There’s an Upside to the Dummies Winning a Few Rounds

We might as well make the best of this

A still from the movie “Idiocracy”.

I don’t love that “use taxpayer money to buy fake trash” is White House policy now. I also think that the proper role for a coked-up 20 year-old is dancing in a go-go cage, not auditing the federal government. Some of my other cranky old man opinions are that it would be easier to access Greenland’s minerals through trade than through an Eric the Red-style conquest, and that “Neville Chamberlain but an asshole” is a bad diplomatic posture. I doubt that many conservatives will disagree with anything I just said, because the main split in American politics these days isn’t liberal/conservative but rather total idiot/not.

Of course, it doesn’t matter what I think, because I’m not calling the shots. Trump is calling the shots, and he’s removed many of the meddling nerds who thwarted his schemes in his first term. The running gag of the first Trump administration was Trump telling people to do awful things and his subordinates just…not doing them. For example: Remember when Trump told a room full of people to get the Justice Department harass Time Warner, and Gary Cohn walked out of the meeting and told everyone within earshot “don’t you fucking dare” do that? Remember when Mark Esper had to tell Trump that he can’t shoot protesters in the legs? It turns out that the “deep state” was actually just not-crazy people refusing to do crazy stuff.

But this time around, Trump is free to be his worst self. Even if the courts uphold the law and Trump backs down from his crazier shenanigans, damage has already been done. Programs authorized by Congress have been haphazardly shuttered, alliances have been trashed, and volatility has given investors their twitchiest sphincters in 17 years. IMHO, this is bad — I’m not a person who cheers for total societal breakdown in the hope that my party will summon 56 Senate seats from the ashes. But even so, I can see a small upside to living in an Idiocracy for just a little while.

It’s always been hard for morons to get their policy preferences enacted. The minute you propose, say, defunding the police or curing polio with raw milk, a bunch of eggheads jump out of the woodwork and meme you to within an inch of your life. It’s hard to pass any legislation in the US, and it’s extra hard to pass legislation that seems like it was written by drunk kindergartners. This is because the Founders had a strong anti-dipshit bias; though half-wits have been a vital part of this nation since its inception, the Constitutional Convention was run by holier-than-thou smarty pants like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Our process stacks the deck against people who are already flummoxed by banking, parking signs, the buffet procedure at Golden Corral, childproof caps, square dancing, escalators, microwave popcorn instructions, velcro, claymation, coin-operated laundry machines, and how to get to Netflix using a remote that doesn’t have a big fucking “NETFLIX” button on it.

Because the dim so rarely get their way, basically everything bad that happens gets blamed on smart people. There’s some justice to this: Smart people usually do call the shots and do fuck things up on a regular basis. The big secret about smart people is that they’re not actually all that smart: They’re only smart compared to other people. The truth is that they don’t totally understand the complex systems all around us, so they walk around acting like they know stuff, but they actually only know slightly more than John Q. Gluehuffer. And that’s why their best laid plans sometimes morph into a big ball of exploding shit.

So: Smart people own every failure, and dumbfucks sit back and say “Shoulda done things my way!” This might be the biggest fringe benefit of being a dumbfuck — it’s either that or being the target market for 97 percent of all entertainment. It’s impossible to prove that something that didn’t happen wouldn’t have worked, so morons have access to a trick play that nerds can never stop. And sure: Nerds can produce a study tearing down morons’ brain-meltingly dumb ideas, but who wrote the study? Other nerds. Idiots see government as a nerdspiracy to suppresses their awesome ideas, and you’ll never convince them otherwise.

But suddenly, idiots have more power than they’ve had in a long time. The second Trump administration is blowing the first one out of the water in terms of brazen hackery; Trump is acting like a movie character who gets a terminal diagnosis and does every wacky thing he ever dreamed. His party controls both houses of Congress, and he also has a 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court and a cabinet full of black belt-level dullards. Not much is standing in his way. We’ll soon find out how many idiotic things that Trump said he’ll do that people who voted for him assumed he wouldn’t do he’ll actually do.

We may have a Franz Reichelt situation on our hands. Reichelt was the amateur inventor who jumped off the Eiffel Tower in 1912 in a self-made "parachute-suit". French authorities said he that shouldn’t have been allowed to jump, but he was allowed to jump, and he died. Had he been stopped, he probably would have been furious at “l’état profond” and maintained that his suit — which looked like a wearable pup tent — would have worked. It’s only because he was allowed to jump that we were able to measure the results, literally: Reichelt left a 15 centimeter crater in the ground. If things go for us like they did for ol’ Franz, then at least afterwards, it’ll be possible to say: “And that’s why you don’t put the dummies in charge.”

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