Penn and Teller, PT Barnum, and What's (Still) The Matter with Kansas?

The Politics of Misdirection

I like books. I keep the old ones around. Why? Vanity mostly. They look awesome on Zoom meetings. I think I look like a public intellectual who is invited to speak with Judy Woodruff on Friday nights on NewsHour rather than a technology deployment strategist who talks to CHROs and CFOs about enterprise software all day. My kids joke that there are five categories of books in dad’s dewey decimal system: dead presidents, dead generals, business, baseball, and an assortment of 20th century American fiction. They aren’t wrong.

I studied political science in college and went to business school when I was finally ready to learn. So I keep the books around for perspective and perhaps to learn from the past. There are lots of versions of the quote about those who fail to learn history being doomed to repeat it. The Spanish philosopher George Santayana first said it in his book The Life of Reason. My favorite version is attributed to Karl Marx: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” The question is: are we in the midst of tragedy, farce, or both?

So today, when I was thinking about what to write, I wandered over to my bookshelf and picked up Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas. Written in 2004, Tonight, instead of watching football, I decided to re-read it to see if it could help me understand what’s going on. The fundamental question of the book is: why do so many Americans continue to vote against their self-interest? I think the question is as valid today as it was in 2004. Perhaps more so.

This is where Penn and Teller and PT Barnum come in. What’s happened over the past generation is one of the great acts of misdirection and self-promotion in American history. The end result has been millions of people who consistently vote against their self-interests, believing that Republican policies will make their lives better.

This voting pattern is also the result of misplaced anger directed toward immigrants, transgender individuals, women, Muslims and other outgroups rather than the socioeconomic disadvantage that is the root cause of their rage. Trump, is the modern day equivalent of PT Barnum. He is the master self-promoter in American history, who fans the flames of this misplaced rage to achieve his number one objective: preserving his own celebrity at all costs.

Social issues are the gorilla in Penn and Teller’s version of the famous attention experiment. While you’re focused on the chicken, you miss the gorilla moving into the cage.

“The Democrats are coming to take your guns.”

“The Democrats favor abortion of babies after they are born.”

“The Democrats hate religion.”

“The Democrats want to take away your gasoline-powered car.”

The Republican media echo chamber aided by social media algorithms fire up the base and distract the electorate with social issues while the republicans continue to disassemble social programs, deregulate industries, use the military for domestic policing, round up immigrants who are waiting for asylum hearings, cancel public media, promote questionable scientific theories about vaccines and autism, all while cutting taxes for the wealthy. It’s the political equivalent of the old touch football tactic where you tell your kid brother his shoes are untied, then immediately run a pass pattern drawn out by your dad while your brother is looking down at his Nikes. (Not that my kid brother ever fell for that trick—he’s way too smart.)

Let’s start with the fundamental premise underlying supply-side economics: cutting taxes creates growth. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office: “Overall, the net effect on private investment from the reconciliation act considered on its own is positive over the 2025–2028 period but negative in later years, as crowding out from larger deficits and higher interest rates more than offsets the increase in investment from tax incentives and a larger labor supply.”

In plain English: by the end of the Trump administration, growth is going to slow because we’re taking in less money than we’re spending due to unsustainable tax cuts, and we’ll need to allocate a higher proportion of mandatory government spending to service our national debt. We’re crowding out spending that could spur growth and investment to pay off a national credit card whose limit continues to grow unabated.

The report essentially dismisses the validity of the supply-side argument by stating: “The growth of real GDP is projected to slow from 2.5 percent in 2024 to 1.4 percent in 2025. That decline reflects a slowdown in consumer spending that stems from the tariffs put in place this year: Those tariffs raise prices for consumer goods and services, thereby eroding the purchasing power of households; they also increase costs for businesses that use imported and import-competing inputs in production. In addition, a reduction in net immigration in 2025 leads to slower overall growth in consumer spending.”

So according to the CBO, the working class Americans who make up a significant percentage of the 49.8% of Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 voted for policies that were decidedly against their self-interest. They voted for policies that the government itself acknowledges will lead to higher prices and slower growth. These same policies drive increased federal debt that will crowd out other categories of government spending that could actually benefit the regular Americans who voted for the President and live in Kansas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota... You get the point.

Why do they continue to vote against their own interests? Because the President makes them feel better by working fawning crowds into a paroxysm of hate, anger, and rage rather than promoting policies that work to end the socioeconomic inequality that is the true undercurrent of his movement. It’s a lot easier to rile people up and make them angry than it is to create and implement effective public policy.

The only way this moment in history ends is with a reasoned long-term plan for economic inclusion that is communicated promoted, and implemented as effectively as the politics of hate.