A Gerontocracy of Blowhards

From the G-File on The Dispatch

The phrase “Year Zero” is often credited to Pol Pot, which is not exactly a credit to the idea. For Pot, the idea was to erase the past and start fresh. This required, alas, the genocidal murder of a lot of people. The idea of Year Zero is of course much older. Indeed, it’s probably better understood as an urge: The desire to start from scratch, or have some great do-over, is at the heart of every radical revolutionary and totalitarian movement and ideology going back to Plato’s Republic. The Jacobins talked about “Year One,” but the idea was the same: Erase the blackboard, turn the calendar back to the beginning, remake society from the ground up.

(Of course, Jesus’ birth is a Year One event, but in defense of Christianity, the idea was invented five centuries after his birth and didn’t really catch on for another four centuries. But that’s a digression I’ll explore another time.)

Because it’s both a human urge as much as an intellectual concept, this desire is central to countless non-genocidal movements, too. I learned from Tom Wolfe that the slogan of the Bauhaus school was “start from zero.” It was also the motivating passion of many ‘60s radicals. “The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero,” Wolfe wrote. “At one point Ken Kesey organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better.”

I’ve written quite a bit about Year Zero thinking as an ideological imperative. It’s basically the TL;DR of radicalism: Tear it all down and start over. And I’d be perfectly happy to write another “news”letter on this. And maybe I will. But not today.

Instead, I want to write about a different kind of Year Zero. Specifically, what I have in mind is the stupidity of ignorance about the past. Note stupidity and ignorance are closely related concepts, but they’re not the same thing. Smart people can be ignorant and stupid people can be informed. Indeed, one of the cool things about knowledge is that it can make not very bright people seem very smart. A well-trained soldier of average intelligence will likely seem like a genius to a lot of, say, high-IQ philosophy professors in the right context. Meanwhile, really smart people can seem stupid if they have no good facts to work with. We tend to look with scorn at thinkers of the past because we know they were wrong. Hah hah, they used leeches! They thought the sun revolved around the earth!

The thing is, the people who came up with these incorrect theories were probably very, very, smart. They just didn’t have access to a lot of information and data. It’s not like you came up with heliocentrism.

In the great Christopher Nolan movie Memento, the main character is smart, but he has no long-term memory. The result is that he often makes the smartest decisions possible, but because his brain starts over every few minutes, those decisions are objectively stupid.

That’s what I’m getting at.

In Ted Lasso, the titular character says, “You know what the happiest animal on earth is? It’s a goldfish. You know why? It’s got a 10-second memory.” In the context of the show, the advice works. Don’t get hung up on the past. If I were writing a different G-File I might even explore how America’s success stems from the fact that it is a Goldfish Nation that thrived precisely because it threw off the bitter historical grievances of the Old World. But that, too, will have to wait for another day.

Except to say that America has a goldfish memory problem.

There’s a lot of wisdom to George Santayana’s aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” But I’d like to offer a different observation. We are condemned to hear a lot of stupid nonsense from people who don’t know—or don’t remember—jack squat about the past.

What got me thinking about this was an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on CNN Monday night. RFK Jr. said (emphasis mine):

Where to begin?

Eugene V. Debs ran for president five times, in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920. On his fifth bid for the presidency, he ran from prison because that’s where the Woodrow Wilson administration put him. Debs was hardly the only critic or opponent sent to prison. Under the Espionage and Sedition Acts, the Wilson administration prosecuted more than 2,000 people for criticizing Wilson and the war (I’ve seen higher estimates, and there were thousands more arrests at the local level, but you get the point). At least 1,000 people were thrown in jail. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure some of them deserved it. But a lot didn’t.

As for censorship, Wilson declared war on “disloyal” publications, particularly—but not exclusively—German-language newspapers. Nearly half of German-language publications folded during the war. This was in part because the Wilson administration refused to let them use the postal system. The radical magazine The Masses was crushed by the Wilson administration, in part for publishing a cartoon saying the war was “making the world safe for capitalism.” From Liberal Fascism:

I should also note that free speech was curtailed in more tangible ways. The Wilson administration encouraged vigilante justice, including the lynching of “traitors.” When Robert Prager was lynched in Collinsville, Illinois, the Department of Justice issued a statement chastising Congress for not giving it enough power to crack down on the disloyal in our midst, saying that, “Until the Federal Government is given power to punish persons making disloyal utterances,” more lynchings will be inevitable.

Clarence Darrow—yes that Clarence Darrow—wrote in a government-backed book, “When I hear a man advising the American people to state the terms of peace, I know he is working for Germany.” In a speech at Madison Square Garden, Darrow said that Wilson would have been a traitor not to defy Germany, adding that “any man who refuses to back the President in this crisis is worse than a traitor.”

The Wilson administration enlisted the aid of hundreds of thousands of quasi-official goons, most famously the American Protective League, to harass, intimidate, and spy on people. An American who made a documentary about the American Revolution was sent to prison for depicting the British in a negative light.

Longtime readers can be forgiven for thinking I’m just using this as an opportunity for eternally deserved Wilson-bashing. So, it’s worth noting that there’s a long history of political censorship in America. FDR used the postal system to censor and intimidate publications, too. Also, in 1942 alone some 10,000 government officials were reading and censoring a million pieces of mail per week. Abraham Lincoln censored the wartime press. The Chicago Times was shut down for criticizing Lincoln’s handling of the war.

Richard Nixon certainly wanted to weaponize government agencies against his opponents. One reason he wanted to is that he was convinced that JFK had ordered the IRS to audit him.

I’m not trying to be exhaustive here. Nor am I trying to say that every encroachment on civil liberties was unjustified. What I am saying is that RFK Jr. is talking out of his sphincter.

It’s also worth noting that—even if you buy his spin about being wrongly censored—he was de-platformed by social media outlets not because he was a political opponent but because he was spewing his anti-vax nonsense. As for the Secret Service thing, that’s hogwash, too.

Donald Trump has a goldfish problem, too. He knows nothing about American history, so every (allegedly) unfair thing that happens to him has “never happened before.” Indeed, RFK Jr. is essentially cribbing Trump’s material. After Biden’s State of the Union Address, Trump posted on Truth Social: “HE WEAPONIZED GOVERNMENT AGAINST HIS OPPONENT – DIDN’T TALK ABOUT THAT, NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE!” In 2016, Trump insisted that “African American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.”

“Ever, ever, ever” is pretty definitive. It’s also nonsense.

Trump insists that no president has been treated as unfairly as him, including Lincoln (he also probably didn’t know Lincoln was a Republican—whenever he learns something new, he likes to say “a lot of people don’t know that …”). But even leaving out the whole assassination thing—which is a pretty big thing to leave out—Lincoln was treated pretty shabbily by the press. Trump didn’t know where some of his favorite terms came from, including “America First,” and “Silent Majority.” He claims to have invented “Make America Great Again,” but when it was pointed out to him that Ronald Reagan used it, he plausibly responded that he didn’t know that. Besides, Reagan “didn’t trademark it.”

When asked about his civil rights record in 2016, Trump said that “there’s nobody that has done so much for equality as I have.” Big statement. What was his proof? Mar-a-Lago complies with civil rights laws. “It’s totally open to everybody!” I guess technically Martin Luther King Jr. never opened a private club that allows people of any color or creed to pay $200,000 to belong to it.

Joe Biden is a little different. It’s not so much that he doesn’t know anything about history, it’s just that the history he invokes is frequently wrong. He wasn’t arrested in South Africa trying to visit Nelson Mandela. He didn’t have a historic conversation with Golda Meir, nor was he a “liaison” with Egyptians. Many of the seemingly historic tales of his personal life never happened.

More to the point, Biden makes up history about stuff he’s not personally involved in. And—also very important—he was doing this long before anyone accused him of being senile (though that’s increased the frequency). In 2008, he told Katie Couric, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed.” But FDR didn’t go on TV then —television was introduced to the American public at the World’s Fair in 1939—and FDR wasn’t even president when the stock market crashed in 1929. He makes up stuff about the Second Amendment, Jim Crow, and more—all the time.

What this says about Biden versus Trump and Kennedy is open to debate. I do think having no idea there was a past is different than being wrong about the past, but the differences are obscure and psychological. Where all three old men overlap is that they’re blowhards. Biden’s style seeks the authority of the past in a different way, but it’s still wild exaggeration and bluster. When he touted Barack Obama’s successful effort to kill Osama bin Laden—which he opposed at the time—he said, “You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan.” Okay, Joe.

But there’s another commonality. They all work from the assumption that the rest of us are too ignorant to know better—or care.

And, sadly, for a huge number of people, they might be right. I think one reason so many people believe all of the Flight 93 stuff from the right and the left is that we suffer from chronic recency bias and historical lethargy. People believe Kennedy’s and Trump’s claims that “this has never happened before” and, as a result, think that gives them permission to believe America is one election away from Armageddon or apocalypse. Many people believed Biden in 2021 when he claimed that Georgia’s relatively modest election reforms were “Jim Crow 2.0”—or in 2012 when he said that Mitt Romney wanted to put “y’all back in chains”—because they have no idea how ridiculous those claims sound in true historical context. Many believe Trump’s nonsense about crime never being worse, when crime was so much worse—in my lifetime. When you have the historical memory of a goldfish, why not take someone else’s word about how “this has never happened before” or “things have never been worse”? If the median voter was historically literate—or willing to apply their historical literacy to B.S.—we might not be so far down the road to a gerontocracy of blowhards.

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