Fascism Makes You Stupid, Not the Other Way Around

Trump and Ezra Klein provide examples

Liberals and anti-MAGA resistors often suggest that MAGA’s adherents worship Trump out of stupidity or ignorance. If America had better education people wouldn’t fall for this bullshit; the rise of MAGA, the argument goes, demonstrates the deep intellectual failure of our polity (cue references to Idiocracy.)

I’ve talked before about why I think this argument is backwards. Lots of people who don’t have fancy degrees are perfectly able to see through Trump’s lies. On the other hand, lots of highly educated people—Ted Cruz, for example, or Jeff Bezos—have embraced Trumpist propaganda. Being educated or “smart” doesn’t make you impervious to Trumpism. Rather, embracing fascism and white supremacy requires you to believe transparent delusions, leading you to believe and say illogical and nonsensical things.

This weekend offered us a couple of strong examples of this dynamic. The first was from Trump himself. The second was from liberal pundit Ezra Klein.

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“Am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?”

Trump has been threatening to send federal troops to what he has referred to as “war-ravaged” Portland. “These are crazy people, and they’re trying to burn down buildings,” he insisted. “This weekend, he posted on social media directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to order an invasion of the city to protect “ICE facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.”

And yet, on Sunday, Trump seemed to confusedly walk back his belligerent rhetoric. Asked if he was planning to send troops to Portland, he said, with odd reticence, “we’re certainly looking at it.” He then explained that he had spoken to Oregon Governor Tina Kotek. Kotek, Trump said was “very nice,” and told him (as she has said publicly) that there is no public safety crisis in Portland and no need for troops.

Trump said he responded by asking Kotek, “’Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place...it looks like terrible.”

Of course, Trump is “watching things on television that are different from what’s happening.” Portland had large demonstrations during the George Floyd protests of 2020; most were peaceful, but some images of fires and looting became rage bait on right wing media, endlessly recycled to give the impression that Portland has been under siege for half a decade. Fash propagandist Steve Bannon, a longtime Trump ally and influencer, has been demanding on his War Room podcast that Trump declare martial law. “Just round them up,” he bloviated in a Politico interview.

Trump is the President of the United States. He has access to experts in every field. He has intelligence agencies. He can literally call local officials (like the governor of Oregon) and people on the ground at any moment. But he prefers to get his information from right wing propaganda networks and Nazi shills because those are the people who most consistently treat him with the sycophantic worship he desires. Every so often, Trump will talk to someone outside his usual circle who flatters him effectively (again, like the governor of Oregon), and he will dimly realize that the information in his bubble is not all he thinks it is. But the moment passes, and he returns to telling himself only what he wants to hear (that he is the GREATEST and his enemies are losers) and listening to only those who tell him the same.

The failure here is not one of intellect, as it’s normally understood. Trump is no genius, but he is able to understand the statement, “Portland is not in flames,” if he is willing to listen to it. But the willingness to listen is a huge problem. Trump is not so much incurious as anti-curious; he hates the very idea of learning something that challenges him or his racist authoritarian worldview. Trump’s cognitive errors aren’t leading to moral errors; rather, his moral failures result in cognitive failures. He has access to the best information, but he chooses the worst, because the worst is more flattering. He is not a fascist because he is a fool. He is a fool because he is a fascist.

“I don’t know what my role is anymore.”

Trump is obviously an extreme case of fascism eating your brain. But it’s not hard to find similar dynamics in a less extreme form—as in this weekend’s conversation between political commenters Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I’ve written about Klein’s embarrassing effort to whitewash Charlie Kirk before; Coates made similar points more eloquently. Klein is to be commended for having Coates on his show, and for attempting to engage with critics. That’s part of what intellectual curiosity should entail; it’s how you educate yourself and stave off the kind of sweeping ossification of worldview and intellect that Trump has deliberately courted.

Nonetheless, the discussion between Klein and Coates is frustrating. At one point, for example, Coates explains that as a Black man, he has spent a great deal of time grappling with a brutal history of white supremacy—a history in which white supremacists often won, not because they were righteous, or had the best messaging, but simply because they had a great deal of power.

I am descended from people who, in their lifetime, fought with all their might for the destruction of chattel slavery in this country. And they never saw it. They never saw it. In my personal belief system, they died in defeat, in darkness…. So I guess the privilege that I draw out of this, the honor that I draw out of this, is not that things will necessarily be better in my lifetime, but that I will make the contribution that I am supposed to make.

To me, Coates’ argument seems like a serious effort to think through the ongoing strength of fascism, to face it, and to resist it.

Klein, though, doesn’t see it that way. Coates’ thoughtful discussion of the actual experience of Black people under fascism, his call to honor resistance even when resistance fails isn’t, for Klein, inspiring. It’s scary and depressing.

“Sometimes I think that having a historical scope that wide can make the present too deterministic,” Klein says—by which he means that he only wants to talk about American history on a timeline of the last ten years. He asks plaintively, “Why are people preferring [Trumpism] to us?”, but he doesn’t want to actually hear Coates’ discussion of the history that makes Trump understandable. Many Black commenters understood that Trump could win in 2016 when white people like Klein (and me) wrote him off. Coates is trying to tell Klein where that wisdom came from. Klein doesn’t want to hear it.

Klein is not a stupid or uneducated man. He’s more educated than Coates, who didn’t graduate from college. But Klein doesn’t like to believe that white supremacy past has something to do with white supremacy present, because he finds that idea depressing, and because it requires him to grapple with the problem that some differences aren’t bridgeable. Coates is attempting to teach him something important, and Klein refuses to be taught. As with Trump, his moral failure leads him to ignorance, not the other way around.

The most telling exchange between Coates and Klein, in my opinion, comes when Coates asks Klein to define his role as a writer and thinker. Klein spirals:

I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man. I feel very conflicted about that question.

The role I want to have is a person curiously exploring his political and intellectual interests in political peacetime. And the role I somehow have is sometimes that. But I’m a political opinion writer and podcaster and so on, and I’m in the business of political persuasion.

What Klein is saying here, I believe, is that he is experiencing a crisis because he believes that intellectual curiosity, “exploring his political and intellectual interests,” is at odds with political persuasion. To be an influencer, he is saying, he needs to stop learning—about the history of white supremacy, for example—and instead he needs to say what will persuade or what is expedient—that Charlie Kirk was a model of good political discourse, for example. As with Trump, truth becomes of secondary, or tertiary interest; the main goal is to find words that lead to power, whether they are true or not.

Do not fill your head with bullshit

Harry Frankfurt defined speech designed to advance one’s interests without regard to truth as “bullshit.” Bullshit is fundamentally anti-intellectual—more anti-intellectual even than lying. Liars have to know what the truth is to avoid it or rework it; often they want to learn things to make their lies more effective.

But bullshitters don’t want to know what’s true or what isn’t. What use is such knowledge? Who cares if Portland is in flames if it’s to your advantage to say it is? Who cares what Charlie Kirk actually said when it’s to your advantage to pretend he was a paragon? For bullshitters, knowing too much—having too wide a historical scope, talking to the Governor— is at best useless and at worst a dangerous distraction.

Bullshit, and fascism, thrive on bad faith; people deliberately choose fascist bullshit as a means of pickling their brains in callousness and hate. When Trump speaks to Governor Kotek, when Ezra Klein speaks to Coates, they have the opportunity to learn something about the world and about the past. And when they turn down that opportunity, it’s not because they lack intelligence; it’s because they believe that learning, in this context, is not in their interest, or interferes with their political goals.

I’m not saying Ezra Klein is equivalent to Trump, or that he’s as ignorant as Trump. I’m saying that ignorance, as a road to fascism, is vastly overstated, because ignorance is downstream, not upstream of fascism. Fascism is, among other things, a decision to choose lies instead of truth as the route to power. I think educated people like Ezra Klein need to take that more seriously when they start to think that they should bracket history and truth in the name of political expediency. If you are a writer and feel you can no longer speak the truth, you should probably take some time off. The alternative, in various senses, is Trump’s bullshit.