Do not spurn the ‘American dumbass constituency’

I think one of the hard and inconvenient truths that liberals need to hear is that the Democratic Party cannot save democracy on its own. There is no future in which the Republican Party loses forever. That’s not realistic. That’s perhaps not even desirable. 

Liberals have to work more to create conditions in which the Republicans choose to behave. Obviously, one way of doing that is defeating them as often as possible. But while that’s an immediate and necessary end, it can’t go on indefinitely. At some point, a Republican will be in the White House again. Then what?

But that’s only one hard and inconvenient truth. The other is about America itself. Fact is, there are a lot of people who are not that bright, who are not paying attention, who are not informed, who don’t care about politics, or who feel like democracy is a lie. 

Put another way, I don’t think liberals, including myself, have thought enough about what we might call the paradox of liberal democracy. We need to expand the tent to fight tyranny and rebuild, but doing so means bringing in people who don’t know they need to be in the tent or who don’t care whether they are. 

They’re “dumbasses.”

That’s Matt Seybold’s term. About three months ago, while liberals were flushed with the anti-imperial energy of the No Kings rallies, Seybold poured this pitcher of ice water:

“Imperative to remember, any big tent, including one that defeats totalitarian kleptocracy, must have a whole lot of dumbasses inside it. To spurn the American dumbass constituency is to lose.”

To which I responded: “Jesus, this feels true.”

Matt Seybold is a professor of American literature at Elmira College in upstate New York. He’s also a Mark Twain scholar and the host of a podcast called The American Vandal. 

In an interview with me, Professor Seybold said that he might come to regret using the word “dumbasses.” His answer to my first question was very long, he said, because he felt like he should explain himself better. That answer was so lengthy and illuminating I decided to break our interview into two parts.

Here’s part one.

But before I leave you with Professor Seybold’s thoughts, I think I should say one more thing about liberals. We tend to see the dumbasses as part of the problem. (I have said as much in various ways.) But perhaps they are part of the solution. 

After all, dumbasses don’t seek power. Only the insane do that, Mark Twain believed.

As Professor Seybold told me, Twain believed “the only people who … will ever stand for election to the executive or legislative branches at the federal or even the state level are sociopaths, narcissists, monomaniacs and greedheads.” 

Professor Seybold added: “Those who, by choice, seek to put their hands on the levers of power cannot be trusted. They should be presumed to be criminals by temperament.”

Liberals tend to see the Democrats as the Good Guys.

But recent events should spur us into rethinking that.

You have said the Democrats are going to be in trouble in the long term if they don't make room for "dumbasses." Your word. I'm guessing you're drawing on your knowledge as a Twain scholar. What did you mean?

You are right that I used the term “dumbasses,” which I may come to regret (more on that in a moment), but first I want to quickly point out a term I didn’t use, which is “Democrats.” 

While obviously Democrats remain practicably the sole opposition party in most elections, especially at the federal level, I’m pretty cynical about establishment Democrats’ plans (and even their intentions) to build the “big tent” coalition that will be necessary to defeat “totalitarian kleptocracy,” as I put it. I think the Abundance Bros, for instance, are giving lip-service to inclusive politics, but are actually building a veil for fascism Lite, which will obviously fail.

The project of defeating totalitarian kleptocracy cannot rely on the Democratic Party as it is currently comprised, but “big tent” coalitions are being formed at the grassroots level for the purpose of activism, protests, labor movements and local campaigns (see, for instance, [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani, who was rejected by the Democratic establishment, but backed by democratic socialists).

My rare moments of hope are based on things like the Debt Collective, Higher Ed Labor United and the litany of disperse municipal, neighborhood, professional and special interest groups whose successes are often premised on paying little or no heed to the binaries – liberal/conservative, progressive/centrist, red/blue, etc – which have become useless for anything beyond activating our lizard-brain tribalism.

Which brings me to the “dumbasses,” a word-choice more befitting a 25-word skeet than a reasoned defense, but which I would divide into two categories. 

The larger – as Twain puts it, “the ignorant are the chosen of God,” by which he means, the majority – are those who are stuck in information deserts, the victims of long-running attacks on education, libraries, local and public media, and are subjected perpetually to micro-targeted misinformation and parallel journalism. This constituency, sizable at every moment in US history, is arguably growing.

The other category of “dumbasses” are those who do not lack for access to information or education, who possess the tools to see the dangers of totalitarian kleptocracy, but who lack the will. Perhaps they are cynically planning to go along to get along, or they are just placing too much faith in the incremental, business-as-usual of US governance, presuming a pendulum swing is inevitable. This is a smaller, more frustrating constituency, but also one that tends to be possessed of greater resources and position.

My view of US political history and its theory of governance is, indeed, deeply influenced by Mark Twain (perhaps too much so!). Twain believed intensely in electoral democracy, although he also believed human nature was such that authoritarianism was always, inevitably lurking. He also supported labor unions, social justice activism and many varieties of secular organizing that expanded the conception of the democratic masses (to include women, for instance, and Blacks and Jews). In these respects, he’s not especially different from a left-liberal American of our time.

Where Twain is ingenious, I think, is in understanding the federal system as reflecting a misanthropic vision of human nature and society. Twain does not believe that any sane person will ever want anything to do with national government. The only people who he can imagine will ever stand for election to the executive or legislative branches at the federal or even the state level are sociopaths, narcissists, monomaniacs and greedheads. Those who, by choice, seek to put their hands on the levers of power cannot be trusted. They should be presumed to be criminals by temperament.

For Twain, the ingenuity of the American System is that it puts the most craven seekers of power in furious competition with one another, limiting the damage any one of them can do, forcing them into constantly shifting rivalries and alliances, reducing the likelihood that a true authoritarianism can emerge.

I’m not as down on humanity as Twain is, but I have a pretty hard time arguing against this vision of governance. Which is not to say that I cannot imagine a strong and egalitarian state, but rather to say that such a state is not arrived at by trusting those who seek its employ, but rather by being vigilantly suspicious of them, demanding extensive checks on their power, and strict accountability for violations of law and custom.