America’s Problems Aren’t Complicated

This article is being co-published with The Lever, an investigative newsroom. Click here to get The Lever’s free newsletter.

One recurring theme in political satire is the fear that humans gravitate to oversimplified explanations for complex problems — a supposed curse of dumbing down that leads us to erect idiocracies led by the world’s Donald Trumps . But there’s an equally strong argument that this grand unifying theory is exactly wrong. Lately it seems we’re gaslit by overly complex explanations that end up obscuring simple realities.

Take the 2024 presidential campaign. After the election, the internet teemed with Rube-Goldberg-machine theories about why the results were what they were. Democrats moved too far left ! It was the culture war ! It was a refusal to go populist