In high school, a friend once told me, “The Democrats shouldn’t have criticized Dan Quayle for being stupid. They should have said he was a bad person.” I asked why. He replied, “Because saying he’s stupid is going to make them look like snobs.”

He was right, of course. Supporters of the Reagan revolution were not limited to just one demographic—I bet I could come up with four or five different groups who joined in for their own reasons—but working-class white people without a college education comprised one of the most important component parts of Reagan’s faithful, and their primary motivation appeared to be a sense that their intelligence had been derided for long enough by well-heeled, highly-educated city folks (though some of them, particularly in the South, were also aggrieved that they had been held up to moral opprobrium about racism.) It’s easy to point out what’s wrong with their point of view. Blanket refusals to admit to wrongdoing regardless of what’s actually been happening aren’t a hallmark of good character. Neither is the willingness to allow resentment to rule your judgment at the expense of your moral principles and good sense.

But there were problems with the liberal position, too, and not just the tactical problem of giving neoconservatives ammunition for their culture war. The two gravest problems were a reliance on simple binary thinking and an overemphasis on intelligence as a determinant of social and ethical behavior. The first (North good, South bad; liberal good, conservative bad; black good, white bad) had the problem of presenting limited truths that obscured more far-reaching and complex truths. In other words, just as it’s been true for the past five years that Trump was bad, it was often true in the 80s that the right wing was bad, that white people were bad, and that the South was bad. But making that the organizing principle of one’s thinking can lead to being a fall guy for every sin eater who comes along (as well as giving unquestioning loyalty to every leader with the right demographic data that comes along).

Sin eaters are like scapegoats, except they’re not innocent. They are used, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes against their will or even without their knowledge, to take attention off of larger groups of people or social structures, so that those people can evade blame and the structures remain unreformed. Admiral Poindexter was a sin eater for the Reagan Administration during the Iran/Contra scandal. Scooter Libby was a sin eater for Dick Cheney when Cheney decided to out Valerie Plame as a CIA agent to punish her husband for telling the truth about yellow cake uranium from Niger. Lynndie England was a sin eater for the CIA and the U.S. military when her participation in the abuses at Abu Ghraib was revealed. And it looks like Derek Chauvin is going to end up being a sin eater for racist cops everywhere, and for the racists in the courts and prison system as well.

The punishment of the sin eater is made to look like the herald of reform, but instead replaces reform. It’s one of many storm drains built into our political system to divert the floodwaters of public rage—or outrage—into safe channels. An effective sin eater eventually becomes a character witness for the powerful and society itself, proving that power need not move and society need not be changed. For instance, the white racists in the South made it possible for the rest of the country to pretend that racism wasn’t a problem for them. All they had to do was "punish," or, more accurately, shame and restrain the racists in the South, and everything was golden.

Except of course, it isn't. Racism is not just an individual or regional issue, but a structural and cultural one. Thus, when I moved to Philadelphia in the 90s, I was shocked by the things white people would say when they were alone. (It’s not that I think Southern racism is any better because white people in the South vet each other before expressing it—but the complete ease with which white people in Philly said racist things was disquieting.)

Being wedded to simple binary thinking has many other pitfalls, but I want to get to the second problem with the liberal position as I first encountered it when I came of age: an overemphasis on intelligence as a determinant of social and ethical behavior. (It took me a long time to figure out that this was a problem). Assuming that people do bad things because they are stupid is almost a reflex for people on the left, in particular for liberals. Liberalism really, really wants to believe that if only everybody could get the right education, then everyone would be reasonable and everything would be all right. It’s true that without good education and information, people are less likely to be their best selves; it’s true that if you corrupt education or any other system involved with the transfer of information, you empower vice and make things damned hard for virtue, across the board. But it’s not true that ignorance and stupidity are the primary reason things go wrong.

Intelligence is not a simple prophylactic against vice. We want to believe it is, because on the left, intelligence is our strength and reason our tool. We want to be able to reason people out of error. It’s much harder to reason someone out of malice. Malice, in fact, implies that we are outside the realm of accuracy, error and correction altogether, and have entered a much more difficult realm where we must consider the operations of power. That’s why three of the last four Republican presidents have been derided as stupid by their liberal (and sometimes their leftist) critics. Sometimes they actually were stupid—making a joke in public that you’ve picked up the red phone, made the call, and missiles are currently on their way to Moscow is stupid, even if Reagan didn’t know the microphone was live. But is the stupidity of that joke really the point?

How are you all doing today?

Please keep Granma in your thoughts. She was in for a second round of surgery on her back yesterday. I'll keep you all posted as I find out how she's doing.