Michael Moore thinks Donald Trump owes his presidency to a “dumbed-down” electorate.
The filmmaker blamed dumb people for Trump’s win over Hillary Clinton in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter that was published Wednesday. “Trump is our Frankenstein, and we are Dr. Frankenstein,” said Moore. “We have helped to create a situation that has allowed us to end up with Trump. The dumbing down of our society through the media, the lack of education through poor schools, allows for a dumbed-down electorate, and for him to be able to actually get 63 million votes.”
Apart from the gratuitous and sweeping insult, Moore’s cliched analysis also contradicts his own earlier explanations for Trump’s win. Perhaps Moore’s thinking has shifted, or perhaps he’s simply slipped into a heightened state of honesty. Either way, Moore’s ostensibly sympathetic insights into blue-collar voters are what made his early prediction Trump would triumph over Clinton compelling in 2016, especially after they came true.
Consider when he spoke of going to “union halls and guys that I grew up with — people who normally vote Democrat who are thinking of voting for Trump.” Or when he chastised the Left for claiming Trump has never read a book: “When you say he hasn’t read a book in his adult life, you’ve just described the majority of Americans. Get out of your bubble, everybody!”
More important than those examples, Moore wrote a surprisingly lucid prognostication before the election in which he pointed to the “Hillary Problem” and “The Depressed Sanders Vote” as reasons Trump would win. Rather than faulting “dumbed-down” voters, he helped explain why perfectly intelligent people may have stayed home on Election Day. But even more critically, Moore also pointed at what he dubbed “The Jesse Ventura Effect.”
“Remember back in the ‘90s when the people of Minnesota elected a professional wrestler as their governor?” Moore wrote.”They didn’t do this because they’re stupid or thought that Jesse Ventura was some sort of statesman or political intellectual. They did so just because they could. Minnesota is one of the smartest states in the country. It is also filled with people who have a dark sense of humor — and voting for Ventura was their version of a good practical joke on a sick political system. This is going to happen again with Trump.” (Emphasis mine.)
Again, maybe his thinking has shifted. But that observation completely contradicts his latest assessment that a “dumbed-down” electorate produced the Trump presidency. If he’s arguing a surge in dumb voters merely tipped the balance for Trump, the sentiment is still wrong and insulting, but he should say it.
As it stands, his new theory is a degrading and over-simplified cliche, which seems to be more rooted in feverish opposition than reason. Has the Left learned nothing from Clinton’s lingering “deplorable” blunder?
