Combatting the Outbreak of Really Dumb Post-Election Analyses

Trump Did Not Win a Mandate. America Has Not Been Transformed. But It Needs to Be.

Beware.

Beware the aftermath of American elections. Beware the impulse of the professional opinion-havers and opinion-writers and opinion-promoters. They will overstate or misrepresent the significance of events in order to advance their biases or their ideological beliefs or the balance in their bank accounts.

Admittedly, this does not just happen in the wake of those instances in which the American people deliver—or appear to deliver—a political verdict. The opinion-industrial complex is at it 24/7. I know. I’ve benefitted from being a card-carrying punditry worker for most of my adult life. I understand the impulses and pressures on those who depend on having viewpoints to make a living or to maintain the role in society they seek (sage, savant, TV personality—the kind of thing that gets them invited to parties and to give speeches and makes them—makes us—feel superior or if not superior at least not as inferior as we might in social or professional settings.

I also am acutely aware of the impulse of the smarty pants sector of the economy to assert and then gradually come to believe that we know better than everyone else. Worse, I’m aware of the fact that there are others who promote this idea because it helps them sell newspapers and magazines and eyeballs and clicks or investment expertise or business consulting services or political ideas that will help them stay in power and thereby have the ability to cut taxes for their friends or shift the focus of the economy to suit their businesses.

Maybe my problem is that I know too many of these people after being in this world for several decades. I know their personalities, quirks, where they went to school, who they hang out with, how they make a living, what their biases are, what their track records are, whether they are wealthy or live more modestly, their stock-in-trade formulations, whose opinions matter to them, how often they lead, how often they follow, whether they are every really creative or whether they are more like weather people seeking to anticipate trends from available signals.

Frankly, I wish everyone knew this kind of information about these people. Not just them, either. I’d love to know more about the personalities and lives of the pilots who fly the planes I’m supposed to get on or the surgeons who are about to perform surgery on me. Maybe the age of big data and the right kind of AI will get us there although figuring out what the right metrics to assess competence are would require some work and I also know people in these lines of work would howl that their privacy is being violated by trying to figure out what makes them tick. Especially given the subjectivity of such assessments.

But wouldn’t it help to know the investment portfolios of those whose opinions on the economy you are reading? Wouldn’t it help to know the backgrounds and social track records or peccadilloes or circle of friends or religious beliefs of those providing advice on how we live? Personally I would not want to get on a plane flown by a pilot whose marriage was in trouble or whose finances were a shambles and who has been sleeping too little or drinking too much. Same with a heart surgeon.

Seem unfair to you to ask such questions? What would you like to know about the uber driver about to take your 16 year old daughter to a party? What would you like to know about a man before they are put in charge of our justice system or about a woman before she is given the keys to the U.S. intelligence community?

Perhaps we can agree that we often do not know enough and in some cases barriers exist to knowing what we need to know about the people whose views or actions can make a difference in our lives, those of our families, our communities and our country.

The problem is that not only do people protect vital information from being released but about them but frankly, the lubricant of ignorance is one of the key elements that enables our society to work, to give people second chances, to enable people to change, to enable many within society to make a living. Knowledge is not just power. It would also be a career-ender for many among us and for plenty of businesses.

So, just as there is an opinion-industrial complex there is a much bigger ignorance industrial complex. Ignorance has also become the primary driver of the political movement that has just won power in this country. Trump and MAGA have created a coalition of those who, by choice or by virtue of personal limitation, know less. This is not a slur. The data shows it. People who read newspapers or watch objective news programming or read alot or have more education are far more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans.

The less you know, the more likely it is you voted for Donald Trump. Which is not to say there aren’t some well-educated, well-informed people who vote for Trump. But they did it because they see Trump as serving their self-interests and despite what they may know. They know his crimes or the threat he poses to democracy. They just have assessed those things and determined that lower taxes or less regulation and greater corporate profits are in their personal interests.