The Problem with Beating Stupid

By Abe Greenwald

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

This morning on the podcast, Christine made the point that conservatives yearn for an intellectually sharp and challenging left, or at least they should. As with any type of competition, facing a strong opponent makes you better. The competition of ideas is no exception. A competent attack on your argument reveals its weak spots and forces you to make a stronger, more convincing case.

 

I then noted that, over recent years, however, the opposite has happened. The left, to be frank, has become really dumb. And having such inept opponents has made the right, in turn, intellectually flabby. Competing against bad players will make you worse.

 

What I meant was that, while the left got a lot of things accomplished, its animating ideologies became so absurd that no extraordinary effort was required to refute them. You just needed what Donald Trump rightly calls common sense.   

 

When one side is claiming that men can get pregnant, the other side can bury them in a debate without a genius on the team. When they call for abolishing the police, they’ve lost without you having to say a word. When they force people en masse into DEI training sessions, they make themselves loathed.

 

Moreover, when they tell you that a stumbling, mumbling president is at the top of his game, you no longer have to justify your support for Donald Trump or defend his conduct. When they proclaim that deadly riots are “mostly peaceful” protests, you may start getting some ideas about storming the Capitol. And against a thoughtless anti-Americanism, you throw up an equally thoughtless blood-and-soil nationalism.

 

While the academic left did create an elaborate architecture of social-justice theories to undergird liberal policy, it was really just a thin edifice of verbiage hiding the emptiness inside. There was no need for the right to respond with a complicated set of thoughtful counter-theories. Conservatives could merely laugh it into dust. Thus we got the Joe Roganization of the right. Rogan is a talented podcaster, but up until recently, he thought the moon landing was fake and that there are a billion Jews in the world. And his popularity on the right has inspired a pageant of additional fools.   

 

After the woke revolution and the Biden presidency, all Americans really wanted was someone to undo the rampant idiocy. That’s what the second Trump presidency vowed to achieve with its “common sense revolution.” And it did much of it—simply by saying no. The administration declared that there are only two sexes, that blue-city crime must be fought, that DEI is no more, that borders must be secure, and so on. 

 

But when policymaking is just a matter of saying no to nonsense, or sending in the troops and enforcing the law, you end up with a politics of nothing but blunt instruments. Problems are nails; solutions are hammers. That’s where we are now.

 

Unfortunately, a politics of blunt instruments eventually elevates the thick-headed and the belligerent. And their ranks swell in surprising ways because, while the dimwitted can’t be made smart, smart people can become very dumb. So a downward spiral has been set in motion on both the left and right, because each side is now fighting irrationality with irrationality. We’ve hit a low recently in Minnesota, where overzealous ICE agents were met with overzealous antagonists, two of whom were tragically killed. At least, I hope it’s a low.