{"id":35564,"date":"2025-01-31T11:48:32","date_gmt":"2025-01-31T16:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=35564"},"modified":"2025-01-31T11:50:46","modified_gmt":"2025-01-31T16:50:46","slug":"the-six-rules-of-stupidity-an-evaluation-of-trump-by-david-brooks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=35564","title":{"rendered":"The six rules of Stupidity. An evaluation of Trump by David Brooks"},"content":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/30\/opinion\/trump-executive-orders.html?smid=nytcore-android-share<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n

Or this might work: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/30\/opinion\/trump-executive-orders.html<\/a><\/p>\n

If the pay wall intervenes I’ve copied the six rules for you to read by themselves:<\/p>\n

“Principle 1: Ideology produces disagreement, but stupidity produces befuddlement. This week, people in institutions across America spent a couple of days trying to figure out what the hell was going on. 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 \u201cfrom their relation to reality.\u201d”<\/p>\n

“Principle 2: Stupidity often inheres in organizations, not individuals. When you create an organization in which one man has all the power and everybody else has to flatter his preconceptions, then stupidity will surely result. As the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it: \u201cThis is virtually a sociological-psychological law. The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Principle 3: People who behave stupidly are more dangerous than people who behave maliciously. 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!<\/p>\n

Principle 4: People who behave stupidly are unaware of the stupidity of their actions. You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that incompetent people don\u2019t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence. Let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Principle 5: Stupidity is nearly impossible to oppose. Bonhoeffer notes, \u201cAgainst stupidity we are defenseless.\u201d 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, \u201cIn 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.\u201d”<\/p>\n

“Principle 6: The opposite of stupidity is not intelligence, it\u2019s rationality. 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 \u2014 conspiracy theories, folk tales and internet legends; that vaccines are harmful to children. They don\u2019t live within a structured body of thought but within a rave party chaos of prejudices.”<\/p>\n

The last people to abandon Trump will be the powerless, cowardly pols who will be eaten alive by the strange cast of characters that calls itself today’s Republican Party. As more and more people like David Brooks point out that the emperor has no cloths. These living ghosts will have to worry about the larger electorate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/30\/opinion\/trump-executive-orders.html?smid=nytcore-android-share Or this might work: https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/01\/30\/opinion\/trump-executive-orders.html If the pay wall intervenes I’ve copied the six rules for you to read by themselves: “Principle 1:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-trump-2016"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35564"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35567,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35564\/revisions\/35567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}