Conversation
-
Charlie Pierce Was Right in 2009, and More Right in 2026
source
Perhaps the most important book of the 21st century for understanding the United States of America
I have a lot of books. Just ask Mrs Dr Peterr, who is delightfully tolerant of this quirk. We have, however come to an agreement that that for every new book I bring home, I have to get rid of at least two old ones. Beyond books I’ve gotten because of my own interests (rather voracious interests, if you ask Mrs Dr Peterr), at various times I have been a reader for a couple of outfits that do book reviews, and they would send me books to see if they were worth having someone write up a review in their publication. So having run out of bookshelf space, I’ve been culling.
One of the things I’ve noticed in my culling is that many books that dig into contemporary events do not tend to age well. On the other hand, I come across some gems I want to keep (at least until the next round of culling). And sometimes, just sometimes, I end up sidetracked in my culling because I sit down to reread one of those true gems. Ladies and gentlemen, let me direct your attention to Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free, by the inestimable, inimitable, and irrepressible Charlie Pierce.
Upon rereading it, it became clear to me that Idiot America has only gotten better with age, since it first appeared in 2009. That is, he wrote it before COVID, before Trump descended the golden escalator, before Dobbs and Shelby County, before the Sandy Hook massacre, before the devastating Joplin tornado, and before the BP/Deepwater Horizon oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico (when it was still the Gulf of Mexico on all the maps). Here’s what Pierce had to say back then about what Idiot America is (and is not) in the introduction:
Idiot America is not the place where people say silly things. It is not the place where people believe silly things. It is not the place where people go to profit from the fact that people believe in silly things. That America has been with us always — the America of the medicine wagon and the tent revival, the America of the juke joint and the gambling den, the America of lunatic possibility that in its own mad way kept the original revolutionary spirit alive while an establishment began to calcify atop the place. Idiot America isn’t even those people who believe that Adam sat down one day and named all the dinosaurs. . . .
The rise of Idiot America, though, is essentially a war on expertise. . . The rise of Idiot America today reflects — for profit, mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of the consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people we should trust the least are the people who know best what they’re talking about.
Pierce was interested not only in present-day America, but was even more concerned about how we arrived at Idiot America. Idiot America is, he tells us, not *those* idiots over there, but all of us who live in this Idiot America culture. He takes his readers back and forth through history, taking the title of his introduction — “Dinosaurs with Saddles” — from the then-newly opened Creation Museum. These folks are cranks, says Pierce, who then proceed to take his readers on trips to meet a whole host of cranks, from long ago and closer to the present, as well as visits to folks like James Madison, whom he venerates as the best of the founders and best at pushing back.
Throughout these wanderings, Pierce noted that the cranks in the United States invariably give pride of place to “the Gut” – that sense they have that they know more (or are smarter than) anyone else. “It’s just common sense,” says the Gut, “so pay no attention to those egg-heads and elites and intellectuals who claim otherwise.”
Idiot America is a collaborative effort, the result of millions of decisions made and not made. It’s the development of a collective Gut at the expense of a collective mind. It’s what results when politicians make ridiculous statements and not merely do we abandon the right to punish them for it at the polls, but we also become too timid to punish them with ridicule on a daily basis, because the polls say they’re popular anyway. It’s what results when leaders are not held to account for mistakes that end up killing people.
Pierce says this, because he has discerned and distilled the mindset of Idiot America, which operates according to the Three Great Premises:
1. Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units.
2. Anything can be true is someone says it loudly enough.
3. Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is measured by how fervently they believe it.Tell me you can read those words today and NOT think of Donald Trump. I dare you. Or think of Pete Hegseth. Or Speaker Mike Johnson. Or Sean Hannity. Or Tom Homan. Or Laura Loomer. Or Robert Kennedy Jr.. Or Elon Musk. Or Jeff Bezos. Or Mark Zuckerberg. Or . . . or . . .
Early in the book, Pierce quotes a letter from Madison to his friend the Marquis de Lafayette in 1830:
We [the United States] have, it is true, occasional fevers; but they are the transient kind, flying off through the surface, without preying on the vitals. A Government like ours has so many safety valves . . . that it carries within itself a relief against the infirmities from which the best of human Institutions can not be exempt.
Going on, Pierce writes “The founders devised the best country ever in which to go completely around the bend. It’s just that making a living off of it used to be harder work.” Again, remember that he wrote this before Trump became president.
But the book isn’t all doom and gloom as he points to the cranks of old and the cranks walking the streets today. At a Book Salon chat at the now-shuttered blog Firedoglake when Idiot America came out, Watertiger (the host) asked Pierce about a way out from this “perception is reality” mindset of the Three Great Premises, and he replied:
Watertiger, I’ve given that a lot of thought and the best answer I can give is that we, as citizens, simply have to do better at self-government. We have to distinguish between entertainment and information. Our powers of discernment have to be sharpened. And, it should be said that, at many of its highest levels, my business has fallen green-room-over-teakettle on this very question. Any journalist who accepts “perception is reality” as axiomatic is committing professional malpractice. Our job is to hammer the reality home until the perception conforms to it.
Which today brings me back to that Madison quote. At first, it sounds like Madison is saying “we’ve got checks and balances between the three branches, and we’ve got laws and rules and ordinances in place, so we’ll be fine.” Looking around at the East Wing, the Reflecting Pool, the dismantling of our strongest alliances (waves fondly to Canada), the demise of USAID soft power abroad thanks to DOGE, and the rise of vaccination deniers at the CDC and measles cases around the country, my first reaction on re-reading that quote was “uh, Jimmy, you might want to write Lafayette another letter.” But that narrowness of mind disappeared when I recalled the first seven words of the Constitution that Madison had a huge hand in crafting: “We the People of the United States . . .” On reflection, I think *that’s* what Madison meant, and that’s certainly the direction that Pierce pointed his readers to in 2009. Beneath all the laws and regulations and the Constitution itself, the biggest thing that protects “the government” of which Madison spoke is We the People.
The Three Great Premises are a frame to understand how the Idiot America mindset works, which is step one in opposing and dismantling it.
We the People stand up to oppose Idiot America thinking when high-powered law firms stand up to Idiot America, saying “No, facts are facts no matter how loudly you say something and how many people believe you.” The same goes for universities that are unjustly attacked over their dedication to facts over the Gut, or comedians who make jokes about those who appear to base their wisdom on the amount praise they get on Xitter or Truth Social, or scientists who name climate change for the danger it is, no matter how many “official” websites Trump and his cronies scrub of the facts.
Pierce was right in 2009, and even more right today. Documenting the atrocities (to borrow an old school blogging phrase) is easy in a target-rich world like the Idiot America under Trump in 2026, but providing hope by pushing back and pointing the way forward is even more critical.
So tell me – where do you see folks making good trouble by pushing back on Idiot America and the Three Great Premises? Tell me, because I’m always looking for hope and for partners in pointing the way forward.
The post Charlie Pierce Was Right in 2009, and More Right in 2026 appeared first on emptywheel.