Ask A Genius 1016: The Hot New Guy in Trump’s Town
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/07/17
Rick Rosner, American Comedy Writer, www.rickrosner.org
Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Independent Journalist, www.in-sightpublishing.com
Rick Rosner: So, he’s been the United States Senator from Ohio since 2023. That makes sense because Ohio is adjacent to Kentucky, directly north of it.
My mom’s from Ohio. Ohio has a bunch of distinct political and geographic regions, which is a lot for a state that’s big for the eastern U.S. but smaller overall. You could argue it’s a bit hillbilly-ish when you get down to the south, next to and across the river from Kentucky. He wrote a book called “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Sorry, I’m tired so that I might mess things up. The book was made into a movie with Amy Adams and Glenn Close. It’s his autobiography. Amy Adams plays his drug-addicted mom, and it’s his story of rising from his impoverished origins. I have yet to read it, but Carole did. It details his impoverished origins and how he went to Yale and did many other things before becoming a senator. He used to hate Trump, but now, he has changed his mind and is the VP candidate.
It’s relevant to us because I read an article today on the eugenic roots of some of the thinking behind “Hillbilly Elegy.” About 100 years ago, around 1917, a man analyzed a lineage of impoverished, low-achieving people in Kentucky, fictionalized with the last name Calacac. This was a famous study. My mom and everyone born in the 1930s knew about it. Calling someone a Calacac was like calling them a hillbilly. The study, published as a book, led to the fashion of hillbilly comedy, with the most well-known example being “The Beverly Hillbillies,” about Appalachian hillbillies who find oil, become millionaires, and move to Beverly Hills. In the 1950s, there was “Li’l Abner,” a comic strip adapted into a Broadway show and probably other things.
The article mentions “Deliverance,” where a bunch of city slickers decide to go rafting through the Appalachians and run into dangerous, inbred rednecks. The book, written by Henry, whose last name I don’t remember, is in the tradition of Francis Galton, who wrote “Genetic Studies of Genius” in the 1800s. Galton believed that smart people gave birth to smart offspring.
One argument in the Calacac book starts with a colonial-era man who marries a Quaker woman, and they have superior children generation after generation. But in his youth, he had a dalliance with a white trash waitress, and the descendants of that union became the Calacacs, generation after generation of hereditarily blighted, low-achieving, poor, disease-ridden people. The book argued that these hereditary characteristics are durable and must be eradicated via eugenics. This gave momentum to the eugenics movement and led to the sterilization of low-achieving people in poor parts of America. Eventually, it was discovered that the whole story was made up.
There was also a famous twin study by someone from England that claimed the heritability of intelligence was the most important factor, even in identical twins reared apart. It turned out to be made up too. JD Vance comes from that hillbilly lineage, and my wife, who read his book, said that the Calacacs are mentioned.
Many people on Twitter today are saying “Hillbilly Elegy” is a bullshit book, especially if it’s based on the idea of inherited inferiority. But I can’t vouch for that being the case.
Using this as a segue, dumbness has been a definite factor in this upcoming election and has been a factor for the past 50 years when political strategists decided to turn low-information voters, a euphemism for dumb voters, into an exploitable demographic. Republicans have done it more than Democrats and now have a concentration of dumb people in their base.
I’m not saying that dumb people are inherently dumb. I’ve met enough people in bars where I carded people, greeted them, and told them to leave when they were drunk. When meeting many people, true stupidity is rare. Most people find their niches in life, in environments and relationships where they’re up to the task. Most people aren’t lacking. I’m not saying dumb people find their way to dumb jobs; most people aren’t dumb. They may have a preference for not doing advanced physics, and so they don’t.
But it doesn’t mean that they’re idiots. Most people aren’t. So, from my lived experience, there are many people on social media believing and defending the transparent nonsense of Trump and the modern Republicans. This leads to the question, how can these people be so dumb and believe this nonsense? It’s also a source of frustration because millions of people might help elect Trump, who was a disaster the first time and was ranked the worst president in history multiple times in surveys by presidential scholars. His agenda for the next term is to be even worse than before. I don’t have a complete explanation, but I know most people are not dumb.
A lot of the people you see interviewed by non-right-wing interviewers at Trump events seem dumb. Do you have any comments while I gather steam for the last part?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: No, I have no thoughts so far.
Rosner: I have to say that the Trump believers, you see, well, just because the vast majority of people aren’t dumb doesn’t mean that you don’t have 1 or 2 or 3 percent of the population who are truly dumb.
So that’s one possible explanation: there are millions of dumb people in America, maybe even 10 million. You don’t run into them often because they’re 1 in 30 or 1 in 50 people. We don’t often encounter people who are profoundly mentally disabled with IQs under 70 because many of them are institutionalized. I did volunteer work with such individuals, and even they surprised me with the extent to which they weren’t dumb.
Even within a community of developmentally disabled or mentally disabled people, they found ways of being that minimized the impact of their disabilities. For example, the Carmel House in Boulder was designed to help them live, but they also helped themselves. But anyway, back to the Trump supporters. It’s a combination of a certain amount of stupidity and mental laziness. Trump is one of our dumbest presidents, but you have to break down his dumbness. He could graduate from an Ivy League school, the University of Pennsylvania. One of his professors said he was the dumbest student he ever had, and Trump paid a kid to take the SATs for him to get in. This leads to the possibility that he paid others to take tests for him. But he managed to make it through college in four years, and I estimate that, at least in his younger years, he probably had an IQ in the 120s, which he shares with many presidents.
There have been 45 presidents because Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, making him two different numbers in the presidential line. Of these 45 presidents, at least a quarter, maybe more, had IQs in the 120s. But Trump doesn’t use his abilities. He’s probably dumber now because he’s in bad shape and has had a lifetime of not demanding much from his brain. He’s not much of a reader, and as president, he only wanted summaries of important events to be less than a page long, and he wouldn’t even read that.
He’s not curious and finds it comfortable not to learn stuff but to say whatever comes to mind. Many of his followers don’t challenge the nonsense they’re told. If you don’t start stupid and don’t challenge the stupid things you’re told, you become effectively stupid after years of this. But it takes much work to tease nature and nurture out of that framework and pin it down. Is it nature? Were you born like this, or is it nurture? Was it your environment growing up? It probably needs to be a better framework.
What do you think about that? Is the nature-nurture debate too simplistic? Does it need to capture the full dynamics of what makes someone smart?
Jacobsen: Yes, it seems too simplistic.
Rosner: We know from myself and others with ultra-high IQs that a big part of it is how desperate you are to have a credential, to have a high IQ. Maybe it’ll make you cool, get you a girlfriend, or maybe you have OCD, which makes you ultra-focused. Cooijmans calls it something like conscientiousness—how willing you are to dive into a tough set of problems and pursue them for hundreds of hours until you get to obscure answers. OCD runs in my family, and it doesn’t make me smarter, just more persistent.
In conclusion, intelligence isn’t purely nature or nurture in some proportion, like 60/40. It’s the result of a combination of mental and psychological factors that you wouldn’t necessarily think would impact intelligence but do, positively for some people and negatively for many in the Trump base. If you’re going to make that argument, it leads to the question: Can you find a combination of factors to make people less stupid and stop them from buying into the lazy nonsense from the modern Republican Party? The answer is not before the election, not in the less than four months we have.
The end. Comments?
Jacobsen: No.
License & Copyright
In-Sight Publishing by Scott Douglas Jacobsen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. ©Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing 2012-Present. Unauthorized use or duplication of material without express permission from Scott Douglas Jacobsen strictly prohibited, excerpts and links must use full credit to Scott Douglas Jacobsen and In-Sight Publishing with direction to the original content.
In-Sight Publishing 