The Last Taboo: Why Are Voters Never Held Responsible for Their Choices?

In his book, The Present Age, the late sociologist Robert Nisbet applied a pithy descriptor to a phenomenon we have seen all too often in public life: the “no-fault” theory of political action, particularly in foreign affairs. “Presidents, secretaries, and generals and admirals in America seemingly subscribe to the doctrine that no fault ever attaches to policy and operations,” he wrote. “This No Fault conviction prevents them from taking too seriously such notorious foul-ups as Desert One, Grenada, Lebanon, and now the Persian Gulf.”

Nisbet did not live to see a spectacular example of his theory. George W. Bush, having failed to prevent the 9/11 disaster his own intelligence agencies foresaw, proceeded to initiate a years-long disaster in Iraq, a catastrophe of his own making. Yet what were the consequences? The American people rewarded him with a second term in the face of abundant evidence of his incompetence and bad faith.

It would appear that Nisbet’s thesis needs revision. What he said was blatantly obvious: of course politicians rarely blame themselves for their own egregious policy failures, for it characterizes the typical behavior of ambitious, self-confident, and often corner-cutting people.

We frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like... How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

What is more significant, and troubling, is the reaction of the people who elect them: why do they more often than not reward leaders who inveigle them into national calamity? Isn’t there also a no-fault doctrine that applies to the American voter, a doctrine that is for the most part rigidly observed by journalists, pundits, and the self-proclaimed wise men who monopolize the op-ed pages of the prestige newspapers?

From the platforms of the chattering classes, we frequently hear calls for “accountability:” for politicians, tech moguls, and the like. Holding someone accountable implies that the person in question is a functioning adult who can be considered responsible for his actions. How telling then, that there are no such calls for accountability when it comes to the American people.

Turning back to Bush, his reelection did not end his reign of error. His policy of radical financial deregulation, about which he and his underlings bragged incessantly, and about which the public had to know if it were remotely paying attention, led in his second term to the greatest financial meltdown in 80 years.

Temporarily chastened, voters latched on to Barack Obama as the savior du jour. It turned out that Obama was no Moses leading the people to the promised land. A nominal Democrat, he was more an old-school Rockefeller Republican whose two terms were mostly an uneventful placeholder in history—not that such administrations are necessarily bad, as the current all-enveloping chaos demonstrates.

But placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection. So they grew tired of Perry Como’s crooning, hankering instead after Ozzy Osbourne smashing his guitar and biting the head off a bat. That explains a good deal about how we got Trump 1.0 and 2.0.

Placid, play-it-safe presidencies are boring, particularly for an increasingly infantilized public that needs 24/7 entertainment to stave off that worst of mental states: honest self-reflection.

Wait, say the pundits, weren’t great swathes of the American people in 2016 victimized by the system, suffering from “economic anxiety?” But exit polling data from 2016 showed that Hillary Clinton won by 12 points among voters making less than $30,000 a year and by nine points among those making between $30,000 and $49,999. Trump, on the other hand, won every demographic making $50,000 or more

In 2024, the U.S. economy was the best in almost 60 years, with October unemployment at 4.1 percent. This is not to argue that everything was ideal, but the economy was better than recent U.S. experience, and unemployment and GDP growth were far better than most developed countries.

Accordingly, pundits dropped the economic anxiety excuse. Instead, we have been inundated with think pieces about how Democrats in some unexplained way “lost the working class,” a demographic conveniently left undefined. This claim contradicts continued polling evidence that Trump consistently did better among more affluent voters. The notion that Trump has magnetic appeal among Americans living a precarious economic existence is largely myth.

Otherwise, the media has treated Trump’s election like an asteroid falling from the sky, a natural disaster seemingly without input from the electorate. Why? It may be that the press still refuses to violate the last moral taboo in American public life: the essential innocence and virtue of this country’s citizens.

Denouncing the rascality of politicians is a revered American tradition, from Artemus Ward to Mark Twain, to Will Rogers, right down to the late-night TV hosts of today. Even the ultra-refined Henry Adams, scion of the Adams's of presidential fame, approvingly quoted the line, “A congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and beat him on the snout!”

Perhaps the only well-known American literary figure to take a dim view of the people who actually elect the politicians was H.L. Mencken. He denounced vigilantism during World War I, Prohibition, the 1920s resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the revival of religious fundamentalism that same decade, not as some plague that befell the country from nowhere, but as an expression of Americans’ mob mentality, anti-intellectualism, and search for easy solutions.

Otherwise, American literary tradition gives us Walt Whitman singing the praises of his fellow citizens, Carl Sandberg (“the people, yes . . .”), Thorton Wilder and his sentimental tale of small-town folks, and Frank Capra’s maudlin cinematic paeans to the fundamental goodness of the common clay. Thousands of lesser lights have engaged in similar rhetorical puffery to the present day. The tragic, grown-up sense of social life in Victor Hugo or the great Russian novelists is absent from the American tradition.

Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions...?

Editorial departments still hew to this convention. A journalist friend recently submitted a piece to a well-known center-left magazine arguing that some responsibility must attach to the voters for the 2024 election. The response: “We can’t say the American people are stupid,” even though the editor agreed with the author.

Political theorists from the center to the far left are also prone to this delusion. They have built an edifice of psychological denial on the idea that even if there is a pervasive system of illegitimate corporate or governmental control, it is miraculously unconnected with the character of the people the system administers. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent is typical of the species, a late-20th century adaptation of Karl Marx’s theory of mystification: that the common people do not recognize their genuine interest because they have been mystified by the powers-that-be.

Mystification merely being academic slang for bamboozlement, the theory never answers the question: why are the people so easily conned by the most childish lies and distortions when accurate information is easily accessible, and never more so than today? (This is quite apart from the fact that Trump told voters very explicitly about the horrors he would inflict, meaning that something other than gullibility is also at work).

It wasn’t always thus: farmers in the 1890s, the core support for the old People’s Party, knew very well who was screwing them: the railroads, the banks, the grain traders. So did 1930s production-line workers in steel, autos, and rubber, struggling for union recognition: they knew it was their own employers, not foreign competition or some culture-wars chimera that was responsible for their miserable conditions.

But now, farmers vote overwhelmingly for Trump, despite their suffering under foreign retaliatory tariffs resulting from his ill-considered economic policy during his first term and likely further damage in his second. And unionization is at record post-World War II lows, despite the material benefits of union membership.

What changed? Historian Rick Perlstein, writing in The Invisible Bridge, said that in the 1970s, as the crises of Vietnam, racial unrest, and Watergate abated, the American people had a chance to learn from these events: in other words, to grow up and be responsible citizens.

They didn’t. Ronald Reagan’s soothing fairy tale of innocent virtue, of a country sinned against but never sinning, became America’s secular religion. I would extend Perlstein’s thesis by suggesting that this bogus innocence has become embedded in the American psyche and individualized into a personalized martyr complex. Every vicissitude of life is now the fault of some detested minority, or the elites, or the system generally.

The vanguard of this personality type, the people who actually generate the atrocious ideas the Trump regime is now implementing, is what substacker John Ganz calls the “creep-loser.” You know the type from high school: awkward, asocial, and full of resentment against the world for failing to recognize his genius.

Many of them become brooding, failed intellectuals, the sort that were the idea engine of authoritarian movements throughout the 20th century, and who now infest places like the Claremont Institute and Heritage Foundation. They are to MAGA what the Old Bolsheviks were to the Communist movement. It is no coincidence that Steve Bannon described himself as a Leninist. Their goal is simply destruction as revenge.

It is true that all of these resentful fantasists together would barely fill a stadium: hardly a key national voting bloc. But their nihilistic attitude is surprisingly prevalent among “real Americans” who never read Ayn Rand or attended Hillsdale College. Beginning in 2015, pollsters have been rather surprised at the frequency that respondents claim they just want to “burn it all down,” not troubling themselves with what will happen to the social infrastructure that supports their very existence.

If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious?

Add to them the rapturist Christians, the hard core of the Christian fundamentalist voting bloc (the largest single constituency of the Republican Party). The belief that a millennial holocaust wiping out earth is something to look forward to is in its basic psychology no different from Hitler’s Götterdämmerung in the Berlin bunker or suicide cults like Jim Jones’ People’s Temple. Even the wider fundamentalist belief system is prone to rigidly separate human beings into the blessed and the damned, a mindset hardly consistent with pluralist democracy.

A final demographic is the most diffuse and least attached to any ideology: the tens of millions of unserious Americans who refuse to take anything seriously, for whom the smallest exercise of civic responsibility is either uncool, or boring, or a violation of their freedom to be irresponsible. Some of them voted for Trump because “he’s funny;” you may know the type. No doubt they think even now that plundering Greenland or sending combat troops to Gaza is comedy gold. Others will apply a sort of degenerate folk wisdom that they think is clever, saying they “always vote those in office out, and those out of office in,” or some similar nonsense.

Other unserious people feign a righteous anger over the price of eggs on the assumption that the White House controls the cost of consumer goods regardless of circumstances like bird flu. The price of eggs or broiler chickens is much more important to them than living under the rule of law or handing down a decent and humane society to their children.

Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it.

If it reaches the point where Americans are sent to Guantanamo for their political opinions, what will be the reaction of the unserious? No doubt indifference, because it won’t affect them, just as arrests of Jews or Social Democrats didn’t affect “good Germans” in the 1930s. As for the true believers, whether religious fundamentalist or secular neoreactionary tech-nerd, they’ll be cheering it on: they never believed in any nonsense about democracy or human rights in any case.

How can America’s purported thought-leaders seriously maintain that a working majority of Americans (those who voted for Trump and those who didn’t bother to vote because they didn’t care) didn’t consciously will what is now unfolding? As Steve Bannon’s role model Lenin was reputed to have remarked, “who says A must say B:” people are intellectually and morally responsible for the consequences of their actions. To argue otherwise is the equivalent of saying that tens of millions of Americans are legally incapable of signing contracts, marrying, driving cars, or exercising the franchise.

Maybe we were always deceived by popular culture, or misread it. It’s a Wonderful Life is conventionally viewed as a heart-warming Christmas movie, with a depressing second act making the finale all the more sentimentally fulfilling, like Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Yet, but for the contingency of George Bailey’s having been born and lived, Bedford Falls inevitably would have defaulted to Potterville, hardly an affirmation of the goodness and civic-mindedness of the majority, who might have been expected to resist the designs of the grasping Mr. Potter.

Contingencies work that way in real life, too. But for the pandemic and the resulting inflation, we might be living in a different world. Alas, given the recent price of eggs, most Americans preferred to ditch safe, staid old Bedford Falls for the vulgar excitement of Potterville. The town’s owner, whether Mr. Potter or Donald Trump, will cheerfully ensure that while he might fleece you for every cent and jail you if you defy him, you’ll never be bored.