The reign of the idiots
Does democracy mean we must suffer the depredations of the stupid forever?
The pathologies of democracy are as nothing compared to the pathologies of tyranny, but they most certainly exist. Churchill was right to say that the democracy was the best of all bad forms of government, but we should remember that this admits to the fact that democracy can be a very bad thing at times. At the moment, the US appears to be suffering the consequences of this to an abnormal degree.
A case in point was a recent New York Times article on supporters of long-shot Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. As some may know, RFK Jr. is attempting to “primary” incumbent President Joe Biden with some—though somewhat exaggerated—success.
RFK Jr. is what in saner ages was referred to as a crank, and not a particularly loveable one. Indeed, he may have doomed hundreds and perhaps thousands of people to death by his relentless campaign to delegitimize perfectly safe vaccines against once-deadly childhood diseases, falsely claiming that the vaccines cause autism.
As should be expected, he did much the same regarding the equally safe Covid vaccine. That particular miracle of medical science likely saved millions if not billions of lives, something RFK Jr. appears to find intolerable. Accordingly, he launched a one-man crusade against the beleaguered Dr. Anthony Fauci, which included a bestselling book damning the good doctor and his supposed Big Pharma co-conspirators, accusing them of innumerable crimes against humanity.
While RFK Jr.’s candidacy will almost certainly fail, he is still polling in the double digits and appears to command a small but dedicated following that adores his bizarre alchemy of leftist, new age, paleoconservative, and environmentalist bromides, along with an ample helping of Alex Jones-ism.
They are a motley crew, appearing to be composed equally of crystal gazers, conspiracy theorists, Camelot nostalgists, left and right anti-war activists, and similar creatures who bring to mind the Waco Kid’s immortal line from Blazing Saddles: “You know, morons.”
One prominent spokesman for the candidate is a gentleman named Charles Eisenstein, described by the Times as “an influential New Age writer.” Eisenstein lives up to his billing. The Times quotes him saying, “There was a timeline in which America was, however flawed, it was moving towards greater and greater virtue,” only for it to be waylaid by the JFK assassination—which, incidentally, RFK Jr. is convinced was a CIA plot, along with the murder of his father, RFK Sr.
However, Eisenstein said, “I feel like maybe that timeline hasn’t died. Maybe we can pick up that thread.” He gave this messianic vision its proper theological context, adding, “It’s so significant that a Kennedy just so happens to be in a position to do that. It’s one of the synchronicities that speak to, or speak from, a larger organizing intelligence in the world.”
This is, of course, pure gobbledygook, a strange attempt to merge Jungian parapsychology with the Kennedy cult of personality and unabashed nostalgia for the proverbial “simpler and happier time” that has never once existed in all of human history, along with a God concept vague enough to be inoffensive to all but the most dedicated atheist.
Another supporter quoted by the Times took an equally religious and equally vague stance on the matter of the candidate’s messianic qualities, saying of an RFK Jr. presidency, “You could say manifest, or you can say prophesize, but we need to see that this is possible. We all need to hold that view and magnetize it.”
I am not ashamed to say that I have no idea what this strange woman meant by the word “magnetize,” as I have not spent nearly enough time in Berkeley, California, but it seems clear that her quasi-spiritual meanderings are embraced by RFK Jr. himself, who also seems to be of a particularly messianic frame of mind.
The Times quotes him saying in a 2021 speech, “We are in the last battle. This is the apocalypse. We are fighting for the salvation of all humanity.” One doubts the most inarticulate evangelical musing upon the coming rapture could have put it any better. What is certain is that RFK Jr. couldn’t have put it any better.
One can go on endlessly about the power of demagoguery in the internet age, the rise of celebrity to the commanding heights of American politics, the degradation of the public discourse through social media, the perennial popularity of conspiracy theories, and so on, but one thing seems clear about RFK Jr.’s candidacy: It is profoundly, utterly, transcendently stupid. It is a stupid thing done by a stupid man backed by stupid people.
Indeed, as unquestionably evil as he may be, Donald Trump at least articulated some genuine economic grievances and discontents on behalf of his followers. RFK Jr., on the other hand, does not possess even the pretense of substance. His candidacy is idiocracy writ large, as if it existed for the sole purpose of insulting our intelligence.
This is easily enough illustrated: Vaccines don’t cause autism. Fauci is not History’s Greatest Monster. Big Pharma saved millions with its Covid vaccines. The assassinations of JFK and RFK were committed by a deranged communist and a Palestinian extremist, respectively. We are not facing an apocalypse. Humanity cannot be saved, it must be lived with, or at least tolerated as best we can. There is, thankfully, no “last battle” preceding our glorious messianic salvation.
But RFK Jr.’s claims otherwise are not simply wrong; they are also idiotic. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and a willingness to see what is under their nose is capable of grasping at least that, if not a great deal more. What is even more disturbing is that RFK Jr. does not appear to be an Alex Jones or a Donald Trump, who are fully aware of the fact that they are lying for their own mercenary purposes. RFK Jr. really believes it, and apparently so do his followers.
Indeed, if anything is clear about those followers, it is that they are quite as stupid as the object of their messianic hopes. The Times quotes one musing on the refusal of intelligent people to legitimize RFK Jr.’s idiocies by debating him. “When someone is taking such an unpopular position, and then nobody wants to debate them, that says something to me,” the hapless fellow said.
These are not the words of someone engaging in healthy skepticism. They are the words of someone who has consciously chosen to believe stupid things and has thought up a stupid reason for doing so. Scientists do not debate flat-Earthers. Biologists do not debate Creationists. Historians do not debate Holocaust deniers. There is a limit to one’s willingness to wrestle down pigs in the midst of the slop, if only because it gives the pig far too much credit.
The transcendent stupidity of RFK Jr.’s candidacy ought to be enough to put paid to it right off the bat, but it is not, and it is worth asking why.
The reason likely has nothing to do with fake news, internet misinformation, or the corrosive effects of social media. It has to do with one of the inherent and most unfortunate flaws in a democracy: Even idiots get the vote, and there are a lot of idiots out there.
Analysts of democracy since ancient times up to de Tocqueville, Burke, and beyond have noted this unfortunate leveling effect. If all are equal in a society, and their voices are all given equal weight, then the unfortunate side effect is a rush to the bottom, to the lowest common denominator. Those of superior intellect, education, skills, or simple common sense are often reduced to an impotent minority.
Indeed, even to posit that there is such a thing as superior intellect, education, skills, or common sense becomes verboten, seen as anti-democratic in and of itself. Socrates was put to death in part for offending against this democratic ethos, and while we do not slaughter our elite today, America’s more fervent populists sometimes call for hanging or otherwise doing away with them, whether they be Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi—neither of them, it should be noted, transcendent geniuses by any means, but still smart and educated enough to hate.
Abraham Lincoln once asked, “Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow?” He quite rightly answered no. “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher,” he asserted. He was right about that too, but today, the author is not slavery or secession. In all likelihood, it is stupidity that will finish us.
Given that the motto vox populi, vox dei—“the voice of the people is the voice of God”—is the watchword of democracy, it is difficult to see any way out of this. If RFK Jr. and Trump before him are any indication, the people are often quite stupid, and they are making their voices heard. In a democracy, this cannot be ignored. Thus, there is a very real possibility that the idiots may soon wield considerable political power.
Unfortunately, Churchill was likely right: Democracy remains the best of all our bad systems. We are unlikely to do any better. It is not impossible to imagine a kind of “nousocracy,” in which only the most intelligent members of society are allowed to rule, but how such intelligence would be measured and what mechanisms put in place to ensure that we do not end up with a despotism of geniuses are difficult to imagine.
America could continue with its current informal aristocracy, made up of the technocrats, bureaucrats, experts, and culture-makers so hated by today’s populists, but this aristocracy is legally constrained from using coercion to keep the stupid away from the levers of power—and this is probably a good thing. Moreover, all aristocracies inevitably tend toward decadence, and expend their energies on the constant task of maintaining their power long past its sell-by date, something that would endanger the liberties of the stupid and the savant alike.
In all likelihood, America is trapped in this dilemma for good. The smart cannot neutralize the stupid without endangering their own liberties. If they take the vote from the idiots, they deserve it not for themselves, and a tyranny of prodigies is as bad as a tyranny of fools. Suffering the stupid, it seems, is one of the prices we pay for freedom.
This does not mean, however, that we must tolerate the stupid in the name of that freedom. In a sense, those who refuse to debate RFK Jr. and his ilk are both right and wrong. They should not debate him and those like him, but they should confront them. They should express the unabashed, unashamed contempt that is due to all fools, especially self-righteous fools.
It should be said, right to their faces: “You’re an idiot.” Simple questions should be asked, such as, “Practically every doctor in the world thinks vaccines are good. Why should I believe you and not them?” Or “Anthony Fauci has spent a lifetime studying infectious diseases, you’ve read a bunch of garbage on the internet, why should I believe you and not him?” Or perhaps, “You do know that you’ve probably killed people, right?”
The answer, then, is to accept the vox populi and add one’s own vox to it. Engage, confront, insult, deride, berate, demolish, and destroy the idiots. Stupid people do not understand very much, but they do understand invective, and in this case, it is invective that may save American democracy from itself.