Most People Don't Grasp Nuance

And you, dear reader, are part of the intellectual elite that does.

Out of all the U.S. presidents who have served during my lifetime, I have no more contempt for any of them than George W. Bush. You might expect this from someone with a cosmopolitan outlook whose vocation is foreign policy: Bush is the Butcher of Baghdad, the Killer of Kabul, a torturer, and quite possibly the reason North Korea has nuclear weapons. He’s responsible for some millions of deaths and squandering nearly two decades of American hegemony playing whack-a-mole in the desert and blowing up brown people. His so-called war on terror undermined U.S. power relative to China, which may have accelerated the end of hegemony and raised the risk of great power war and nuclear escalation. He ripped up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and redoubled America’s futile pursuit of national missile defense, which also raised nuclear risks. If there was justice in the world, Bush and his advisors would all be breaking rocks on a chain gang at Guantanamo Bay.

I also have no greater respect for any president during my lifetime than I do for George W. Bush. Bush was an unparalleled leader on global health, and he spent a great deal of political capital drumming up support for HIV/AIDS antiretroviral treatment in Africa. If you look at a chart of life expectancy for countries that participated in Bush’s AIDS program, PEPFAR, you can see how much of a game changer it was. Bush was responsible for saving about 25 million lives over 20 years, with a budget of just $120 billion. That’s about the same efficiency as the top global health and development charities in the world, and more than five times as many lives saved as the highest estimate of the number of people killed in the post-9/11 wars.

(As if that wasn’t enough, Bush also gave us the indomitable Matthew Scully, author of Dominion and the foremost Christian and conservative apologist for ethical veganism in the United States today.)

Source: The Economist

You can’t say anything like this about Bush’s successors. Since Bush left office, PEPFAR funding has stagnated in nominal terms and declined by nearly one-third when you adjust for inflation. Obama proposed cutting PEPFAR. So did Trump. Obama, Trump, and Biden have all failed to launch any similarly ambitious global health initiatives. They’ve also all committed nearly Bush-scale crimes in foreign policy, like enabling industrial-scale slaughter in Yemen and Gaza, and none has committed any equivalent redeeming actions. Probably the best thing you can say about them is that Obama at least tried to reduce nuclear risks—he signed New START and the very good Iran deal—Trump authorized Operation Warp Speed, which accelerated COVID vaccine development and saved thousands of lives, and Biden has passed some pretty good climate policy. When you consider the competition, however, all three have been bush league (pun intended).

Source: Kaiser Family Foundation

On balance, then, George W. Bush has been the greatest president of my lifetime, by far. He’s killed probably more people than anyone else during the 21st century, but he’s also saved more lives than almost anyone else, and he’s saved a lot more people than he’s killed. He should be in prison for war crimes, and while in prison he should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

If you’re a low decoupler or you don’t understand nuance, you probably think I’m an idiot for holding these opinions in tandem. Is there some way to reconcile them? Yes, actually: Very easily. If you do grasp the concept of nuance, you know there’s nothing about these opinions that puts them in tension with each other, since a person can do both good things and bad things, and even if they do bad things the good things can outweigh the bad.

Most people have a very poor concept of nuance, at least as far as politics is concerned. They’re not able to accept that there can be anything good about a Bad Person or anything bad about a Good Person, and their understanding of political morality is about as sophisticated as a children’s fairy tale. If you don’t believe me, try getting someone who supports Donald Trump to admit that he’s habitually corrupt (like, comically corrupt), which is obviously true. Except in some very rare cases, they’ll deny it and call you a communist. Try getting someone who opposes Trump to admit that he’s not Satan incarnate and he did at least one good thing in office. (No matter what you believe, I’m sure you must agree with at least something he did.) Again, those who are willing to admit the obvious even when it complicates their worldview are few and far between, although more common than on the other side.

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This was supposed to be an article about why George W. Bush is the best president of my lifetime. Around the time I was about to hit “Publish,” however, a particularly low decoupler—Jeff Tiedrich—found my article about him, and apparently he didn’t like it. (Sorry, Jeff, you weren’t supposed to see it!) “[T]his guy thinks I fucking suck,” he said. Actually, I’m quite magnanimous about Tiedrich. I admire how, unlike a lot of other internet personalities, he’s not a grifter—he’s posted for well over two decades, regardless of how much or how little people pay him—and he’s a master of his craft. I didn’t say anything about whether I agree or disagree with his opinions, and I actually find his writing style morbidly amusing. My point was simply that Tiedrich appeals to the vast majority of people who are intellectually lazy.

This was lost on Tiedrich’s intellectually lazy followers, who assumed that if I think publishing a list of Tweets every day with the word “fuckface” interspersed between them 50 times doesn’t make you a veritable brain genius, I must be a Trump supporter. This resulted in some very amusing comments, mostly because they all confirmed the things I was saying in the article—and not one of the posters had the self-awareness or reading comprehension to realize it.

Imagine, for a moment, what John Mearsheimer would do if he discovered my article criticizing his misapplication of grand international relations theory to granular, real-world foreign policy cases. He probably wouldn’t lash out and accuse me of being a liberal internationalist or a toady for Bob Keohane. He probably would come up with a thoughtful and cogent response, and it would move my opinion somewhat in his direction. That’s because Mearsheimer is a sophisticated thinker who grasps nuance and can understand complicated arguments.

Most people aren’t like that. Even in the real world, you run into Tiedrich-heads all the time. (The term here meaning “people of all political persuasions who don’t understand nuance,” rather than literally “people who read Jeff Tiedrich’s blog.”) I’m not a partisan of any major political tribe, and I have a lot of unique and even idiosyncratic beliefs. (Don’t get me started about fish!) So the liberals think I’m MAGA. MAGA thinks I’m a communist. Communists think I’m a libertarian. And libertarians—well, the few libertarians I run into are actually pretty high decouplers, so they tend to understand what’s going on. But almost everybody else doesn’t care enough to expend the effort it would take to understand complicated and unconventional arguments.

This might make me sound pretty self-aggrandizing and elitist, like I think I’m a lot more intellectually sophisticated than the average person. But that’s just because I am! And so are a fair share of you, dear readers. According to polling data, almost half of Americans have not read any books in the past year, not even the trashy kinds of books you can find at the airport. If you’ve done so much as read one-and-a-half pages of Twilight per day for the past 365 days, you’re at least as much of an intellectual as the average American.

I wish there was some grand takeaway from all this—more than just that most people aren’t able to follow a complicated argument, or admit that Bad People can do good things and vice versa, or deal with criticism rationally. But none comes to mind, since you really don’t have to care about what the majority of people who don’t grasp nuance have to think and say, since they usually don’t have the motivation or wherewithal to make it through elite institutions and exercise political power. That’s becoming less true as the Republicans become the stupid party and the rubes increasingly take over conservative institutions, but I suspect that if Trump is re-elected, the more intellectual conservative elites will still be the ones doing most of the governing. Alas, the Tiedrich-heads of the world will be Tiedrich-heads, while the rest of will be the movers and shakers.

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