Andy Borowitz: How American Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber

AMANPOUR: And as the world grapples with this warm, with inflation, and climate change, political leadership is needed more than ever now. Our next guest, the well-known American humorous Andy Borowitz, believes that good leadership is hard to find these days. His new book, “Profiles in Ignorance: How Americans Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber”, looks at Americas embrace of anti-intellectualism. And he’s joining Walter Isaacson to talk about why it’s endangering the nation.

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WALTER ISAACSON, HOST: Thank you, Christiane. And Andy Borowitz, welcome to the show.

ANDY BOROWITZ, AUTHOR, “PROFILES IN IGNORANCE”: Thanks for having me, Walter.

ISAACSON: In this, book you talk about the new age of ignorance we’re going to lose way back in American history. But you sort of start the contemporary age of it with Ronald Reagan’s election as governor of California. And you call it, sort of, the stage of ridicule. Explain that to me.

BOROWITZ: Well, I focused on the last 50 years of American ignorance. It has been a centuries old trend, of course, and it goes back to the 17th century. I won’t get into that. But yes, they are the three stages of ignorance, as I defined them which are, ridicule, acceptance, and celebration. And Ronald Reagan really kicked off the ridicule phase. In the ridicule stage, politicians who were ignorant had to pretend to be smart. And Ronald Reagan was great on TV, that’s why he was recruited by some Californian millionaires to run for governor. But he didn’t know anything. He knew very, very little. And so, they had to pump him full of information to make it seem like he knew stuff, and he won the election by a million votes. And that really got the whole party started.

ISAACSON: Yes, you say he didn’t know anything. But let me just ask you, it seems like an odd question, who was smarter, Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter.

BOROWITZ: Oh, clearly, Jimmy Carter. And, you know, smart is an interesting adjective. I’m not qualified as a neurologist to know much — how much brain capacity somebody has. I’m really not qualified in that regard. But one thing I think that’s really important is how much intellectual curiosity you have. And that’s usually reflected in how much you read. And people like Jimmy Carter read a ton. Harry Truman read a ton. Ronald Reagan didn’t open a single book in college. And when his chief of staff, James Baker, prepared a briefing book for a big economic summit, he didn’t touch that. And James Baker said, why didn’t you read that last night? And he said, well, Jim, “The Sound of Music” was on TV.

ISAACSON: Well, let me drill down a bit on that. You say that Ronald Reagan was not nearly as smart as Jimmy Carter. Yet, what is the correlation with success there? Ronald Reagan actually was a very successful president in terms of getting done what he wanted to get done. Jimmy Carter was remarkably unsuccessful. Why are people like you putting so much on this notion of “Intelligence” when it doesn’t seem to correlate to success as president?

BOROWITZ: Well, it depends on how you define success really, I guess. I don’t regard Ronald Reagan as a successful president. I think he was successful in getting elected. I think he was very successful in getting his agenda through. But what that agenda was, unfortunately, was very relevant of his own ignorance. He let the AIDS crisis spiral out of control because he was very unaware of what AIDS was or what it meant. He really created homelessness in this country because he thought that — and he said this to David Brinkley, he said, the homeless just want to live outside. They don’t want homes. So, in terms of ignorance, yes. A guy who is very good on TV, like Ronald Reagan, much better than Jimmy Carter, he cleaned his clock in the debate, he’s going to have much more success electorally, and he’s going to have a lot of success, perhaps, getting his agenda through. But what that agenda is and what it will mean for America is another thing. And that’s where I think it helps to actually read a book.

ISAACSON: You know, speaking of books, the corollary to your book, or really the opposite of your book, is Halberstam’s, “The Best and the Brightest.” And this is about really smart people. You don’t get smarter than Mac Bundy or Robert McNamara. And, yet they took us down a path that was not very wise. I’m still asking you, could your book, sort of, ridicules people who are, “Aren’t smart.” You know, how do you contrast that with what happened in “The Best and the Brightest”?

BOROWITZ: Well, smart people make mistakes too. But all I can say is that I am an elitist in the sense that I want people empower to be smarter than I am. We always role a dice with our leaders, right? We elect them. We don’t know what they’re going to do. Maybe some of the smarter ones will make mistakes. Some of the dumber ones might surprise us. But over the last 50 years, the guys who have been allergic to knowledge, who’ve refused to read a briefing book, who’ve refused to read a book of any kind, have gotten us into things like the war in Iraq, which one of the hugest disasters in our history. And also, really ignored things like AIDS and the coronavirus. So, yes. Smart people make mistakes. I consider myself kind of smart, I make mistakes every day. I’d still rather put my money on the guy who’s read a book.

ISAACSON: All right. So, you say the war in Iraq. And I assume you’re talking about George W. Bush doing it. If I remember correctly, Hillary Clinton was very much in favor of that war, so was Madeleine Albright, so was Richard Holbrooke. Were they ignorant and dumb?

BOROWITZ: No, they’re smart and had very bad judgment. But still the guy who was, you know, president of the United States and didn’t pick up a briefing book and didn’t read the presidential daily brief that said, bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S. I still think you want a guy or woman who has the most information. Again, you can look at those people and say, yes, they were very smart and had bad judgment. I’d still would rather have a Hillary Clinton in the White House than say, you know, Donald Trump who doesn’t read anything. That’s just my preference.

ISAACSON: You go back — actually go way back in American history and you mentioned that earlier. But one of the things that interested me was Harding, because you say, in some way, he’s the beginning of this. Explain to me why you think Harding, sort of, exemplifies this age of ignorance that we entered.

BOROWITZ: Well, you know it’s funny, I have kind of a contrarian view of Warren G. Harding. I think he’s actually gotten, kind of, a raw deal. Mencken (ph) said that he was one of the dumbest, biggest nitwits ever in the annals of American history. Of course, Mencken (ph)could have lived to see some of the people we’re dealing with currently. But Warren G. Harding actually — I think has gotten a raw deal. He did a lot of good things or tried to when he was president. He actually proposed an anti-lynching law, which is something that was ahead of its time. He went down south and gave a major civil rights address, which was controversial and taking risks. So, in a way, I’m actually a defender of Harding. I’m not — I don’t — I, you know, I feel like he’s been unfairly lined. He wasn’t great. He was one of our greatest presidents. And he certainly left something to be desired. But he had strong points. Maybe it’s a little unpredictable. I’m a little bit of a Warren G. Harding defender.

ISAACSON: Yes, and you talk about H. L. Mencken, the smart guy. The really smart dude and stuff. He was a racist. He was antisemitic. He was pro-Nazi. I don’t get the correlation between being smart and having good judgment.

BOROWITZ: Well, there isn’t always. I mean, I think that I still say that I would rather have — if I have to roll the dice, I’d rather roll the dice on a guy who’s smart than on a guy who hasn’t read anything. The word smart again keeps on coming up. I think you and I use them on slightly different terms, because I don’t really know exactly how to measure how smart somebody is. I can measure how informed or how intellectually curious they are. And the way I can measure that is by their habits and what they do, you know. What they read. I mean, one interesting thing I learned in researching the book, Walter, is that a lot of people who were great in school weren’t necessarily our best presidents. A lot of our best presidents weren’t great in school. I’d like to look at somebody like FDR. A C-student, not a great scholar. But when it came to things like the dust bowl, which was an ecological disaster that we’ve never seen the likes of before, he knew what he didn’t know. And he surrounded himself with experts who did know stuff and he listened to experts. He didn’t like Donald Trump say, I know more than the generals. I know more than the scientists. He listened, he learned, he took their advice, and the dust bowl was resolved in a really good way. And that was to me — to me, that’s an example of somebody who has intellectual humility. We get in trouble, I agree with you, sometimes with people who think that they are the best and the brightest, and they know more than anybody else. And as a result, they don’t feel that they have anything more to learn. I think that’s dangerous. And I think smart people sometimes fall into that trap. It’s better, I think to say, I have tremendous areas that I don’t know that much about that I need to learn more about. And that’s where intellectual humility and intellectual curiosity comes in.

ISAACSON: So, you talk about Sarah Palin and the age of acceptance in a way. Tell me how Sarah Palin leads us further along this path.

BOROWITZ: Well, the age of acceptance, and I talked about the age of the – – their age of ridicule was the era of Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle, who — they were politicians who were not very well informed, but we’re expected to be smart. And that performance succeeded with Ronald Reagan, not so much with Dan Quayle who exposed his ignorance at every turn. With George W. Bush and Sarah Palin, we did move into a new phase which is the age of acceptance. Where George W. Bush actually discovered that accepting his ignorance and presenting himself as a guy who didn’t know very much, was actually a political advantage. He bombed famously in early, sort of, ambush on Boston Radio, where a radio host asked him to name some foreign leaders and he came up empty. He really missed three out of four questions. And his advisor came out and says — his spokesperson came out and said, well we’re electing the president of the United States, not a jeopardy contestant. And this led to the sole era of acceptance where the important thing was to say, hey, I don’t know very much but I’m like you. I’m the guy that you would rather have a beer with than that other guy, Al Gore, who’s, you know, pointy head of intellectual. Sarah Palin, in her debate with Joe Biden in 2008, right at the beginning said, I’m not going to answer any of the questions. It was an amazing moment of candor in American history where she’s like saying, I’m not going to fake the way Dan Quayle had to fake it when he was debating Lloyd Bentsen. I’m actually going to get out here, and I’m just going to say what I feel like. And a lot of the times, she would say things that just were absolutely untrue and nonsense. She said that we were engaged in a war with Iran, which we weren’t. She thought that Saddam Hussein attacked us on 9/11. But Sarah Palin moved us into the celebration phase out of acceptance because she really embraced the fact that she didn’t know things. And she replaced facts with just non facts or what later became known as alternative facts of her own.

ISAACSON: And you’re talking about the celebration phase. Does that lead us to Trump and even Marjorie Taylor Greene?

BOROWITZ: Well, it does. I mean, in the celebration phase, which we’re in now, sadly. Ignorance, in a way, has become such an asset that it’s preferable to people being well-informed. So, in Donald Trump’s case, it came very easily because Donald Trump, as I’ve stated, never read. He doesn’t know very much. He combines ignorance with arrogance. And that he thinks he knows more than the generals and the scientists, and pretty much every expert. Marjorie Taylor Greene, also comes very naturally to this phase because she’s extremely ill-informed and she thinks that petri dish is a peach tree dish. And that shooters have space lasers, I wish, personally, but that doesn’t apply to me sadly. But then, I think, the more troubling phenomenon that we’re looking at now, Walter, is that we have a lot of very well-educated, well-informed politicians. People you might say our winners of the meritocracy. Like a Josh Hawley or a Ted Cruz, or Ron DeSantis, who have the finest educations that money can buy in America, but they’re willfully trying to sound dumber than they are. And I think that’s really a spectacle that’s so regrettable because, at least, when I was growing up in the age of the space age and the space race, we really look to people who were smart and experts and science — you know, scientists. And people like, you know, Carl Sagan and Jane Goodall. And those are the icons that I grew up with. And now, the fact that we have leaders of our states and leaders in the Senate and even the presidency who willfully say no, don’t listen to the scientists. I don’t think that that bodes well for us as a country. I also don’t think that it’s an irreversible trend. I think that we can reverse it.

ISAACSON: How?

BOROWITZ: I think that we all have to stop spending so much time on Twitter. Stop watching so much cable TV, no offense to people who are on TV, and we have to start getting active in our democracy. And I think that means stop always nationalizing our problems. We always like to get obsessed with the national elections and the national figures, Pelosi, Trump, Biden and the rest. I think that we have to start working locally where democracy really is at its best. I live in a small town. People here have to go to town meetings if they want to be involved in politics. And in a town meeting, I know the sounds tremendously corny and Capraesque. But in a town meeting, you really can’t be a jerk to somebody else because you might run into that person at the gym next week. And so, I have to actually subdue my natural tendency which is to be annoyed and sarcastic and contemptuous, and I have to be civil instead. And you know what, I think that that is the answer. I think that we’ve had trickle down ignorance in our country where our leaders have said ignorant things, and we as a population have grown more ignorant as a result of that because we want to believe that they know they’re talking about. I think we need to bring knowledge up from the bottom up to the top. We have to become knowledgeable citizens, and then demand the election of knowledgeable leaders. That’s my little pitch to America.

ISAACSON: You take aim at Democrats as well. Mostly you’re targets in the book are Republicans but there’s Elliott Spencer, and many others in the book. I think John Edwards, Anthony Weiner, Andrew Cuomo. Tell me, to what extent did they help lead us into this age of ignorance.

BOROWITZ: I think these guys who behaved in extremely sexist, misogynist ways, did it out of a sense of not just stupidity, but arrogance. Things that they got that they could get away with, they tried to do. And so, I — although I didn’t focus on their activities as much as some of the other people, I think again, there are, you know, there are serious crimes and serious misdeeds can’t go unmentioned in a book about ignorance.

ISAACSON: In the conclusion of your book, you talk about one of the things you got wrong which is that a more educated population would vote in a way that you would approve of. And yet it’s a greater education and the people who have a high education have been voting for things like the Tea Party. What am I missing here?

BOROWITZ: You’re not missing anything. That was — one thing I say in the conclusion of the book since it’s a book about ignorance is I talk about my own ignorance. Things that I — biases that I had going into writing the book that I learned were untrue. I think education is great. I think education would make all of our lives better. We’d be better at our jobs. We would be more interesting to talk to. We might say things that are true or as opposed to falsehoods. But I don’t think education alone makes for better voters. I do think that civil engagement will. I think that, you know, if you are sitting in a room across somebody you disagree, you may never change his or her mind. But I think you may get to understand the other side better. It’s a really big ask because we’re living in a very tribal culture, as you know. We’re — everything is tribalized. There are even people now in line saying that Dan Quayle spelled potato correctly, which I know it was an interesting manifestation of how tribal we’ve become. But I do have faith, and maybe again this is my midwestern optimism, that if we sit in the same room with another person who’s from the other tribe, maybe we can recognize it. Instead of tribes, were actually part of a community. And that to me is our last, best hope. And it’s really not a question of everybody has to get super well-educated. Though I think that would be nice, as I said, for other reasons. I think that being engaged in democracy would give people, perhaps, more respect for democracy, more understanding of it. And maybe we’d be a little bit less inclined to treat democracy as a spectator sport where we’re just rooting for one side to crush the other.

ISAACSON: Andy Borowitz, thank you so much for joining us.

BOROWITZ: Thank you, Walter.