The New Hampshire Primary Shows an Educated State that Chose Ignorance*

The results serve as an alarm for the state of election politics and zeal for democracy in the United States.

“A Jesus Christ-Ronald Reagan 2024 presidential ticket would have lost to Donald Trump in New Hampshire,” lamented an articulate conservative on Jan. 24 after the results of the state’s primary.

New Hampshire, where 94% of the population completed secondary school and more than 40% have higher education, serves as an alarm for the state of election politics and zeal for democracy in the United States. The Republican Party has given up any initiative to preserve itself as a party within the system.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s surprising victory in 2016, the American press, ashamed for not having predicted the change in the wind, ventured into the country’s interior. It decided it needed to give voice to the predominantly white and conservative voters who preferred to see a client of porn stars, a tax evader, someone who associated with mobsters and a debauched frequenter of Manhattan’s drug-fueled nightlife in the White House.

And so the “diner” interview was born. The “diner,” an American luncheonette that doesn’t vary from state to state, is an institution that remains rooted in the 1950s, although these days, it serves avocado toast, an incontrovertible sign of capitulation to the pornographic wave of gastronomic novelties.

Thus, urban reporters from the traditional media, guilt-ridden for liking music, theater (and, imagine, books!), took the pulse of angry voters who worshipped Trump. For years, we have been hearing platitudes about those forgotten voters, forgotten by the East and West Coast elite.

But there was a clear distinction – one that wasn’t properly highlighted – between a former unemployed miner in Western Virginia, whose life was destroyed by addiction to opioids prescribed criminally to treat a health problem, and characters like the colonel who became a celebrity after the New Hampshire primaries.

“Colonel” Ted Johnson, interviewed by Politico, was chosen by the media, which covers politics as if it were a horse race, to be the beacon who explains why Americans insist on voting for a criminal, indicted 91 times with more than evident signs of dementia.

Johnson is a retired military man who believes the U.S. is in the middle of a civil war and needs Trump to “pull the system apart.” This is a guy who spent decades following the orders of his military commanders until he entered the reserves and who is so bored with his comfortable home and secure pension that he admitted to a reporter, “He [Trump] exposes the deep state, and we’re going to have four miserable years for everybody.”

Johnson is a Trump supporter who advocates punishing the entire country or “breaking everything” (between you and me, repressing minorities). The problem is that the colonel will not suffer any misery. The economy of the hated Joe Biden is going well for him and continues to improve. And what he calls “breaking the system” is a rollout of cruelties to immigrants, Black citizens, women and children.

We need to listen to “Colonel” Johnson and admit that his thought bubble is real. But we need to act so that these privileged nihilists, bored with the status quo, do not rise to become the oracles of a Trumpian dystopia.

*Editor’s note: This article is available in its original language with a paid subscription.