Oh my!

Believing that the entire set of factors that led to Trump's win in 2016 can be simplified to one word.... "stupid", as soothing as it may be to some, is, to me, quite "stupid".

Furthermore, solving this problem by using social engineering tactics like requiring everyone to achieve an advanced post-secondary degree is overly simplistic. As former presidential candidate, Andrew Yang often pointed out. Trump is not the source of the problem, he is a symptom. History is ripe with stories about the ebb and flow between governing elites and the revolutionaries who upend them.

Trump supporters do not have a monopoly on being stupid. There's plenty to go around. The socio-economic policies that brought us to where we are today result from a complex mixture of decisions the source of which is a broad collection of politicians of many stripes. The pandemic has merely ripped off many of the social band-aids keeping things out of sight.

When history crosses the 't's" and dots the "i's" about all this the biggest culprit will prove to be the uneven disruptive impact of technology on the supply/demand curve of human labour. Not the inherent stupidity of a particular class of citizen.

I'm willing to bet that the distribution of IQ scores between those who support Trump and those who don't would appear relatively equal. Perhaps we should be a bit more analytical than concluding that the source of the problem is pure stupidity.

After all, if that's really true, the most pragmatic solution is to treat them as less evolved, round them up and put them all in camps where they can't bother us.

Oh, wait, society has done that several times before for a variety of reasons and decided that's not such a good thing.

It would be stupid of us not to do better than that.