Stupid, Helpless, Bandit And Intelligent -- A "Tectonic" Election -- January 13, 2025

Locator: 44675OPED.

From The WSJ: link here -- 

Cipolla divides people into four categories: helpless, bandit, intelligent and stupid. In any normal interaction between two people, he contends, the helpless person suffers a loss while the other gains. The bandit exacts a benefit while levying a loss on the other. The intelligent person gains while enabling the other person also to gain. The defining trait of the stupid person is that he gains nothing while obliging the other to take a loss. 

Mr. Trump’s fans can argue with his despisers about whether he belongs in the category of bandit or intelligent, but he definitely can’t be classified as stupid according to Cipolla’s definition.

The astounding fact of recent years, however, is that Mr. Trump’s chief political opponent—Joe Biden—is a perfect specimen of Cipolla’s idea of stupidity. For four years, Mr. Biden has made decisions and pursued policies that made his supporters, party, country and foreign allies worse off, and in almost every case he has gained nothing and very often suffered commensurate political losses. You could make a cogent argument that Mr. Biden belongs in the category of helpless, so often do his decisions benefit his political adversaries, chiefly Mr. Trump, and not himself. But those blunders—principal among them his insistence that he was capable of running for re-election—have exacted massive costs on the rest of the country.

For three years Mr. Biden made it policy to do nothing on the country’s southern border apart from revoking Mr. Trump’s executive orders. What did he gain from this dereliction? The answer isn’t obvious. 

Mr. Biden overrode his military advisers and insisted on a total and immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, with no clear plan to extract Afghan allies, U.S. citizens or American military hardware. A loss for the U.S., for sure. But where was the benefit to Mr. Biden or his administration?

Mr. Biden openly defied the Supreme Court’s ruling on his student-debt cancellation plan (the justices “tried to block me, but they didn’t stop me”). He thus managed to sow resentment among Americans whose debts he didn’t forgive, encourage a generation to indulge in foolish borrowing, and make himself look like the lawless strongman he accused Mr. Trump of being.

In each of these instances—and there are many others—Mr. Biden not only created ruin, discord and embarrassment for those who wished him well; he did so without gaining any advantage for himself.

This perhaps explains why he has been so comparatively active since losing the election in November. These are the months when, no longer beholden to the electorate, an outgoing president can do things he knows to be dumb or counterproductive and suffer no harm for it.

In December, Mr. Biden pardoned 1,499 criminals, many of them guilty of heinous offenses and showing no signs of repentance. What was the point, other than to attract the praise of a little band of activists and the righteous scorn of everybody else? Then the president commuted 37 of 40 capital sentences. In a single move, he managed to offend the families of murdered victims (some of them children), express his contempt for the law and the courts (there was no question of the trials’ fairness) and reveal that he has no principled objection to the death penalty (he passed over the three most infamous killers). And for all that, he gained nothing for his legacy or his party.

Much more at the linked opinion.

Meanwhile, did Trump just win a "tectonic" election? Link here.

From the linked oped:

“I was at first inclined to think of this election simply as a repudiation election,” he says. He now suspects that Mr. Trump’s victory might be a “tectonic election”—one that marks a permanent structural change in the American electorate and political parties.

He characterizes only three past elections as tectonic—1800, when Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams and the Federalist Party quickly withered; 1860, when Lincoln’s victory established the Republicans as a major party that would dominate presidential politics for seven decades; and 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt trounced Herbert Hoover and cemented the modern Democratic coalition.

If your name isn’t Donald Trump, the idea that 2024 could join this list may strike you as counterintuitive. Kamala Harris carried 19 states and received more than 48% of the aggregate popular vote. Mr. Trump didn’t even manage a majority. (Neither did Lincoln, but he had three significant opponents.)

“It’s not a landslide in terms of numbers,” Mr. Guelzo acknowledges, “but it is a landslide morally speaking. What I mean by that is that the DNC was running against a presidential candidate that everybody was convinced was unelectable against nearly anyone. They could have put up almost any candidate and the confidence was that the country was simply not going to buy the idea of a return of Donald Trump to the White House.”