Recent polls suggest that half the country could vote against its own interests in November. The self-sabotage is impressive: Christians who advocate debauchery; poor people giving their money to a billionaire with rotating Ponzi schemes; and retirees who do not understand that tax cuts to 1% threaten their own rights.
As the new Time magazine interview makes clear, Trump has done nothing for the common man and everything for his wealthy donors, but somehow that fact doesn’t seem to matter.
To misquote Jesus, the stupid will always be among us.
Our Politics Reflects a Cognitive Decline
When Trump celebrated his victory in 2016, his statement “I love the less educated” made headlines. Eight years later, it is not that half the country supports violent coup attempts, but rather that they sincerely believe that the 2020 elections were stolen, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The US appears to be asleep to “Idiocracy,” a funny and not-so-funny satire about Americans in the year 2500 who have lost the ability to think. In the film, Americans elect a stupid professional wrestler as president – President Camacho – because he is loud and manipulative and they don’t know any better. The Trump sequel writes itself.
As funny as the movie was, America’s declining cognition is quite serious. Americans’ logic, language, and reading comprehension levels have dropped measurably. Last year, researchers at Northwestern University and the University of Oregon reported that while American IQ has increased dramatically over the past century, cognitive abilities showed a measurable decline between 2006 and 2018. Scores in three of the four broad domains of Intelligence fell during this period: logic, vocabulary, and visual/mathematical problem solving.
Excessive use of personal electronics, social media could be to blame
In 1850, unwashed children between the ages of 6 and 18 were crammed into a smelly school room with no air conditioning and no technology – and often no books – but still emerged well-versed in Latin, French, humanities and trigonometry.
Today, with whiteboards, laptops, separate classrooms for each grade level, and historically unprecedented teacher/student ratios, student comprehension levels are falling rather than rising. Last year, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, math and reading scores for 13-year-olds reached their lowest scores in decades, which is not explained by the COVID-19 gap in recent years.
The explanation can be found in a growing dependence on smartphones, social networks and electronic devices that offer rapid and excessive stimulation, dulling the brain’s ability to think critically and organically.
Observational studies of human learning have shown a direct link between children’s exposure to fast-paced television in the first 3 years of life and their subsequent attention deficits as they age. Excessive sensory stimulation (ESS) during childhood has been shown to increase overall cognitive and behavioral deficits. Even rising levels of ADHD among older children and college students are correlated with subjects’ early exposure to excessive electronic media.
Overstimulation, in general, reduces our ability to think
It seems logical that overstimulating the human brain with loud colors and noise would, over time, reduce our ability to think critically. Just as excessive reliance on crutches can cause leg muscles to atrophy, excessive exposure to addictive but mindless electronics and social media can atrophy the brain’s learning centers.
Smartphones aren’t the only culprits. Recent studies have also shown that high noise levels, including exposure to high-decibel music at home or in the car, and noisy, ubiquitous television, also lead to cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in the brain.
Education Levels Are Affecting US Politics
The growing political divide in America may have more to do with levels of education and cognition than actual beliefs. By wide margins, the most educated congressional districts in the US elect Democrats, while the least educated districts elect Republicans.
According to Politico, Democrats control 77% of the most educated congressional districts, while Republicans control 64% of the least educated districts. The rural poor love Trump, even as Democrats present table results that benefit their lives: jobs, infrastructure, broadband, health care, and industrial regulations so trains don’t derail and parts don’t fly out of planes at 16,000 feet.
Maximilien Robespierre, one of the most influential figures of the French Revolution, was known for his attacks on the monarchy and his defense of democratic reforms.
He famously wrote: “The secret of freedom is in educating people, while the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.”
Although Trump’s closest advisers consider him an idiot, he has a con man’s intuition about how to manipulate ignorance.
Sabrina Haake is a Chicago attorney and Gary resident. She writes the Substack newsletter The Haake Take.
