The Carlinian Divide

I keep coming back to the quote by George Carlin: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

There is an important message there for a democracy.

First of all, Carlin seems to confuse median and mean, but in a symmetric distribution it doesn't matter. The median of stupidity is defined as the point where half the people are stupider and half are smarter; the median splits the population in half. The "average" or mean would be where you added up everybody's stupidity and divided by the number of people. These are often not the same. Hopefully now I have eliminated readers from the bottom half and we can talk freely among ourselves.

Here is a point that I have not heard articulated clearly enough. If everybody voted, then the outcome of an election would be determined by summing the top-half voters and bottom-half voters together, and giving the win to the person who got the most votes. To win, you'd have to get some votes from both halves.

But it is not true that everybody votes. In actuality, nine-tenths of an election campaign involves getting people to get out of the EZ-chair and go to the poll. So there are two stages to winning an election: motivating people to vote, and getting people to vote for you. I would say that in our most recent presidential election, Hillary Clinton was undercut and badmouthed by Republicans and Democrats alike, so that even if you agreed with her positions you still had doubts, and many people who would have preferred her on principle simply did not vote.

Back to Carlin. Because everybody does not vote, you can win an election by appealing to the top half (now offhandedly referred to as "the elites") or bottom half of the stupid distribution. You don't need both. If a third of the stupid half votes, and a quarter of the smart half, the stupid half will get their way. For me there are two takeaways from this observation: those having to do with Trump, and the rest of them.

Trump clearly shot for the bottom of the barrel. Where his opponent had encyclopedic knowledge and crisp clear policies in mind for issues foreign and domestic, Trump ran by calling her "Crooked Hillary" and chanting "Lock Her Up!" at his rallies. He still doesn't know one shithole country from another and doesn't like any of them, after a year of being President. He watches Fox & Friends for his policy advice, even when he has the best sources in the world. He appealed to the half of them that are "stupider than that," and he is giving them what they want.

Interestingly, he did not do that by fooling them into thinking he is one of them. He really is one of them. He isn't a crafty manipulator, making carefully-worded statements to keep the faithful in line; he just says whatever comes off the top of his head, and it's stupid. In some ways this is the biggest disappointment of his Presidency.

The irrelevance of the total electorate is a major structural problem with democracy. Especially once people get cynical and don't see the point in voting, the voting population falls well below a hundred percent; you can split the electorate into Carlinian halves (I hope that term sticks) and a candidate can win by appealing to one half or the other. As we have seen, if you can rally the stupid people you have a good chance of winning.

Also, the rest of them. I had always privately assumed that those blue-suited, silver-haired lions of government had risen to the top because of their ability to keep track of dozens of complex policy controversies simultaneously and to read the electorate and say exactly the perfect thing at the right time to make people retain faith in them. So if they said something stupid there was probably a good reason for it, positioning themselves in advance of the next election, perhaps, or appealing to some subgroup that I was unaware of. Maybe I am old-fashioned, I can't explain it, I knew Congress passed some dumb bills but I always figured there was some philosophical or inner-sanctum wisdom behind it that we would understand in the long run.

Now we have this front-page story where in a meeting the President said "Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?" He was referring to Haiti and the entire continent of Africa. The President of the United States was saying he did not want black people coming to the United States.

Chattering conservatives jumped in line saying that Haiti and all of Africa are indeed shitholes, etc. They enjoy that sort of thing and it is to be expected and doesn't matter.

The President was referring to the home nations of more than a billion people, and they were not happy about the comment. Further, the USA, of which the President is president, includes nearly forty million people whose ancestors came from Haiti and Africa.

The statement was like a pressure valve that released a cloud of public statements that the President is a racist. Until this moment in his term you could only infer it from under-the-breath comments and from things he had said and done in the past, but here he clearly and openly articulated that he did not want black people moving to the US. This is a significant moment in clarifying the dialog in America about race. "Racist" can be something you call someone who seems prejudiced, or it can describe a belief system, and the President's statement was an expression of the belief that black people are inferior.

But then -- how do the Stupid Half politicians deal with this? Do they argue about incomes and education levels, AIDS and Ebola, contributions to society and the need to protect people whose lives are in danger?

No, of course not. Their defense of the President was: "He didn't say that."

And they didn't mean, "He didn't say he didn't like black people." They meant, "He said shithouse and not shithole."

Look, I'm not making this up. Open the newspaper.

We have seen a lot of politicians line up behind Trump's stupidity over the past year. They go around the table praising him like something out of Orwell. And it has become obvious that they are not just conducting some highly-skillful political maneuver -- they are actually as dumb as he is.

To the lower Carlinian half, the controversy is that the President said the word "shit." You will see the terms "vulgar" and "vulgarity" in a lot of headlines. Sorry, let me tell you, Presidents talk just like the rest of us. They clean it up for a speech in public, but among themselves the political in-group talks just like anybody else. I wouldn't expend the effort, but I'll bet you could go back and find at least one instance of every President saying the word "shit" somewhere, at least since the days when people took notes.

No, the issue is not that the President used a vulgarity in a meeting.

The lower Carlinian half is also being bombarded with the message that the Fake News reported something wrong. He didn't call them "shithole countries," the rightwing propaganda outlets are saying, the Fake News is just saying that to turn you against him. And if you are kinda dumb, this makes sense. If they can't tell the difference between "shithole" and "shithouse", who knows what else they got wrong? It's just one tiny step from there to covering up Hillary's human-trafficking ring.

And now a fascinating new sort of meta-issue has arisen. A number of famous-name-brand journalists have begun referring to Trump's racism out loud, in clear terms, on major news shows. So now there is, at least, a debate about whether and when you can refer to a person as a racist. Trump's statement has greatly strengthened the point of view that, yes, sometimes a person is actually a racist, and the news people can say so. It is weird to think, but "talking about racism" is a big breakthrough for our media.

Trump himself denies being a racist, though I think this is in that category with "shooting someone on Fifth Avenue," things that wouldn't hurt him any. People elected him to be a racist. But we used to be able to talk about it without using the word itself. Politicians could talk about "thugs" or "welfare queens" and the message would be clear enough. They didn't actually say out loud, "We don't want black people here." But now that cat's out of the bag.

The good news is that Carlin focused on the glass-half-empty, because he's a comedian and stupid people are funnier. Truth is, half the people are smarter than average, too. And now I think we come to a battle over the media. I just watched a video of George Stephanopoulos seriously asking a Very Important Senator in a blue suit to make a bold and clear statement about whether the President said "shithole" or "shithouse." To his viewers that's what matters. If the audience wants that, the news networks will provide it. Half the people are that stupid, and the networks can make money off stupid people.

But we have also seen a good number of news anchors look into the camera and discuss the President's overt racism as a news story, which it is. America has always struggled -- it's not always pretty but we agreed on the goal -- to provide a welcome to all kinds of people. The Statue of Liberty is a symbol of the USA's idealism and hope, it projects our magnanimity to those arriving from across the Atlantic. The great tidal movement over the several hundred years of our history has been toward inclusiveness, and the xenophobic reversal of this by the Trump Presidency is one of the historical stories of our time.

The upper Carlinian half is fed up with the news. Sure, they want to see what crazy thing Trump is going to do next, but for instance in the previous election they also wanted to know what the candidates felt the US can do to support stability in the Middle East, cool down our relationship with North Korea, build our economy, reduce mass murders and gun killings, combat global warming. Calling somebody "Crooked Hillary" didn't work for the top half, it did not answer any of the questions that intelligent voters based their choices on. But deplorable ignorance day after day resonated with stupid people and the commercial media profited well.

So the next question is how to redesign media to inform the upper half of the Carlinian dichotomy. "The elites" are smart enough to double-check their information on the Internet, to get news from good sources and treat it with skepticism, but we don't get to plop down in the EZ-chair after a hard day at work and listen to intelligent analyses of the issues. The elites buy stuff, media could advertise to smart people; somehow the top half is going to have to impress on corporate wheeler-dealers that there is a market for accurate, intelligent news. It can still be colorful, funny, controversial, we can handle both sides. Maybe Trump's racism will be the thing that finally allows the smart half to participate in the national media culture.