Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

by Charles P. Pierce

  By then, as Wilentz writes, anti-Masonry was spent as an independent political movement, but it had played a critical role in transforming the National Republicans into what would become known as the Whig party. Among Whigs, it was the politicians whose careers had begun in anti-Masonry who often were ahead of the party, particularly on the issue of slavery, which was gathering a fearsome power within the country’s politics. In 1835, William Henry Seward bolted the anti-Masonic party that he’d done so much to promote and joined the Whigs.

  For the next fifteen years, Seward and Weed and the other anti-Masons worked within the Whig party to close the ideological gap. They didn’t talk much about the Masons anymore, but the anti-elitist energy that had fueled the anti-Masonic movement in upstate New York was easily translated into a dislike of southern plantation society when the slavery issue became inflamed. The abolitionist movement pressed on the Whigs from the outside while Seward and the rest of them pushed from the inside, until the party could bend no further. Gradually, as their conspiracy theorizing fell away, and their visions of a dark Masonic cabal went up in smoke, the democratizing part of the anti-Masonic movement stayed, and it helped to defeat the slave power in America, which actually was the conspiracy that was running the country.

  The Whigs imploded. Seward and his fellow renegades left, founding the Republican party and, eventually, nominating Abraham Lincoln. Seward would serve Lincoln as secretary of state until he was nearly killed in his home on the same night Lincoln was shot in Ford’s Theatre. It was a confederacy of drunks and idiot children that attacked Lincoln and Seward, not the Masons. That would have been crazy. And still, nobody was sure who they’d pulled out of Oak Orchard Creek all those years before, although some people continued to have their suspicions.

  NOT far from where the Masons gathered in Newtonville, and not long after the Masons held their open house, the Royal Order of Hibernians opened their hall to a convention of UFO enthusiasts and some fellow travelers: there was some interest on display in Bigfoot, and in lost civilizations. The Hibernians had already decorated for their annual Halloween party. The walls were adorned with old movie posters—King Kong and The Bride of Frankenstein. Black and orange balloons bobbed to the ceiling in every corner of the hall.

  Browsing through the literature, it was easy to see the lasting impact that Ignatius Donnelly’s work had had on the national historical counternarrative. Even those volumes arguing that Atlantis had an alien origin conformed to Donnelly’s notions as to where the place was and what had happened to it. And clearly, Dan Brown’s labors had done as much for the Illuminati-Templar-Masonic publishing industry as it had for the membership of the Masons themselves.

  But the main focus of the conference was lights in the sky—or, in several cases, lights under water. There was about the whole evening a sense of faintly acknowledged bunkum mixed with a charming desire for a kind of personal revelation, for acquiring hidden knowledge. There was nothing theoretical about what these people knew. The conspiracy or conspiracies were almost beside the point. It was the hidden knowledge that was important, a Gnosticism for the media age, with action figures for sale.

  “There’s a little P. T. Barnum and a little Don King to it, I guess,” said Jack Horrigan, who organized the conference. “There’s some substance to it, and then there are the guys from the Planet Beltar, and this is a photo of their alien spaceship. Pass it on.”

  The essential Americanness of the whole thing was hard to deny. The isolation of conspiracy theories as mere commercial commodities, tightly circumscribed within the Three Great Premises, has not been a good thing. It has forced upon conspiracy theories the role of history’s great patent-medicine show. The creative imagination at work in them never crosses over into what’s glibly described as the real world. How different would American politics look if people generally applied to it what every poll says they believe about what happened in Dealey Plaza? The people looking into Iran-Contra could have used a little of the attitude Ignatius Donnelly brought to the works of Shakespeare. Not that Donnelly was right, but that he allowed himself to believe there was knowledge hidden somewhere to which he had a right; in pursuit of it, he summoned all his creative powers, which, as we’ve seen, were considerable. To demand to know is the obligation of every American. That it occasionally leads people down blind alleys, or off to Atlantis, is to be celebrated, not scorned.

  In 2007, Jonathan Chait published The Big Con, a mordantly funny examination of how conservatives in general, and the Republican party in particular, came to believe so deeply and fervently in the crackpot notion of supply-side economics. Chait is a fanatically moderate liberal, a bright and wonkish soul, and a positive sobersides on almost every issue. And yet, on the very first page of his book, he’s already calling supply-side enthusiasts “a tiny coterie of right-wing extremists, some of them ideological zealots, others merely greedy, a few of them possibly insane.” And, well, boy howdy, it gets rougher from there. By page 21, we learn that “American economic policy has been taken over by sheer loons.”

  However, Chait seems just a bit troubled by this. “I have this problem,” he writes. “Whenever I try to explain what’s happening in American politics—I mean, what’s really happening—I wind up sounding like an unhinged conspiracy theorist. But honestly, I’m not.” This disclaimer is utterly unnecessary. If there weren’t something of the conspiracy theorist in him, he wouldn’t have been able, clearly and hilariously, to depict the lunatic economic nonsense that the country’s dominant political party so rigidly adopted. He should be proud of sounding that way. We all need to unleash our inner Donnellys from time to time.

  Modern conservatism, of which supply-side economics is the beating heart, did more than anything else to devalue traditional American conspiracy theories. People who held to the old conspiracies did so because they knew something important was at stake. They considered the government something of value. That’s why the anti-Masons were so hell-bent on exposing the Masons who were running government.

  But to the supply-siders, and to the movement behind them, government is not worth the trouble. For all their faults, the old iron American conservatives did believe in the essential importance of the American government, which was why they were so afraid of what the Bavarian Illuminati might be doing with it. On the other hand, movement conservatism is a style, not a philosophy, and the government is merely a performance space. Thus, conservative conspiracies have lost their essential lunatic tanginess. If you’ve made yourself rich and powerful deriding the government, what do you care if some shadowy cabal is running it, as long as it’s not also running the corporations who fund your research?

  Every election cycle or so, we still get some tub-thumping about the shadowy liberals who are running things, but now the dark forces are the Dixie Chicks, not the Rothschilds. Where’s the threat, except perhaps to the memory of Patsy Cline?

  Chait needn’t have worried. The people he’s writing about don’t care whether he sounds unhinged or not. They don’t even care if he’s right. (He is.) Their theory is valid because it has made them money and sold itself successfully. The facts are what they believe, and the truth depends on how fervently they believe it. All Chait has done is to show them for what they are—charlatans, but not cranks. Cranks are much too important. They are part of the other America—Greil Marcus’s old, weird America. A charlatan is a crank with a book deal and a radio program and a suit in federal court. A charlatan succeeds only in Idiot America. A charlatan is a crank who succeeds too well. A charlatan is a crank who’s sold out.

  Part II

  *

  TRUTH

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Radio Nowhere

  For an unobtrusive little bookworm, Mr. Madison understood the Gut and what it could do better than most of his peers did. He saw it for what it was—a moron, to be sure, but more than that, too. The Gut is democratic. It is the repository of fears so dark and ancient and general that we reflexively dress up the
Gut as good ol’ common sense, which we define as “whatever the Gut tells us.” The Gut inevitably tells so many different people so many different things at so many different times that it causes them to choose up sides. Good ol’ common sense is almost never common and it often fails to make sense. Because of this, Madison was wary of the Gut from the start, and he tried to devise a system within which the Gut could be channeled and controlled, as by the locks in a canal. “So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities,” he wrote in Federalist 10, “that when no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions.”

  Political debate channeled itself into political parties. Madison made peace with their inevitability, and he even helped Thomas Jefferson start one, but he never really trusted them, either. In retirement, he wrote to James Monroe that “there seems to be a propensity in free governments which will always find or make subjects on which human opinions and passions may be thrown into conflict. The most perhaps that can be counted on is that … party conflicts in such a country or government as ours will be either so light or so transient as not to threaten any permanent or dangerous consequences to the character or prosperity of the republic.”

  Here, of course, he calamitously misjudged his fellow Americans. Following the Gut as though it were not the moron it is, Americans do have a positive genius for choosing up sides. Madison wanted conflicts to be so ephemeral as to not endanger anything important. He did not reckon with the fact that, one day, the country would become so good at choosing up sides that it brought the same unthinking dynamic to questions of life and death, war and peace, and the future of the planet that it does to arguments about center fielders or alternative country bands.

  We choose up sides in everything we do. In 2006, for example, writing in the conservative National Review, a man named John J. Miller listed the “50 Greatest Conservative Rock Songs.” Now, to be fair, Miller was a little bit out of his comfort zone. He’d emerged from the halls of the Heritage Foundation, an institution that never has been confused with the Fillmore West. Nevertheless, he soldiered bravely on, never noticing the absurdity that was piling up around his knees. For example, among the addled Tolkienisms with which Robert Plant larded Led Zeppelin’s “The Battle of Evermore,” the essential conservatism appears in a single lyric:

  “The tyrant’s face is red.”

  Miller somehow failed to move on to a study of those noted communist propagandists the Cyrkle, whose 1966 hit contained the following summons to revolution:

  “The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball.”

  A bubblegum “Internationale,” that one.

  Miller dug deep. In what may have been an attempt to send Bono into seclusion, he cited U2’s “Gloria” because it’s about faith and has a verse in Latin. (Miller fails to pay similar homage to the “Rex tremendae majestatis” lyric in the Association’s “Requiem for the Masses.”) Two songs wholly or partly about the difficulty of scoring really good dope made Miller’s list: “Der Kommissar,” as a commentary on the repression in East Germany, where only Olympic swimmers ever got really good dope, and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” as a lesson that “there’s no such thing as a perfect society.” Not even Keith Richards has ever been stoned enough to interpret that song that way.

  Miller lists some antigovernment punk songs without noting that the government in question was run by that longtime National Review pinup Maggie Thatcher. The Sex Pistols as an anti-abortion band? The notion of the Clash as spokesfolk for adventurism in the Middle East might have been enough to bring Joe Strummer back from the dead. To his credit, Miller was sharp enough to immunize himself against any family-values tut-tutting from his side of the aisle by admitting that a number of the songs on his list were recorded by “outspoken liberals” or “notorious libertines.”

  Led Zeppelin? Notorious libertines? Who knew?

  Thanks to that disclaimer, Miller could write, with a straight face, that the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?” is pro-abstinence and pro-marriage, although it was recorded at a moment when Brian Wilson was hoovering up the Chinese heroin. Possibly Miller saw Wilson as following a trail through moral consistency already blazed by Newt (“Got a cold, dear? I want a divorce”) Gingrich, Rush (“Why wasn’t I born an East German swimmer?”) Limbaugh, and Bill (“Where the hell’s ‘Tumblin’ Dice’?”) Bennett. In any event, he can listen to the Kinks while being completely deaf to Ray Davies’s sense of irony, which is roughly akin to listening to the “1812 Overture” and failing to hear the cannons.

  This is disorder. There are so many things in the wrong place here—entertainment standing in for identity, identity standing in for politics—that any actual appreciation of the art is impossible to find. It’s on the wrong shelf. Or it’s slipped down off the windowsill and behind the radiator where nobody will find it. Mr. Madison was right to be worried. Americans do nothing better than we choose up sides and, once we do that, we find it damn easy to determine that someone—the Masons! the refs! liberals! dead white males!—is conspiring against us. And sometimes, they are. Or so the Gut whispers. The Gut is, if nothing else, a team player.

  THE New Media Conference begins with an old joke.

  “I go back to the days when the Dead Sea was just sick,” says Joe Franklin, a man who has been broadcasting from New York since shortly after Peter Minuit blew town. His audience takes just a moment to laugh, possibly because the joke does not translate well from the original Sumerian.

  The conference is being held in a hotel in lower Manhattan, about three blocks from Ground Zero and two blocks from the Hudson River. “New Media” is a little misleading, since by now it’s a general term for everything that isn’t CBS or the New York Times. The new media include blogs and webcasts and podcasts. The New Media Conference, however, is a talk show convention.

  There is a great homogeneity to the gathering. Golf shirts and khakis are the uniform of the day. The conventioneers do morning drive in Omaha and evening drive in Nashville. As a matter of fact, the conference isn’t even a “talk show” convention per se. One of talk radio’s most successful and profitable genres, sports talk, isn’t represented at all. There are very few people here who dispense home improvement advice on Saturday morning, or run the Sunday afternoon gardening show. Rather, this is a convention for people who do “issue-oriented” talk radio. It is sponsored by Talkers magazine, the bible of the industry, and its majordomo is Michael Harrison, an Ichabod Crane-ish character who bustles about the lobby, snapping photos of talk radio stars like Laura Ingraham and G. Gordon Liddy, and saying “Wow!” a lot.

  Liddy’s very presence says a great deal not only about the conference but about the industry it’s celebrating. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Gordon Liddy is an authentically dangerous man. Back in the 1970s, he was the Nixon campaign operative who proposed firebombing the Brookings Institution, murdering the news columnist Jack Anderson, and hiring yachts as floating brothels for the purposes of blackmailing delegates to the Democratic National Convention. And he did all this from inside the executive branch of the government. Even Nixon’s felonious attorney general, John Mitchell, thought Liddy was a lunatic, and Mitchell was no field of buttercups himself.

  Liddy crashed and burned when burglars he’d organized got caught in the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, touching off Nixon’s prolonged Götterdämmerung. Liddy went to prison, having named no names, but not before he offered to present himself on any street corner in case anyone from the White House wanted to silence him. Alas for that plan, the only person working for Nixon crazy enough to shoot Gordon Liddy in public was Gordon Liddy.

  So off to the federal sneezer he went for a while, and then he came out again and gradually, improbably, made a celebrity out of himself. He toured college campuses with the LSD guru Timothy Leary, whom he had busted years ago as a local prosecutor in upstate
New York. This is not so bad. Everybody has to earn a living. It was clear, though, that no country serious about its national dialogue on any subject would allow Gordon Liddy near a microphone, for the same reason that we would keep Charlie Manson away from the cutlery. There was a time in this country when Gordon Liddy could have moved along to a notable, if unprofitable, career as a public crank.

  However, in “issues-oriented” talk radio, threatening to poison a journalist is a shining gold star on the résumé. Westwood One, a huge radio syndicator, gave Liddy a national platform, and Liddy did with it pretty much what you might expect. On one memorable occasion, he gave his radio audience pointers on how to kill a federal agent. (“Head shots,” he advised.) The comment caused no little outrage, particularly among federal agents with heads. President Bill Clinton mooed earnestly about the corruption of our national dialogue. This sent the talk radio universe into such collective hysterics that the New Media Conference in 1995 gave Gordon Liddy its coveted “Freedom of Speech” award for boldly speaking truth to power. Which is why Gordon Liddy is here today, and why Michael Harrison is taking his picture and saying “Wow!” a lot. Harrison will help the conference hand out this year’s “Freedom of Speech” award, a subject on which he waxes particularly messianic.

  “There’s always a big battle around this award,” he says in his opening speech to the conference, “and a lot of it goes back to when G. Gordon Liddy got it. That was a defining experience for so many people with this award. The press likes to take things out of context and blow them up for their own political agenda.”