "elite human capital" thesis is that it obsesses with intelligence and loses sight of wisdom. This is why the founders constantly called for the marriage of "talent and virtue," or, put differently, IQ and moral strength.

Intelligence, or knowledge, alone is no guarantee. After all, the greatest tyrants of the twentieth century were very intelligent—but their theories of governance were a disaster. America's blessing is in its talent, yes, but also in its pragmatism, moderation, and prudence.

Lock up your daughters- it’s the Hereditarian Revolution!