From Democracy to Kakistocracy

 

By David K. Shipler 

Kakistocracy, n: government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state 

            When President Richard Nixon nominated Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court in 1970, his lack of intellectual heft was defended by Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, who famously declared: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos.”

            The Senate rejected Carswell, with 13 Republicans joining Democrats in voting no.

            Ah, for the good old days. This time around, it is not just mediocrity that is ascending to power but wild incompetence seasoned with wackiness. From Donald Trump on down, the federal government is about to be converted into a cesspool of financial and moral corruption, and into a juggernaut of fact-free autocratic decrees, political arrests, and military roundups. At least that’s Trump’s goal, which his key nominees are poised to pursue.

If Hruska were still with us, he would have to update his argument by noting that the country’s sexual assailants also deserve “a little representation.” Since most voters just elected a court-proven sexual assailant president, he would surely find sympathy in the supine Senate. And remember, Republicans in years past confirmed Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court despite credible accusations, respectively, of sexual harassment and assault. Today, Trump seems partial to men who do that kind of thing, since the accused (but not proven) assailants he’s picked for his Cabinet include Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services.  

Their slimy behavior with women is the finishing coat on layers of obnoxious absurdities that threaten the country’s well-being. Under the guise of federal reform and downsizing, they and their yet-to-be chosen lieutenants in various agencies are likely to damage Americans’ health, undermine national security, normalize suspicions of democracy, deepen poverty, stifle news coverage, and chill dissent. Their designs would further fuel anti-government antagonism by underming the best things government does, making it hostile to people’s needs and unworthy of the people’s regard.

 Institutions, government or private, need periodic reform, fresh eyes to spot deficiencies, and sometimes tough measures to improve their functions. There are many ways to tame a bureaucracy, to trim waste and hone it for efficiency, and even to reorient its priorities. Some in business who take over failing companies wield a ruthless ax, shedding workers as if they were detritus gumming up the works. Some dispose deftly of unprofitable entities. Some use a scalpel on existing structures and make adjustments. But the goal in most such projects is to save the company, not to destroy it.

In “Trump World,” the current euphemism for Dante’s third circle of hell, a very different objective has taken shape. It contains a severe contradiction that might be summed up this way: destroy parts of the government doing things you don’t like and expand its reach into things you like, particularly punishing the poor and prosecuting your critics.

There is little about the Trumpists’ agenda that can be called “conservative” in its traditional meaning, other than a push to deregulate the private sector and to slash benefits for Americans struggling low in the socio-economic hierarchy. That’s in keeping with conservative Republican values: Enrich yourselves and impoverish the vulnerable.

Otherwise, the Trump agenda envisions government intrusion into in areas once thought immune from the long arm of the state: scaring broadcasters and online companies into denying you information, sending the military into your workplaces and neighborhoods to check your citizenship and immigration status, requiring doctors to ask women their reasons for seeking abortions, monitoring courses taught by your local schools with the threat of defunding, and so on. His appointees are lined up to speed draconian changes in America.

Can it happen? The saving grace of Trump’s first term was his ignorance and lack of curiosity about the mechanisms of governing. He alienated the three most important institutions that any wannabe autocrat would require: the police apparatus in the form of the FBI, the intelligence-gathering establishment, and the military. Trump has learned, though, and he is recruiting collaborators—some of the vilest people in America—to align these powers to support his authoritarian aspirations.

With a clever sleight of hand, Trump projects his own nefarious defects onto his opponents—e.g., the Democrats threaten democracy, the Democrats weaponize the Justice Department. His propaganda deflected many voters’ gaze. When he says he wants to turn the Justice Department against his political enemies and the press, and nominates Gaetz to do it, he’s finally telling the truth. It’s wise to believe what he says.

Gaetz has such a record of nutty confrontation that some of his Republican colleagues in the House are delighted that he resigned to curtail his ethics investigation. So there’s little doubt that he, along with a Trumpist FBI director, would aim the immense powers of federal investigators and prosecutors squarely at Trump’s Democratic critics, including California Senator Adam Schiff. News reporters are likely to be targeted if they cover Trump negatively. Even if four Republicans are sensible enough to reject Gaetz, which seems possible, Trump can be counted on to replace him with a nominee tuned to his revenge portfolio, even if less flamboyantly.

Hegseth also poses acute dangers. He could be a gateway into enhancing the white supremacist presence in the armed forces. His tattoo resembling one used by extreme right-wing militia got him taken off the national guard detail guarding the Capitol on January 6, and his inclination toward Christian nationalism has a whiff of ethnocentrist religiosity. White nationalism is already present in the ranks to an extent, but having a Defense Secretary tolerant of extreme racism, and pledging to purge senior officers, sets the stage for a dramatic remaking of a military that has been staunchly apolitical. And using active duty forces to impose internal order by rounding up undocumented immigrants or putting down demonstrations would cross a line that would not be easily reestablished.   

Kennedy, with his crackpot conspiracy theories about various health issues, would damage medical research for a generation, setting the United States back behind most of the industrial world. “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people,” he said in July 2023. “The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” This is the man Trump wants running federal health programs. Yet Kennedy strikes a chord with the public in channeling their suspicion of authority and expertise, and in railing against preservatives in food, to take just one example.

That is a tactic often used by people who peddle misinformation, according to Dr. Leana Wen, who writes a column for The Washington Post. “It’s not that all they say are lies. If that’s the case, no one’s going to listen to them. But instead, you can listen to someone like this, you can nod your head and say, yes, that’s right, that’s right, that’s right, and then you end up going along with the other things that are then said that are actually not right.”

Kennedy and most other nominees look attractive to the rank and file voters who hate the federal government and think it needs to be broken. Trump has traded cleverly on this antipathy and sense of alienation and powerlessness, and his naming of non-experts appeals to nihilist impulses in the broad electorate.

Ironically, though, appointing people outside their areas of expertise might impede Trump’s ability to refashion the federal bureaucracy. Because “experts” are part of the “elite” that have become the “enemy” in the faux internal war exploited by Trump, he is not installing anybody who knows much about the agencies he wants them to run. How effective their demolition will be is a question. Nevertheless, their less visible incoming deputy secretaries, assistant secretaries, and department heads, who might be equally bizarre, might know better how to get the job done. The press—even the remaining free and fair press—will not have sufficient resources to cover those agencies at the grassroots level where they’ll need to be monitored.

The term kakistocracy should now enter our everyday language. It comes from two Greek words meaning “worst” and “rule,” that is, a society ruled by its worst people. Trump is obviously one of the worst, and many of those he is elevating to positions of authority are among the worst of America. How many of us, in our own lives, have ever met anyone like Trump or the others? Certainly very few. It’s a good bet that very few of his own voters have, either.

So it's time to ask why the worst people in this society are rising to govern us, why voters are allowing the United States of America to become a kakistocracy.

The Democratic Party's New Playbook

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The Shipler Report has obtained an early draft of the National Democratic Committee’s manual for the next presidential candidate. It is the result of the post-election self-flagellation that only Democrats can perform with such alacrity. Here it is: 

                “Dear Candidate (insert name),

                Donald J. Trump has become a model of how to win elections in the new America. Following his successful campaign in 2024, we strongly recommend adopting his top ten techniques, as follows: 

1.      Begin to lie as soon as your lips start moving.

2.      Use only superlatives, as in, “We will have the best hurricanes ever,” and, “We have the worst open sewers in history. Nobody has ever seen anything like it.”

3.      Read Mein Kampf – great tips

4.      Terrify the citizenry and badmouth the country as swarming with swarthy, pet-eating ex-convicts and insane, blood-poisoning invaders.

5.      Use these four words often, no matter what the problem, imagined or real: “I will fix it.”

6.      Ramble for hours incoherently in front of large audiences by “weaving” unrelated digressions into a tangled web that makes you seem cognitively impaired.

7.      Sell Bibles that include an extra New Testament book with your name, and a preface reading, “The Gospel According to _________.” Price it exorbitantly so people know it’s valuable.

8.      Sell bright blue MAGA hats, but don’t tell anyone that the initials stand for “Make America Gullible Again.”

9.      Pretend to perform a sex act with a microphone.

10.  Lose millions in lawsuits for sexual assault, and keep bragging about grabbing women’s pussies. Most men love that, and millions of women do, too.”

This is satire. It’s all made up (except for what isn't), a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

Uneducating America

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Imagine a democratic country where voters ended a political campaign knowing more about the difficult issues than they did at the beginning. Imagine the learning experience of hearing presidential candidates seriously discussing how to curb the wars in Europe and the Middle East, compete sensibly with China, retard climate change, address the coming revolution of AI, open economic opportunity for the impoverished, reduce racial discrimination, and gain control over immigration. Now flip that upside down and you have the world’s supposed model of democracy, the United States of America.

                On the tasks before us, we understand less and less. If we once believed we lived in a free-market economy with prices set mainly by supply and demand, the campaign has taught us to think that a president has all the power and so should get all the blame—or credit—for our struggles or our prosperity, whichever happens to occur during an administration.

                If we ever understood the limits of US control over global conflicts, we are now convinced that an omnipotent president could stop Russia vs. Ukraine and Israel vs. Hamas and Hezbollah.

                If we ever took the trouble to grasp the complex forces of desperation and hope that drive immigrants from their violent homelands to ours, we can no longer be bothered with anything but simplistic measures and instant cures.

                Elections seem to dumb us down. Its practitioners filter out the nuance, contradictions, and history essential to forming smart policy. We retreat into our caves of certainty and disparage the “undecideds.”

The problem is not brand new, just worse with Donald Trump, whose fabricated unreality flows effortlessly out to a gullible electorate. It’s worse now with social media and biased journalism that flatten the intricate contours of the country’s challenges. It’s worse with Russia attacking democracy itself by aiming fake posts and videos at a pluralistic system that Moscow has long feared, from the communist era into the present.  

                You can get to some issues if you get your news from responsible sources—The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, PBS NewsHour, for example. Good reporting has been done on   important challenges facing the country. But the campaigns themselves have been negligent. If you look for detailed policy papers on the candidates’ websites, you’ll find that Trump’s are mostly propaganda and Kamala Harris’s mostly platitudes.

Instead, campaigns bombard us with symbols and slogans, smears and slanders designed to trigger more emotion than thought. Trump advocates huge tariffs on imports, which he claims China and other foreign countries will pay, which they will not. Harris counters that Trump’s tariffs are a “sales tax,” which they are not. Neither tries to educate the public about how tariffs work: taxes charged to the importer, who will probably, but not definitely, pass at least some on to the consumer. Or, foreign manufacturers could reduce prices in response. Neither candidate makes an effort to discuss the pros and cons of tariffs as a tool to promote domestic business alongside their risk of fueling inflation. Unless you take the trouble to read a BBC or Wall Street Journal analysis, you are left misinformed by both sides.

Even the BBC can get it wrong, as in a fact-checking article that said, “The Biden administration has added 729,000 manufacturing jobs.” As for Trump, “He added 419,000 manufacturing jobs during his first three years in office.” Sorry, folks, the jobs were added by the manufacturers, not the presidents.  

Yes, government influences the economy through spending and taxes legislated by Congress and interest rates set by the Federal Reserve. But personifying in the presidency vast powers over barely controllable developments, domestic or foreign, distorts discussion and evades the hard tasks of problem-solving.

Therefore, as election analysts have observed, many of us vote more with our guts than our heads. We are wooed or repelled by a candidate’s images, and the image of strength, candor, and decisiveness holds sway over the studious, the reflective, and the instinctive regard for the multiple sides of a question. That blanks out the chance to be educated about policy during an election.

                Good leadership contains a paradox. Presidents need to be both strong and yet studious, decisive and yet open to various viewpoints. They are also entitled to change their minds as, one hopes, they mature in their thinking. In the electoral process, however, ironclad consistency is celebrated as principled while evolution is denounced as hypocrisy. Both can be true, but not always. No considered policy discussion is possible when no space is given a candidate for a change of mind, even for purely political expediency,

Harris, for example, has not been able to delve into the virtues or pitfalls of fracking, because she once opposed it and now accepts it, the arguments on each side be damned. It’s a worthwhile discussion, but we don’t hear it from her or, it goes without saying, from Trump.

Trump, instead, projects an aura of power by being dogmatically closed-minded, insulting, and authoritarian, and therefore worshipped from the gut by millions who are drawn to their sense that the country needs a strongman, with all the accompanying dangers to democracy.            

                A remarkable feature of this campaign has been its lack of serious examination of the peril the world faces of widespread warfare and of ways to avoid it. Trump has warned of an imminent World War Three, and in this case it might not be hyperbole. But he doesn’t lead an intelligent conversation on parrying China’s expansionist strategy, and he merely brushes away Ukraine as something that he’ll magically solve between his election and inauguration.

On the Middle East, Harris tries not to antagonize pro-Israel voters while giving little nods of recognition to the suffering of Palestinians, not enough to erase many Arab-Americans’ distress at the Biden administration’s support for the Jewish state. Trying that balancing act is politically protective, but it wipes out any chance of serious discussion of the confounding issues in that war and America’s longterm role in addressing the conflict.

            In sum, neither Trump nor Harris has offered creative thinking for managing and defusing this most dangerous period since the end of World War Two. But if they had, would their ideas have penetrated the miasma of puffery and propaganda intrinsic to American political campaigns? Would they have been heard through the noise and carefully considered by voters as they made their choices in this most consequential election? Don’t bet on it.