Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (8 page)

There is nothing fundamentally wrong in believing in the NAFTA Superhighway. Indeed, there’s something essentially American in doing so. The NAFTA Superhighway includes almost every element of traditional American conspiracy theory. There are the secret moneymen, plotting to steal the country’s economic future. There is the nativist fear of foreign hordes. There’s the feeling that a cabal of experts is working against good old common sense. And there’s the overall threat to American identity.

Unfortunately, thanks to the media of instant communication, the matter of the road that doesn’t exist bled so swiftly into the mainstream that nobody was able to break it down into its component parts, keeping those that were helpful and jettisoning those that were not. It couldn’t function as a starting point for healthy democratic skepticism about the issues of trade and national sovereignty in the globalized economy. It had to be accepted whole, and it was.

Though it exists only in the mind, the NAFTA Superhighway leads through Idiot America via the Third Great Premise. The road exists because enough people believe it does, and because they believe it fervently enough to act on their belief. They write letters. They quiz candidates. They cheer on Lou Dobbs. They act as though the NAFTA Superhighway is real, and things go out of place again. When that happens, even conspiracy theories lose their value, which always has been considerable in a country built on imagination.

B
etween 1798
and 1799, Mr. Madison spent much of his time wondering about the wheels within wheels. Both Great Britain and France had been playing cleverly behind the scenes, seeking to influence the new American republic. Conspiracy theories abounded, not all of them fanciful. President John Adams, distrustful of the revolution in France, beset at home by noisy political opponents and impertinent newspaper editors, and seeing hidden hands in every fresh outburst against him, had signed the Alien and Sedition Acts. Thomas Jefferson referred to the period as the “reign of witches,” and he and Madison worked surreptitiously in Virginia and Kentucky to pass resolutions arguing that the states had the right to nullify acts of the federal government they deemed unconstitutional.

(This theory of republican government would have unfortunate consequences when southern politicians revived it with a vengeance in 1861. Indeed, in his later years, Mr. Madison saw clearly where the doctrine was headed. Between 1828 and 1833, fearful of the civil war he knew was coming, he supported President
Andrew Jackson in the nullification crisis against South Carolina, and he spent years attempting to erase from history his involvement in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. Even for him, there were wheels within wheels.)

Madison saw the inherent value of inflamed public opinion as a spur to political action, but he was also wary of the demagogic threat to reason if public opinion was not kept in its proper place. He’d helped create channels in which public enthusiasms could be made to work for the common good, like a wild river run through a mill. He did that because he believed that the republican spirit was present in all human endeavors, from politics to popular culture to the fashions of the day. He saw that the dangers unreason presented to that spirit were as prevalent in the shops as they were in the Congress.

In 1792, he had taken up the cause of some twenty thousand British buckle manufacturers thrown out of work because the fashion of the day had changed and shoes were now being made with laces, or as slippers, with no fasteners at all. “Can any despotism be more cruel than a situation in which the existence of thousands depends on one will,” Mr. Madison wrote, “and that will on the most slight and fickle of motives, a mere whim of the imagination?” Nothing, he believed, was as dangerous to reason as fashion was.

IN
1887, Ignatius Donnelly attempted to demolish Shakespeare. Say what you will about him, he didn’t aim small.

Donnelly was a Baconian, one of those people who assert that Francis Bacon was the real author of the plays attributed to that semiliterate hayseed from Stratford. It was a snob’s argument, and it ran counter to the populist principles that still animated Donnelly’s politics. But he adopted it with a ferocity
that surpassed even his enthusiasm for prehistoric comets. He published
The Great Cryptogram
, a massive doorstop in which he attempted to prove not only that Bacon had written the plays, but that he’d encoded clues to his authorship within them. Donnelly claimed to have discovered in the First Folio edition a “cipher” involving dots and dashes, and the spaces between words. He then applied this cipher to certain words that he called “constants,” and, mirabile dictu, he discovered exactly the messages he expected to find and those messages proved exactly the case he’d wanted to make.

The book was as big a flop financially as
Ragnarok
had been, and as poorly reviewed, but it wasn’t ignored. Donnelly was shredded by the critics this time. A certain Joseph Gilpin Pyle wrote
The Little Cryptogram
, in which Pyle used Donnelly’s method to find in
Hamlet
the message “The Sage [of Nininger] is a daysie.”

Undaunted, Donnelly went to England and defended his work at the Oxford Union. It became the great cause of the rest of his life. He wrote a couple of bizarre works of speculative fiction, but he came back to Bacon and Shakespeare in 1899, with
The Cipher in the Plays, and on the Tombstone.
By now, Donnelly was arguing that Bacon had written not only Shakespeare’s plays but those of Christopher Marlowe, and the novels of Miguel de Cervantes.

Donnelly fell into obscurity, burying himself in the splintering rural Populist movements at the turn of the century. His wife died and, in 1898, he married again, to a woman forty years younger, which caused no little scandal among the society set in St. Paul. On New Year’s Day, 1901, at the house of his new father-in-law, the Sage of Nininger died. He was sixty-nine years old. It was the first day of the twentieth century.

He was himself alone. He joined science to the popular culture in such a way that his work remains the ur-text for almost
all treatments of Atlantis to this day. In 1969, the folksinger Donovan had a hit single called “Atlantis” in which he relates, almost by rote, the story of Atlantis as it’s told in Donnelly’s book, although Donnelly didn’t go so far as to croon, as Donovan does over an endless coda, “my ante-di-looov-i-ahn bay-beeee!” The refinements Donnelly wrought in the art of pseudoscience were advances as profound as were Darwin’s refinements of actual science. In many ways, Ignatius Donnelly helped create the modern counterhistory that America was born to have.

Donnelly was the perfect American crank. When
Ragnarok
failed, he didn’t write three more books trying to get it to succeed. He moved along to debunking Shakespeare. He didn’t care what the accepted wisdom was, nor did he insist that his work be included in it. He seemed to realize that the struggle to be respectable renders a crank worthless to the culture. The crank must always live where the wild imagination exists. The crank pushes and prods but does not insist that his ideas be judged by standards that do not apply. The crank lives in a place of undomesticated ideas, where the dinosaurs do not wear saddles.

It’s always been there, in the oldest folk songs, in the whispered politics of the colonial tavern, in the angry speeches at the grange hall, in the constant rise of fringe religions, and in the persistence of theories about who’s really in charge and what they’re doing. There are gray spaces in the promises of freedom that made inevitable the rise of a country of the mind wilder and freer than the actual republic, what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old, weird America.” That country has its own music, its own language, its own politics, and its own popular culture. It has its own laws of reality. Ignatius Donnelly didn’t discover Atlantis off the coast of the Azores. He discovered Atlantis in this country of the mind, in the willingness of Americans to believe.

What Donnelly did was to keep this counterhistory in its
proper place as a subtext, as grace notes, as the niggling little doubts that are as firmly in the democratic tradition as any campaign speech is. After all, sometimes there
are
wheels within wheels. Sometimes people are keeping real secrets, and sometimes those secrets involve actual events that are as cosmically lunatic as anything Ignatius Donnelly ever dreamed up. We should always listen to our inner Donnellys. But we shouldn’t always take their advice.

A
brief word, then, about politics.

It will appear to most readers that the politics in this book concerns the various activities of the modern American right. This would seem to make the work something of a piece with Richard Hofstadter’s in the 1960s. However, we are emerging from a period of unprecedented monopoly by modern American conservatism—what some people call “movement conservatism”—over the institutions of government.

The long, slow march from the debacle of the Goldwater campaign in 1964 through the triumph of Ronald Reagan and, ultimately, the consolidation of power under George W. Bush from 2000 to 2008 depended in everything on how tightly the movement fastened itself to popular irrationality from economics to fringe religion. The movement swallowed whole the quack doctrine of supply-side economics, adopting it with almost comically ferocious zeal.

The movement lapped up Reagan’s otherworldly tales, such as the famous one about how he had helped liberate Nazi death camps, even though he’d spent most of World War II defending the bar at the Brown Derby. It was thereby prepared to buy whole hog the notion of George W. Bush, the brush-clearing
cowboy who was afraid of horses. It attached itself to the wildest of religious extremes, sometimes cynically and sometimes not. On one memorable occasion in 2005, just as the controversy over intelligent design was heating up generally in the media,
The New Republic
polled some of the country’s most prominent conservative intellectuals concerning the theory of evolution. The paleoconservative pundit Pat Buchanan stated, flatly, that he didn’t believe in Darwinian evolution, but a number of others confessed a thoroughgoing fondness for it. Jonah Goldberg, for one, despite his heavily footnoted distrust for priestly experts who use science to discredit traditional notions of faith, was notably lucid on the subject. But once intelligent design—with its “scientific” implication of a deity—was thrown into the discussion, an exhibition of tap dancing erupted the likes of which hadn’t been seen since Gene Kelly in
On the Town.

Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of neoconservatism, told the reporter that the question of whether he personally believed in evolution was “impossible to answer with a simple yes or no.” And Tucker Carlson, the MSNBC host, seemed to be chasing his opinion all around Olduvai Gorge. Asked whether God had created man in his present form, Carlson replied, “I don’t know if he created man in his present form…. I don’t discount it at all. I don’t know the answer. I would put it this way: The one thing I feel confident saying I’m certain of is that God created everything there is.” In June 2007, a Gallup poll found that 68 percent of the Republicans surveyed said that they did not believe in evolution at all. And this was the ascendant political power of the time.

Movement conservatism was so successful that it drove its own media, particularly talk radio, and conservative media fed back the enthusiasm into the movement, energizing it further. The movement’s gift for confrontation was ideally suited to media
in which controversy drove ratings, which then drove the controversy, and so forth. The more traditional media joined in, attracted, as they always are, by power and success. The more the movement succeeded politically, the tighter it was bound to the extremes that helped power it. The September 11 attacks functioned as what the people on the arson squad would call an accelerant. Even popular culture went along for the ride. The vague, leftish conspiracies of
The X-Files
gave way to the torture porn of
24.