Andy Borowitz's 'Profiles in Ignorance'

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Andy Borowitz from The New Yorker is back with us now. Many of you know he writes the satirical New Yorker column called the Borowitz Report. Some of the recent Borowitz Report stories include these. "Now that Boris Johnson dropped out of the UK Prime Minister's race, the Borowitz Report provided this US analysis. American seething with envy after malignant narcissist chooses not to run again."

After the charge that anti-abortion rights candidate Herschel Walker paid for his girlfriend to have one, the Borowitz Report got reaction. The headline was, "Trump furious at Herschel Walker, says only a loser pays his bills." This one would speak for itself since it's the Supreme Court day on the show. "Ketanji Brown Jackson bravely infiltrates shadowy alt-right group." Think about it. That's the made-up Borowitz Report news.

He also has his new book that includes not one word of fiction. It's called Profiles in Ignorance: How American Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. Yes, it's about the increasing embrace of ignorance among politicians over time, from Ronald Reagan or so, through Donald Trump, but more tellingly about the public's reactions to them in what Andy calls the three stages of ignorance; ridicule, acceptance, and celebration.

We celebrate Andy Borowitz the satirist, and Andy Borowitz the historian. Hi, Andy, we welcome both of you back to WNYC.

Andy Borowitz: Well, it's good to both be back here. I should point out that it's a funny history book. I haven't gone totally serious. I'm not like going Robert Caroline or something.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. All true things described in a way that will make us laugh, even as it makes us cry. Let's start with a few things from the book. After you were on in the summer for the actual book interview, I thought a lot about your three stages of ignorance. I want you to talk about the Reagan story in relation to this because it's not so much about Reagan's own ignorance, it's the public's reaction to it, right?

Andy Borowitz: Right. Reagan was an icon of what I call the ridicule stage, which is the first stage of ignorance. It's hard for people who were born after Reagan to realize this, but back in the 1960s, when Reagan first got into politics, there was still the expectation that politicians know things. In the ridicule stage, a dumb politician had to pretend to be smart.

That's really the situation that Reagan found himself in.

He was a very ignorant guy, knew very little, but he was surrounded by handlers who fed him with enough information to make him seem like he knew a few things, and he was fantastic on television. That was his main strength. He made knowledge beside the point in a way, because he would say things, like in his debate with Jimmy Carter, the one soundbite that people remember from that debate was who said, "There you go again," and cocked his head in this sarcastic way.

That didn't mean anything. It didn't contain any information, but people just thought, "Oh, Ronald Reagan, he's great. He really is sincere. He communicates. He's the great communicator," but there was no content to what he was communicating. He was just saying a catchphrase. He did that throughout his presidency. He said things like, "Go ahead, make my day, and may the force be with you." He showed his Hollywood roots. He loved Hollywood catchphrases.

Brian Lehrer: Here's what stuck with me from your book after we did the original interview, and why I wanted to have you back, because the book says, "Reagan's mythologizers try to recast him as a deep thinker." What you were just describing was covering for his limited knowledge of things. The big shift, as I read your book, and it's haunting me, is the period or the transition, let's say, from the Reagan era to the George W. Bush era, where the public had come to embrace ignorance in a president as kind of a good thing.

They didn't try to hide it like they did with Reagan. In Bush's case, they actually tried to use it to their advantage. Can you just talk about like what's really at the core of that?

Andy Borowitz: It was very successful because George W. Bush, I described as the father of the second stage of ignorance, which is acceptance, which you describe perfectly. It's a time when we no longer were trying, as politicians, to appear smart, we were saying to the public, "Look, I don't know very much, but neither do you." That makes me the guy you would like to go have a beer with as if that were the most important thing a president could do.

That whole question about, who would you rather have the beer with, Al Gore or George W. Bush? George W. Bush won handily. That wasn't an actual pollsters question, that was a question designed by the Sam Adams beer company as a marketing gimmick. We've been living with that legacy ever since. Some marketing guy came up with that question, and that's become an important benchmark for how we judge politicians.

George W. Bush was very ignorant. He was as ignorant as his fellow fraternity member Dan Quayle. They were both members of the DKE fraternity which is, no offense to the DKEs out there, but it's known as one of the less academically accomplished fraternities. He came into the public eye in 1999, when he was starting his candidacy for the 2000 race. He had a really bad moment on Boston TV where a local journalist named Andy Hiller asked him a bunch of foreign policy questions, and he really whiffed on three out of four of them, he couldn't name any foreign leaders.

This was the kind of thing that, in the ridicule stage, would have killed Dan Quayle's career and kind of did. In George Bush's case, he was brilliant or his handlers were because they came out and they said, "George W. Bush isn't running for jeopardy contestant, he's running for president of the United States." Now, what that construction suggests is that a jeopardy contestant needs to know more than the president.

I'm not so sure that's really a very smart or very good idea, but people really ran with that, and George W. Bush, rather than trying to hide his ignorance as Dan Quayle did, or as Ronald Reagan did, he really started embracing it and talking about how badly he did at school and how he didn't pay attention, and he didn't read any books. It made him seem, to a lot of people, very likable and very authentic.

He really got this whole party started. Anti-intellectualism has been a part of American life for centuries, as Richard Hofstadter pointed out in his famous book on that subject, but in terms of political life, George W. Bush, in the modern media age, really did become the first politician to openly embrace and emphasize how little he knew.

Brian Lehrer: Finally, the celebration phase of ignorance, as you call it. How much of that is about the enthusiastic embrace of the big lie by millions of Americans? Again, your book was haunting me in the weeks after we first talked about it as I was watching the January 6th committee hearings, and all this evidence that they knew that they were peddling a lie, and yet they were celebrating it.

Andy Borowitz: Well, this goes back, actually, to Ronald Reagan, too, because when you remove knowledge from the picture, that leaves a vacuum, and what fills that vacuum usually, history tells us not just in our country, but elsewhere, is hatred, bias, bigotry, and falsehoods. In the case of Ronald Reagan, a lot of times he would say things like he would talk about this, one of his favorite iconic targets was the welfare queen.

He was always talking about this welfare queen who was a real person, but he made up all the facts about her about how much she was gouging the government for, how many aliases she had, all the actual information which--

Brian Lehrer: A particular individual who he was focused in mind as if a model for-- [crosstalk]

Andy Borowitz: Yes, actually a very smart journalist wrote a book about her a couple of years ago, and he just compared the reality of who she was with what Ronald Reagan said about her and there was a big gap. Donald Trump has been lying his entire life. He lied about himself, the art of the deal, which he didn't write, Tony Schwartz wrote it. Was full of stuff about his mastery of real estate, which people who actually worked with him knew not to be the case.

He's almost 100% myth, I've got to say, Donald Trump, and it's been very impressive to see how he's, over the years, corralled media companies in amplifying his lies. The big lie is, unfortunately, probably a predictable result of what happens when you strip away knowledge and you replace knowledge with stories. In this case, the stories are made-up stories, the stories about missing ballots and all these dead people who voted. One thing I learned in the book, which is, if I can add a glimmer of hope to this gloomy narrative still front-laying out here, is that people do prefer stories over facts. It's true in politics. It's true probably in advertising, a lot of other fields. If you've got a big lie, what you need to do is you need to replace that with a true story and a compelling true story.

Those people who are bemoaning the rise of Trump and bemoaning this celebration phase where people like Marjorie Taylor Greene talk about Jewish space lasers and we have Lauren Boebert and all these complete fabulous. It's one thing to just sit on our butts and complain about them and bemoan the fact that they're lying. What we have to do is we have to get out there and come up with better stories that are true stories and real stories.

It would be good to get out there and explain what are some of the things. If you want their opponents to win, make a compelling story. Don't just say, "Oh the other side is idiots and we're better." That doesn't move the ball at all. I think that's kind of the challenge I would leave people with, which is like take action against ignorance. Don't just sit there refreshing your Twitter feed and talking about how dumb everybody else is.

Brian Lehrer: You usually fight ignorance by making up fake news stories for the New Yorker that, of course, have a point. Since we're almost out of time in the segment, we just can take one recent example of that and let you riff. Here it is, the Borowitz Report satirical headline is, Dr. Oz claims that eating classified documents was essential to Trump's healthy diet. My question for you, Andy Borowitz, is, do you know if classified documents are more nutritious than ordinary documents?

Andy Borowitz: I don't know. I think that they might provide some roughage. I think that you have to figure out what would a Donald Trump document look like? It probably does have ketchup on it of some sort, and as Ronald Reagan taught us, ketchup is a vegetable, correct? That was one thing he said in his day. He actually said that was an important part of the school lunch program was ketchup.

I don't know for a fact. That's one of those got you questions that you journalists, you enemies to the people, like to throw at me. I don't, for a fact, know that classified documents contain more nutrients, but I do know from reporting that Donald Trump did like to eat documents. The story is somewhat fact-based and that he was very big on destroying documents.

We know from Maggie Haberman that he flushed documents down the toilet or tried to, but he also would eat them from time to time. That Dr. Oz story has more than a kernel of truth in it actually.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going for the classified documents are more nutritious than ordinary documents theory. We thank Andy Borowitz from The New New Yorker. He writes, The New Yorker's Borowitz Report, and his new book is called Profiles in Ignorance. Andy, thanks as always.

Andy Borowitz: Thanks so much, Brian.

 

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