Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, write to me at rrbates1951@gmail.com. Comments may also be sent to this address. I promise not to share your e-mail with anyone. To unsubscribe, write here as well.
Monday
Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People—the subject of a fine essay by blogger Greg Olear following Trump’s electoral victory last November—has become more relevant than ever following the passage of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” While Democrats are hoping that tax breaks for billionaires and slashed programs for everyone else will finally bring Trump’s working-class supporters to their senses, the play provides us with a caution: many have such a deep and irrational hatred for experts that they will sometimes punish, not reward, people who are trying to make their lives better. In order to “own the libs,” they will vote against their own best interests.
I witnessed such hatred in a personal way when a conservative cousin tore into Dr. Anthony Fauci, who received the Presidential Medal of Honor from President George W. Bush for his work against AIDS and who valiantly steered us through the Covid crisis. Although Fauci worked tirelessly to save lives, my cousin blamed him for (as far as I could figure out) being the messenger.
As we saw during the pandemic, she was far from the only one. There were even people who chose to die rather than trust life-saving vaccines. Since then, this suspicion of expertise seems to have gotten worse. In all likelihood, we’ll see no one in MAGA blame Trump or Texas administrators for the recent 200+ flood deaths, even while they ignored weather and disaster experts. Trump denies climate change and has gutted the National Weather Service; FEMA, under the control of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, was missing in action for 72 hours after being informed of the crisis and couldn’t handle cries for help because it had fired so many of its personnel; Texas officials, despite prior warnings and offers of aid, turned down funds that would have installed a flood warning system, and yet all may escape accountability.
We’ve reached the point where responsible governance, which relies on expertise, has given way to performance governance, which relies on vibes. While the first can be dull, the second costs lives.
I am reminded of a Simpsons episode from many years back in which Homer runs for waste disposal manager, an elected position. When there is a public debate, the politically glib Homer, relying on soundbytes, runs circles around the boring but competent agency head. Eventually, the man throws up his hands in disgust and quits. Knowing nothing about waste disposal, Homer then makes a complete hash of his job, with garbage in Springfield spiraling out of control. In the end, the whole town has to move.
In Ibsen’s play, local doctor Thomas Stockmann tries to warn the public that the town’s famous health spa has been polluted by its tannery. The mayor, the factory owner, and the townspeople pressure him to quash his results, but he insists on the truth. After all, he knows people will sicken and perhaps even die if they silence him. “The strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone,” he declares at play’s end.
When it is pointed out that the majority disagrees with him, he lashes out at this majority:
The majority never has the right on its side. Never! That’s one of those societal lies that intelligent, free-thinking men must reject. I ask you: Who is it that forms the majority of the population in a country? The smart people, or the stupid people? I think we can agree that stupid people are in the overwhelming majority all over the world. But, damn it all, surely it can never, ever be right that the smart should bow down to the stupid!
(The people try and shout him down.)
DR STOCKMANN: Sure, sure—you can shout me down, I know. You can cut off my mic. But you cannot prove me wrong. The majority has might on its side—unfortunately; but right it has not. I am in the right—me and a few other scattered individuals. The minority is always in the right.
I am reminded of an Emily Dickinson poem at this moment in the play:
Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much Sense – the starkest Madness –
’Tis the Majority
In this, as all, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –
Unlike Stockmann, Fauci learned to be diplomatic through his years of public service. Although he sparred with idiots he encountered in Senate hearings—especially Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul—he didn’t wander into the sweeping judgments that Stockmann indulges in.
But that doesn’t matter to MAGA. Experts, just by knowing stuff, are suspect. I think of Walter Miller’s dystopian novel Canticle for Leibowitz, where the angry mob seeks out leaders and experts to blame for the nuclear apocalypse that has devastated the world:
So it was that, after the Deluge, the Fallout, the plagues, the madness, the confusion of tongues, the rage, there began the bloodletting of the Simplification, when remnants of mankind had torn other remnants limb from limb, killing rulers, scientists, leaders, technicians, teachers, and whatever persons the leaders of the maddened mobs said deserved death for having helped to make the Earth what it had become. Nothing had been so hateful in the sight of these mobs as the man of learning, at first because they had served the princes, but then later because they refused to join in the bloodletting and tried to oppose the mobs, calling the crowds “bloodthirsty simpletons.
Were we wrong to laugh at Trump for suggesting that we could cure Covid by injecting bleach? In any event, Trump got the last laugh by attacking the elites who laughed, just as the mobs prevail in Leibowitz:
Joyfully the mobs accepted the name, took up the cry: Simpletons! Yes, yes! I’m a simpleton! Are you a simpleton? We’ll build a town and we’ll name it Simple Town, because by then all the smart bastards that caused all this, they’ll be dead! Simpletons! Let’s go! This ought to show ’em! Anybody here not a simpleton? Get the bastard, if there is!
We saw something like this happen with China’s cultural revolution under Mao, which in turn inspired the Khmer Rouge’s anti-expertise massacres in 1970’s Cambodia. There are similar currents at work in MAGA in the attacks on science, libraries, news organizations, universities, classrooms, medical research labs, and the like. We see it also in GOP tolerance for the incompetent individuals that Trump named to run the federal agencies.
In Ibsen’s play, Dr. Stockmann pays a price for telling the truth: his house is vandalized, his teacher daughter is fired, and he himself is the target of a town boycott. We never hear what happens to those townspeople who drink the poisoned water or the out-of-town visitors who patronize the spa, but we can imagine rising cancer rates and other sickness outbreaks.
And what of investigative reporting that should back up Stockmann’s claims? Well, the town newspaper bends the knee to the authorities much as CNN, CBS, ABC, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and other mainstream outlets have done with their both-siderism reporting. The following statement by the newspaper editor could have come from those media outlets that passively report (as opposed to aggressively fact check) the lies spouted by the Trump administration. I love how Ibsen captures the sanctimonious self-righteousness of the complicit press:
Hovstad: And, in the matter before us, it is now an undoubted fact that Dr. Stockmann has public opinion against him. Now, what is an editor’s first and most obvious duty, gentlemen? Is it not to work in harmony with his readers? Has he not received a sort of tacit mandate to work persistently and assiduously for the welfare of those whose opinions he represents? Or is it possible I am mistaken in that?
Martin Luther King famously told us that the truth will make us free. Ibsen makes it clear that we may also pay a price for truth telling. Along with the discipline and hard work it takes to become an expert, there is the challenge of holding fast when people hate what your expertise reveals.
