This was published 7 years ago
Welcome to our new reality: the rising politics of stupid
By John Birmingham
We live in the Age of Neo-Stupidity. The return of the flat-earthers. The rise of the anti-vaxxers. The gathering hordes of creationists, conspiracy nuts and the deniers of science. It is a flanking attack on reason from left and right. Although Donald Trump's tilt at the US presidency has shone a light upon the ugly, batshit craziness of the so-called alt-right, there's plenty of crazy to go around on the far left too. In fact, on some issues they meet in the middle of their own howling intellectual wasteland.
Last week's storm in South Australia, the one that knocked out the entire grid, brought the crazy in claims by some very mainstream political figures that it was all the fault of renewable energy. It was one step from there to blaming gay Muslims and aliens for the blackout.
Thompson's book is focused less on Donald Trump himself than on the conditions that sustain him - and on what, if anything, can be done to reverse them.Credit: John Locher
How did we get here? Giving in to stupid people got us here, that's how. And saying no to stupid people is the only thing that will deliver us from this place.
As much fun as it is waking up every morning to check on overnight Trumpocalypse developments, there is a chance this man could soon have at his personal command the military resources and vast security apparatus of the world's only hyper-power. There will still be moments when that is darkly amusing, but mostly it'll just be terrifying, waiting for him to take offence at some perceived slight and fire off a couple of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles in the place of some really unhinged tweets.
But in a sense, Donald Trump is not to blame for Donald Trump. He is just doing what he has always done, acting out his deepest, most narcissistic fantasies. Should he be elected, don't wait for reality to constrain him. If deporting 10 million Latinos proves to be as difficult as building the wall he promises will keep them out, he's quite capable of ordering that the millions of would-be deportees be set to work on the massive project as prisoners, prior to their expulsion.
At least 30 per cent of the electorate would cheer him on.
Many people here would too.
There has always been a lot of energy at the dark insane fringes of politics, but until recently that energy was largely confined there. A number of things have brought the madness closer to the heart of our polity; the long, destructive transfer of working and middle class wealth into the hands of the super rich; radically democratising the means of communication via the internet; and the increasing desperation of mainstream parties to capture the votes of those citizens they've been selling out for decades. If you can't offer people reasoned policy, offer them their most dangerous fantasies made real.
It would be nice if politicians in the mainstream parties didn't pander to this psychosis, but since some of them have already joined the lemming stampede over the cliff we can probably look forward to a lot more reasonable sounding arguments in favour of total insanity.