Hanlon's Razor Is Getting Rusty in the 2024 Election
Don't attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The summer's presidential politics have been ripe for conspiracism: the Democratic candidate switcheroo, the attempt on former President Donald Trump's life, the rise (and fall) of Project 2025, the late-breaking veepstakes. It's tempting to understand each of these plot developments as manifestations of an elite cabal's sinister game of 5D chess. We've never needed Hanlon's razor more.
Hanlon's razor reminds us not to attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The namesake of the adage—a Robert Hanlon from President Joe Biden's beloved Scranton—offers little context for interpreting the phrase; it appeared as a stand-alone in a 1980 book of clever sayings. Later, it was picked up by early Usenet boards and often invoked to reject various conspiracy theories.
One of its most famous users is, confusingly, the similarly named Robert Heinlein. In his novella Logic of Empire, he offers this variant, to explain the recurrence of colonial slavery on Venus: "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity."
While not quite as dire as Heinlein's Venusian dystopia, conditions here on Earth certainly look bleak. Far from being a grand master–level game of villainous chess, the final months of the 2024 U.S. election season are best understood as children playing a game of Sorry!
There was without a doubt a conspiracy of silence around Biden's cognitive decline. But Hanlon asks us to consider whether all but his very closest family and associates might have chosen not to examine the evidence too closely until the very end ("When Biden's 'Bubble Wrap' Burst"). His advisers almost certainly foolishly overestimated their capacity to manage his deficits and also guessed wrongly about the speed of his decline. There may indeed have been people involved who were motivated by ill intent, but they were never as powerful as the stupidity that dominated at every stage. The result was a chaotic scramble to replace Biden with Vice President Kamala Harris, the person who was already his most likely successor and replacement.
One might think presidential assassinations are an exception to Hanlon's razor. Surely taking potshots at politicians is pure malice in action? Not so fast. We remain largely in the dark about the motives and machinations behind the attempt on Trump's life, and the information we have about the shooter's politics seems mixed. Perhaps he, like John Hinckley Jr. before him (who took aim at Ronald Reagan in an attempt to win Jodie Foster's love), was laboring in ignorance (or delusion) about the way the world works. And, of course, he mostly missed.
Project 2025 is not unusual in Washington, D.C. Many think tanks—and magazines—conceive of themselves as the cartographers and human resources department of the nation's political future. They craft road maps and corral talent in order to be poised to strike when electoral victory is at hand. The goals of this particular cluster are more authoritarian than usual. But the methodology is familiar. What's notable isn't the belief that this strategy for influence could work; it has before. It's the belief that it could work now. As Stephanie Slade explains in this month's cover story ("'Only the Best People'"), the built-in dysfunction of the MAGA GOP is a form of insurance against a truly world-changing conspiracy. Trump himself has already quenched, fueled, and then reextinguished the fire of Project 2025 with casual remarks as he campaigns, and there are months left to go.
At least one reason we need Hanlon's razor in the first place is that many of the incompetents believe themselves conspiracists. It's more flattering, at least by certain lights, to be malicious than to be idiotic.
It used to be said that the Democrats were the stupid party and the Republicans were the evil party. In this, as in so many things, the two parties have moved closer together while also moving in the wrong direction, converging on policies and political practices that are both stupid and evil.
In recent political history, January 6 is the great test of how hard-core a Hanlonian one is willing to be. The riot and trespass on the Capitol was a display of villainy so stupid that it rusted the razor right through. Yet even there, stupidity proved to be the more powerful force. While there were certainly villains in the mob, the rowdy morons won the day—and lost the fight.
Hanlon's razor is, in the end, a call to condescending charity toward one's opponents and one we'd all do well to keep in mind as we descend into the final weeks of the election season.
This article originally appeared in print under the headline "Hanlon's Razor Rusts."
