February 21, 2025
Dear Interested Readers,
Maybe Trump’s Radical Ways Are Revealing That I Am A Conservative
Last Thursday I was delighted to see that David Brooks had a new opinion piece in the New York Times. His column usually comes out every Thursday, but he missed February 6th. Perhaps, he was on vacation. He usually has great titles for his commentary. The title of last Thursday’s column was Can We Please Stop Calling These People Populists? I would suggest that you also check out his column from January 30th, “The Six Principles of Stupidity.” As you might imagine, he details with humor how the Trump administration has scored on each of the six principles which were:
Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement.Â
The example that Brooks gave for this principle was the freeze of 3 trillion dollars of government spending that was announced and then quickly retracted. His comment was:
This is what happens when a government freezes roughly $3 trillion in spending with a two-page memo that reads like it was written by an intern. When stupidity is in control, the literature professor Patrick Moreau argues, words become unscrewed “from their relation to reality.”
Principle 2: Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals.
You may have to think about this one for a minute but it is like the “Emporer has no clothes” story. People will be stupid in an autocracy to avoid being at odds with “Der Führer.” The quote he uses appropriately comes from the martyred German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote:
“This is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.”
Republican members of the House and Senate take note!
Principle 3: People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. Â
Think about all the errors in judgment and reversals of poorly considered proclamations during the first month of the Trump reign of terror. Brooks’ comment was:
Evil people at least have some accurate sense of their own self-interest, which might restrain them. Stupidity dares greatly! Stupidity already has all the answers!
Principle 4: People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions.
This principle is a restatement of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” which posits that really stupid people don’t realize how stupid they are. Their bias is that they know the answers. Any Trump speech or tweet is likely to be an example of this dysfunctional bias. Brooks references a couple of Trump cabinet members who were confirmed secondary to the effect of Principle #2 as an example of Principle # 4:
Let’s introduce the Hegseth-Gabbard corollary: The Trump administration is attempting to remove civil servants who may or may not be progressive but who have tremendous knowledge in their field of expertise and hire MAGA loyalists who often lack domain knowledge or expertise. The results may not be what the MAGA folks hoped for.
Principle 5: Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose.
To understand this principle and how it operates in the Trump administration just think about all the times in the last month you have been surprised by something so stupid you are really at a loss to know what to think or say. I offer turning Gaza into a beachfront resort sans any Palestinians who will be happy to live somewhere else as an example. If that doesn’t work for you think of the “Gulf of America” or the idea of buying Greenland or making Canada the fifty-first state. What can you say to that kind of stupidity when it comes out of left field and completely surprises you? Brooks’ elaboration is so on point that I will give all of it to you:
Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, “Against stupidity we are defenseless.” Because stupid actions do not make sense, they invariably come as a surprise. Reasonable arguments fall on deaf ears. Counter-evidence is brushed aside. Facts are deemed irrelevant. Bonhoeffer continues, “In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack.”
Principle 6: The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it’s rationality.Â
Unfortunately, a rational person, say Nancy Pelosi or Kamala Harris just doesn’t have the mass crowd appeal of a buffoon. Transfer of rational thoughts is hard since it is often an exercise of swimming upstream against self-interest, multiple biases, and yes, ignorance that prefers to structure explanations from misinformation delivered by someone who entertains and complements them than someone who delivers the difficult truth. Jimmy Carter was a rational but boring candidate.  Brooks writes:
The psychologist Keith Stanovich defines rationality as the capacity to make decisions that help people achieve their objectives. People in the grip of the populist mind-set tend to be contemptuous of experience, prudence and expertise, helpful components of rationality. It turns out that this can make some populists willing to believe anything — conspiracy theories, folk tales and internet legends; that vaccines are harmful to children. They don’t live within a structured body of thought but within a rave party chaos of prejudices.
Against the background of the “Six Principles of Stupidity” let’s move on to Brooks’ assertion that Trumpism is a “faux populist movement.” This analysis is somewhat sad because it suggests that about 80 million American voters were the victims of a big con. They were promised everything at the rallies they attended where they were told that they had been disparaged, cheated, abused, and denied by elites who were self-dealing criminals who controlled big government for the explicit purpose of keeping them down. Having been saved by God from the assassin’s bullet, the recipient of their affection was going to “Fight, Fight, Fight” to Make America Great Again which was just code for correcting all that they felt was holding them down. Eggs were going to be cheap. No talented minority person was going to have an advantage over them because of the plot of someone pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion which felt like a process that would rob them of their birthright opportunity and make them a minority in the land of their forefathers.Â
Brooks begins his recent column where he reveals the con with a comment that underscores the reality that education is one of the social determinants of health:
Over the past 20 years or so many of us social observer types have been writing about the horrific chasms separating the educated class (people with college degrees) from the working class (people without).
Some of these chasms involve basic health outcomes. People without college degrees die about eight years sooner than people with four-year degrees.
Some of the chasms involve family structure. Women with only a high school diploma or less are about five times as likely to have children out of wedlock as women with a college degree.
Some of the chasms are sociological. People with only high school diplomas or less are much more likely to say they have no close friends. They are more likely to live in towns where social capital is collapsing and the young are fleeing.
When my wife and I drove cross country in an RV during the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, I got a very close look at what we “coastal elites” refer to as “flyover America,” or “red state” middle America. It is sadly true that there are higher frequencies of “deaths of despair” in those states which is a partial explanation for the shorter life expectancies in those states. Massachusetts is number two in overall “life expectancy at birth” at 79 years. Mississippi is dead last at 70.9. Hawaii is number one in “life expectancy at birth with a lofty 79.9 years.Â
It seems that the political climate in a state is also a social determinant of health. During the first days of the current administration in the storm of executive orders, data of this sort was one of the things that there was an attempt to block. The CDC was ordered not to release any data. That event was an example of Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement.
Why would any rational administration want to deny providers of healthcare and public health resources the ability to exchange information? Red state folks were feeling pretty good having vanquished the evil doers who support the “deep state,” Why confuse them with data that suggests that the world is complex and that there are things that can’t be corrected with an executive order?
Brooks goes on to reveal that the problem is not of recent origin, and it is not getting better. As you might expect if you focus on former slave states, gaps have not been closed over the past one hundred and fifty years. Any progress made by Black Americans in the last century and a half has been lost to the poverty of white Americans. If you remember, it was the strategic plan of Martin Luther King, Jr. to forge a bond between poor white populations and his movement for civil rights and economic equity for Black Americans. His last big plan before his assassination was the “Poor Peoples March on Washington in 1968.” The realization that we need to focus on DEI is not a recent “woke” phenomenon.
Some of these chasms involve educational outcomes. By sixth grade, the children of poor families are performing four grade levels lower than the children of affluent families. As Daniel Markovits of Yale has pointed out, the education gap between affluent and non-affluent students today is greater than the gap between white and Black people in the era of Jim Crow.
After this startling introduction, identifying what should not have been news for most of us, Brooks makes some observations that many of us may have overlooked. Have you contemplated the deep meanings of populism, conservatism, liberalism, or progressivism? Intersectionality is a relatively new term that is not in the vocabulary of many of us. It is important to understand how we misunderstand and misuse these terms and labels before we go further. I have given you an easy link to how Wikipedia defines each of these terms. You can test your own understanding by reading the first few paragraphs on each of these subjects. If you are like me, intersectionality is a relatively new term for you. It was first used in the late eighties in an attempt to characterize the variations in the movements seeking to gain equity for women, but it can apply to anyone.
As I contemplate these terms, it occurs to me that because of my own respect for tradition and belief in the strategies that seek to improve existing organizations through continuous improvement, I am probably best described as a progressive conservative. The last thing I would want is a rapid process of radical reform led by people like Trump and Musk who obviously have little regard for institutional integrity or the “political norms” that make the Constitution a viable document. If there is anything that makes Trump a threat to our future, it is his disregard for established political norms like accepting the results of an election.Â
We are all many things. Using myself as an example of progressive conservatism and intersectionality, I am simultaneously old, male, religious, and socially progressive. I see value in established norms and traditions. I want improvement through a combination of institutional continuous improvement and sound government policies and regulations. I have frequently mislabeled myself as “liberal,” but that may be because I am biased against anything labeled conservative when in fact with the exception of my desire to see us improve the documented social determinants of health and expand diversity, equity, and inclusion as a way to improve opportunity for everyone, the rest of my profile may suggest to many that I have strong “conservative” values. My unrecognized conservatism may be why I am drawn to the wisdom of Brooks and his even more conservative but never-the-less progressive colleague, David French.
In our world, labels may be one of the most significant sources of misinformation. Brooks continues with a focus on the difference between populism and conservatism. Pay attention to what I have bolded.
If America elected a populist as president, you would expect him to devote his administration to addressing these inequities, to boosting the destinies of working-class Americans. But that’s not what President Trump is doing. He seems to have no plans to narrow the education chasms, no plans to narrow the health outcome chasms or the family structure chasms. He has basically no plans to revive the communities that have been decimated by postindustrialization.
Why is that? The simplest answer is that Trump really seems not to give a crap about the working class. Trump is not a populist. He campaigns as a populist, but once he has power, he is the betrayer of populism.
What’s going on here is not a working-class revolt against the elites. All I see is one section of the educated elite going after another section of the educated elite. This is like a civil war in a fancy prep school in which the sleazy kids are going after the pretentious kids.
Look at who is running this administration. The president is an Ivy League-educated real estate developer. The vice president is an Ivy League-educated former venture capitalist. Elon Musk, the emperor of DOGE, is an Ivy League-educated billionaire.
Look at the people working with Musk. Luke Farritor is a 23-year-old who used artificial intelligence to decipher an ancient Greek scroll. Ethan Shaotran is a 22-year-old Harvard student. Gavin Kliger wrote a Substack post called “Why I Gave Up a Seven Figure Salary to Save America.” These people are not exactly Joe the Plumber.
And look at the programs they are going after. They’re not going after the programs where big budget savings can be realized — like the entitlement programs. They’re going after the programs where they think highly educated progressives work. They’re going after the foreign aid community, the scientific community, the NGO community, the universities, the Department of Education and the Kennedy Center.
They are seeking to destroy the wokesters (the word they use for highly educated progressives) and D.E.I. (the term they use for what highly educated progressives do).
What happened to the MAGA faithful that made it possible for Trump to wage his war against progressive elites? They are still paying a lot for rent, eggs, and gas. Perhaps it is too soon to expect change. Remember, the fabricator-in-chief promised miracles on day one. What he did on day one was to free the January 6th hostages and ban all DEI activities in government. I hate to tell friends, neighbors, and probably a few family members who voted for him that they were suckered.Â
A little further along Brooks asks the key question and then gives us his answer:
How did we get in this mess?
Well, starting about 60 years ago, a group variously labeled the Bobos or the creative class began establishing hegemony over commanding institutions of American life — the universities, the media, the foundations, publishing and entertainment. There are two things you should know about this class. First, like most groups, its members dislike intellectual diversity and tend to impose a stifling progressive orthodoxy in the places they dominate. Second, more than most groups, they see themselves as the moral uplifters of society, on everything from environmental attitudes to sexual ethics, and enjoy preaching in order to enlighten their morally backward countrymen.
Ooh, that hurts. I don’t see myself as one of those, although I am sure that others would say that the description fits Lindsey perfectly. I will admit to being influenced by some of these folks, and I often join forces with them in a coalition for progress, but maybe I am fooling myself.
Progressives exercise hegemony over these institutions but not total control. Every year, for example, elite colleges admit a few conservative students. They often have one or two token conservatives on the faculty, whom they can roll out for panel discussions. These rare conservatives tend to form dissident communities with one another. In the 1980s there was The Dartmouth Review, which gave us Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Later, The Princeton Tory gave us Pete Hegseth. Today there is The Claremont Review of Books, one of the intellectual mouthpieces of Trumpism…
The right-wing elite college dissidents often feel besieged, embattled. They are often both merry pranksters and also cranky, bitter and oppositional. They catastrophize. They look out on those hellscapes of Hanover, N.H.; Princeton, N.J.; and Claremont, Calif., and they decide Western civilization is in ruins. Above all else, they seek social revenge on those who condescend to them.
What comes next is important because Trump is not a conservative. Brooks labels him as an anti-left nihilist with word-class narcissism, and he is trying to tear down everything and everyone who has challenged him.
And here’s the crucial fact about many of them. Many of them are not pro-conservative; they are anti-left. There’s a big difference. They do not focus on building and reforming the civic institutions that conservatives believe are crucial to any healthy society. They focus on tearing down whatever institutions the left occupies.Â
Conservatives believe in constant and incremental change. Nihilists believe in sudden and chaotic disruption… The Trump people are basically the French revolutionaries in red hats — there are the same crude distinctions between good and evil, the same contempt for existing arrangements, the same descent into fanaticism, the same tendency to let the revolution devour its own.
…The members of the Trumpist elite think they’re going after the educated elites at U.S.A.I.D. and the N.I.H., but you know who’s really going to pay the price? It’s the woman in Namibia who is going to die of AIDS because PEPFAR has been eviscerated. It’s the child in Ohio who’s going to die of cancer because medical research was slowed. It’s the future citizens of America whose lives will be worse because their state institutions no longer function. It’s the working-class communities that will continue to languish because Trump ignores their main challenges and focuses instead on culture war distractions.
…They are people who would destroy your home because they don’t like your lawn sign.
I totally agree with Brooks’ last sentence and bottom line:
I’m not a fan of populism, but real populism would be better than the right-wing elite nihilists who are running the country now.
It is too early to say what will happen to Medicaid, SNAP, and public education. I don’t expect any infrastructure improvements in transportation over the next four years. We will make little progress fighting global warming. I do expect that we will abandon our leadership of the free world. A Gaza resort may not be finished by 2028, but I fear that the Russian flag will be flying over much of Ukraine.Â
Will Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “Make America Healthy Again”? I doubt it. Achieving the Triple Aim and lowering the cost of care without dropping the total life expectancy of the citizens of Mississippi to even lower levels will require the expertise that is quite likely to be fired or to leave government service in fear. We won’t produce more primary care physicians or improve rural (think red state) access to care by cutting the budget of HHS and Medicaid to fund tax cuts.  Cutting the budgets of medical research institutions that are trying to better understand the causes of and management of chronic diseases while assuming that those problems are rooted in conspiracies and believing that we will be better avoiding immunizations and should drink more raw milk are strategies that leave me and other progressives who see the conservative wisdom of preserving institutions shaking our heads in disbelief.Â
Musings In The Cold
Our grandsons and their father have been with us this week. Before they fly back to California on Monday, we are expecting a visit from their youngest cousin from Maine and his parents this weekend. We had a choice this week. We could stay indoors to avoid wind chill factors that adjusted temperatures in the teens to feel like single digits or we could bundle up and “deal with it.”Â
For several winters my wife has wanted to visit the Ice Castle in North Woodstock, New Hampshire. Today’s header shows the California grandsons whooping it up at the very chilly scene. I was OK during the neat sleigh ride we took through the woods as the sun went down. After sunset the temperature dropped and I lost all contact with my fingers and toes despite “double gloves” and enough clothing layers to impair my movement.Â
Yesterday, we joined the ice fishermen on our lake. Our easy-to-set-up “Ice Shelter” obtained from Amazon was warmer than I expected, but drilling through almost three feet of ice with a hand auger is a workout. My seven-year-old grandson claims that he “saw” a striped fish looking up at him from the hole. I can neither confirm nor deny his observation, but if a fish was there he did not take our bait. Maybe later today or Saturday when the temp will rise to 31, we will have more luck.
Stay warm as you contemplate the components of your intersectionality and true political orientation. While I was trying to stay warm this week, I had the thought that what I really enjoyed about practicing medicine was that when I was standing at the bedside or exam table the patient mattered most and the patient deserved all of my attention, but now I see that was not the whole story. The whole story includes all the forces, positive and negative, that created the moment and the support and resources that were available to support my efforts to understand and meet the patient’s needs. Sitting in my little shelter and waiting for a tug on the line that never came, I pondered what the state of healthcare will be when my grandsons are 11, 21, or knocking on the door of 80 like me. Thoughts like that can occur while you are sitting in front of a hole in the ice. Give it a try.
Be well,
Gene
