Startling it was, the other day, when I ran aground and got snagged up in Jamelle Bouie's NY Times column, "How Has Joe Biden Become So Unpopular?" The title alone should have served as a lighthouse beacon of gratuitously troubled reading to come; I could have stopped there and turned my eyes to more salubrious material. But no, I ventured on. The beguiling siren of learning Jamelle's answer to such a stupid question was irresistible to me.
How has Joe Biden become so unpopular? The question's framing — its oozing of the extreme — conjured images of pitchforks at the White House gates, with a sweating, neurasthenic, Nicholas II-like character bunkered within, counting, perhaps, his last moments before the righteous provincials breach Secret Service security and render him a martyr to unexampled incompetence. Is Joe that unpopular? Or was I merely a victim of clickbait?
Turned out, yeah, the latter. For it also turned out that President Biden — according to the very author of his vast unpopularity — is not, after all, very unpopular. As Bouie trembled to inform us, Biden held a 46 percent approval rating after the last of his seven months in office — "the last" month having been about as problem-riddled as any early presidential month could be. Throughout, solid poop had been raining remorselessly on Joe from media know-it-alls and preening jackals on the right with reinvigorated intensity, and yet, Biden was — is — nowhere even close to, say, Truman's one-time 22 percent approval rating or Nixon's 24. Now they were unpopular.
Thus, though I love a good story, something in Bouie's premise seemed disturbingly askew from the get-go. Nevertheless I soldiered on, as did Bouie, who went on to explain that "there is a laundry list of reasons" for Joe's "downslope"; indeed, reasons why he is doing much worse — and that's a quote — in polling than at the year's beginning, when his approval rating was but a single digit higher than it is now.
In Bouie's "laundry list" (defined by dictionaries as "long and exhaustive") are all of three items: America's withdrawal from Afghanistan (sorry, our "shambolic" withdrawal, to use the media's obligatory descriptor), Covid's persistence, and a "slower" growing economy. To Bouie's list I would add inflation and the "border crisis."
I'd also add that these troubles incite the rather fascinating question of President Biden's responsibility for them. Yes, America's withdrawal from Afghanistan was messy — quite unlike the historical precedents of, for instance, Germany's graceful exit from Stalingrad or France's smooth retreat from Waterloo? Covid: Biden cannot force every moron to get himself vaccinated. The "slower" growing economy: It's related to those unvaccinated morons. Inflation: Though it's a global phenomenon, in the U.S. inflation was to be expected subsequent to Trump's blockheaded handling of Covid, the economic devastation it wrought, and then the economy's resurgence. The border: Biden cannot prevent Pedro from walking the 970 miles from Oaxaca, Mexico to Laredo.
At any rate, having worked my way through Bouie's abbreviated list of acute reasons for Joe Biden's vast unpopularity, which is nonexistent, I set off for further enlightenment. Which Mr. Bouie promptly offered: "There’s another dynamic at work, one that should guide our expectations for how popular Biden is and how popular he could become. Put simply, we’re still quite polarized."
That observation, to understate things just a trifle, was a letdown. Of course we're polarized. With few exceptions, we've always been polarized, as Bouie proceeded to relate. The deeper question is: Why are we so extraordinarily polarized today? And the answer is: As America's idiots have engaged politics more closely over the past few decades, the idiots have become even dumber — and some of their stupidity is bound to spill, from time to time, into the brighter, more rational mainstream (the Herd Effect). Which accounts for Biden's marginal decline in popularity of late.
Although Bouie altogether neglected the Great Polarizer's — Reagan's — seminal role in the further dumbing down of America's stupid, he did note our increasing polarization when Bush followed Clinton and Trump followed Obama. Now it's known by even today's yet-intellectually tainted schoolchildren that Bush was dumber than Reagan, and Trump was infinitely dumber than Bush. But here's the thing: With each of those presidencies, their rank-and-file disciples became all that much dumber by absorbing the assorted presidential imbecilities, the Republican Party at large became more dimwitted and rancid each year, and by now the whole lot of it is utterly bankrupt in the smarts department.
Hence the percentage of the American electorate that self-identifies as stupid — i.e., Republican — is bound to be the percentage of Americans disapproving of President Biden, who's done nothing to earn their disapproval. Therein lies our baseline: 46.9 percent of the American electorate was stupid enough to vote for Trump last year. Thus Biden's 48.5 percent disapproving group (Bouie's figure) is populated by the unspeakably cretinous, with a scattering of the stupidly susceptible, mainstream herd mixed in.
It's not so much that mere polarization accounts for the president's dip in his approval rating, as Bouie observed. Sure, we're polarized, and we pretty much always have been. Rather, it's what lies at the root of today's extraordinary polarization: staggering stupidity. And the only question that Joe Biden must ask himself is: Will we get even stupider?