The Stupid, It Burns
The second act of the Trump presidency has moved American policymaking wholly beyond reason
This week I reached a new low in my capacity to process the utter thoughtlessness of American politics during the second Trump administration.
To be an intellectual is to bring generalized knowledge from multiple fields to current events, seeking to analyze and understand them and giving readers or listeners guidance about how the world got here and where it might be going. In doing this work, I draw on expertise in political philosophy, empirical political science, and intellectual history, as well as more superficial knowledge of adjacent fields in the social sciences and humanities. I launched this Substack almost exactly four years ago to contribute to such thinking. And four months into the second year of the second Trump administration, I feel defeated.
But this isn’t quite right. In talking about Socrates’ claim that his wisdom amounts to knowledge of ignorance, Leo Strauss points out that knowing what one does not know is not ignorance. It is a form of knowledge. Likewise, knowing that the actions of the American government and the statements of the American president defy reason is not ignorance or its own expression of irrationalism. It isn’t nothing. I have achieved understanding. I understand that we’re all trapped in the real-world equivalent of a deranging cognitive-psychological experiment in which the country’s senior elected official behaves like a man barely sane and characterologically incapable of distinguishing truth from lies.
