Stupidity the New Political Power

For centuries, we have built societies on the assumption that people can govern themselves. Our institutions are premised on individual responsibility, private property, free expression, voluntary association, markets, constitutional limits, and the assumption that adults can generally be trusted to govern themselves.

Yet much of today’s politics appears to be moving in the opposite direction.

Competence increasingly seems negotiable, even disqualifying. Expertise is often treated with suspicion. Political arguments and complex problems are compressed into slogans. Identity matters more than accomplishment, authenticity more than knowledge, and how a politician makes people feel more than a politician’s ability.

Why? And more importantly, what happens to our democracy when understanding a political argument matters less than producing the politically correct reaction?

That is a different question from whether conservatives or liberals are right. It is a question about self-government itself. The old populist argument was simple: the elites have failed you, so: “Power to the people.”

The emerging version may be something stranger: you don’t need knowledge; you only need to blame someone or something.

That’s a very different kind of populism.

Self-governance is hard work. It requires citizens to absorb facts, recognize tradeoffs, distinguish evidence from assertion, remember history, tolerate disagreement, and occasionally accept outcomes we don’t like.

None of which is particularly riveting, but anger, outrage, fear, and identity are.

And the modern infosphere delivers them exceptionally well.

A politician no longer needs to explain how a complicated policy will work. A social-media influencer doesn’t need expertise in the subject he is discussing. A political movement doesn’t necessarily need to persuade anyone through argument. Identify an enemy, construct a grievance, provide a slogan, and you have an audience to control emotionally.

Citizens become consumers of political content. And content is its own reward for holding attention, not for its veracity.

This may explain something else that should trouble us: the increasing importance of political performance. We know people respond to charisma and physical attractiveness. We know presentation affects perception. We know voters rely on selective information sources rather than examining issues neutrally.

That’s not new. But technology has rewritten the rules. A candidate can become a celebrity before proving they can govern, gaining millions of followers without demonstrating expertise beyond attracting followers. A compelling personality can overwhelm a simple question without addressing or even understanding the problem.

At some point, this stops being merely a question of political style.

 

What if political systems have evolved to reward incompetence?

Not because voters consciously want incompetent leaders. Rather, evaluating competence requires effort, information, and judgment. A politician who answers difficult questions honestly will inevitably disappoint some people. A politician who avoids them can promise almost anything.

That creates a peculiar political incentive:

The less citizens demand intellectually, the easier it is to mislead them.

That’s why this new populism is destabilizing. Traditional populism claimed elites were denying ordinary people their rightful political power. The emerging version turns that proposition on its head. It gives people the sensation of enormous political power while quietly diminishing the power they actually possess.

Citizens get to vote, post, protest, rage, boycott, and demand. But increasingly, political appeals are reduced to choosing your tribe:

Left or right, Us or them, Victim or oppressor. Choose your tribe and never be troubled with thinking again.

Are we witnessing an evolved populism?

Traditional populism mobilized ordinary people against established power. What we’re seeing now increasingly mobilizes people through identity, grievance, emotional attachment, and simplistic narratives rather than arguments about how society actually functions.

That’s a distinction with a difference.

Are contemporary political movements organic expressions of what millions of people independently believe? Or are those beliefs being shaped—sometimes deliberately, sometimes accidentally—by social-media algorithms, political organizations, universities, corporations, bureaucracies, advocacy groups, entertainment, foreign influence operations, and an opinion industry devoted to delivering specific outcomes?

No secret room is needed to coordinate the entire process. Systems don’t require conspirators to produce coordinated effects. Embedded incentives will do the job on their own.

If outrage attracts attention, outrage will be amplified. If grievance mobilizes voters, grievances are cultivated. If identity produces loyalty, identity becomes the objective. If fear generates clicks, fear will be supplied.

And if citizens consume politics this way, politics, having no scruples, accelerates the process. The result is a feedback loop: the public becomes more emotional because politics becomes more emotional, and politics becomes more emotional because emotional appeals work.

That brings us to a larger question about where Western societies are headed.

For centuries, the West developed underlying assumptions about the individual. Individuals possessed rights, property could be privately owned, and government had limits. Markets could operate without central direction, and people were responsible for their choices.

No system is ever perfect, but it still produced an extraordinary civilization. Today, many of those assumptions are being challenged. That’s okay. Every generation should challenge inherited ideas.

But there is a question almost nobody asks loudly enough:

 

What replaces them?

If individual responsibility declines, what then replaces it? If open markets are rejected, who allocates? If private property becomes less secure, who decides what belongs to whom? If institutional authority is weakened, what replaces it? If competence becomes subordinate to identity, how do complex societies keep functioning? And if citizens lose the habit of independent judgment, who’s left to govern?

Perhaps our greatest vulnerability is also its greatest strength. Free people are difficult to control. But free people can also be persuaded too easily to surrender their freedoms if you convince them that those freedoms are responsible for their problems.

Individualism frequently slides into selfishness, while freedom too often decays into license. Skeptics turn to nihilism, as populism becomes tribal. Democracy itself can destroy itself by weakening the conditions that make democracy viable.

 

Conclusion:-

Collapse is not inevitable, even as we should see the warning signs.

It likely won’t be tanks in the streets or governments falling overnight. Failure will arrive in something much more mundane: institutional competence matters less; political loyalty matters more than truth; citizens become increasingly unable to agree on basic facts; disagreements become moral emergencies; government assumes responsibilities once reserved to individuals; and political leaders are rewarded for promises, not results.

The most troubling sign may be simpler still:

People become increasingly certain of what they believe while becoming increasingly incapable of explaining why they believe it.

That’s how a civilization becomes stupid, not by losing intelligence, but by losing the habit of using it. And that may be the most consequential issue for our civilization.

Not whether the left or right is winning. Not even whether populism is winning.

 

What if the real winner is a political system that no longer requires citizens to think for themselves?

If that is happening, we should probably figure it out before we discover the answer the hard way.

God Bless America.

Allan J. Feifer—Patriot

Author, Businessman, Thinker, and Strategist. Read more about Allan, his background, and his ideas to create a better tomorrow at www.1plus1equals2.com. Read additional great writers here.