Idiot America

Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free
Charles P. Pierce

The problem, as Charles Pierce sees it, “is not that America has dumbed itself down” (though he obviously thinks it has), but that stupidity has become a dominant economic and political force in the land, riding roughshod over the spirit of the Enlightenment as represented by the book’s presiding founding father, James Madison. Truth has come to be measured by how many units it can move, how loudly it is broadcast, and how fanatically it is believed. The great American crank, a figure Pierce admires, has been superseded by the more commercially-oriented charlatan, defined as a “crank who’s sold out” and gone mainstream. The argument is a familiar one, and engages all the usual suspects (evolution-denying fundamentalists, talk-radio hosts, conspiracy theorists, global-warming skeptics, etc.) without saying much that’s new.