When You Can Fool Enough of the People All of the Time

Wednesday, a writer I usually enjoy, Jeff Tiedrich spontaneously labeled what remains of the United States as"Dumbfuckistan" and provided a new continental map; much to the outrage of many of his readers who could claim their state barely voted for Kamala Harris although many-or-most-most of the congressional elections went for the stupid candidates. Tiedrich’s new national identify label came from a 2016 book titled, Welcome to Dumbfuckistan: The Dumbed-Down, Disinformed, Dysfunctional, Disunited States of America. And that is definitely who we are today and, most likely who we will be for decades to come.

Sadly, Jeff’s map is more accurate than the AP’s presidential results indicate because in the other state results from California to Colorado and New Mexico to Minnesota the congressional results masked the inner stupidity of the rural and suburban areas (i.e., Minnesota’s Brad Finstad, Tom Emmer, Michelle Fishbach, and Pete Stauber, Colorado’s Jeff Hurd, Lauren Bobert, and Jeff Crank, and Virginia’s Rob Wittman, Jen Kiggan, John McGuire, Ben Cline, and Morgan Griffith, all 2016 election deniers and MAGA Republicans). The re-elected incumbents were some of the most incompetent and laziest of the most incompetent and lazy congress in our pitiful national history. (If you do a search on “laziest congress in history” you’ll get a collection of MAGA editorials titled “Is this the least productive congress ever? Yes, but it’s not just because they’re lazy” you’ll get three Google pages of articles listing several lame excuses that would get any normal person fired for incompetence.)

I've seen this coming since the 1960s. A country stupid enough to elect Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, G. W. Bush, and Trump, twice each, it's pretty damn dumb. But Trump is somewhat worse than all of them and he doesn't make any pretense at being decent, competent, or in any way interested in preserving that infamous "American way of life." And more than half of the voters loved all of that and fell for it like starved fish in a stock tank. And this is after the few reputable people from the first Trump administration had the courage to warn their own voters that Trump is a fascist, is incompetent, and a generally vile human being, Trump’s 34 felony convictions, and the fact that when presented with Trump and Harris’ polices, the before the election, “voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them.”  “Stupid is as stupid does.” As Heather Cox-Richardson pointed out, “An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: ‘We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.’” In other words, a buttload of stupid, lazy people.

Abraham Lincoln may or may not have said, "You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." What he left out is that you only have to fool enough of the people all of the time to do whatever damage you have in mind. The necessary ingredient for that magic formula to be true is stupidity. I am not using the word “stupid” carelessly. For a lot of years, my definition of that word has been the one detailed by Professor Carlo Cipolla in an essay titled “The Basic Laws of Stupidity”: A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.” That definition perfectly describes the tribe of culters known as “MAGA Republicans.”

And the 2024 national election was a point where stupid people in the former United States of America hit critical mass of stupid people. If that XY graph is too complicated for you, here is a simplified, cartoon explanation that might meet your intellectual requirements. The stupid category is on the lower left quadrant where an angry nitwit intentionally crashes into a ladder where a worker is laying bricks, causing a brick to fall on the stupid fucker’s rage-fueled, but otherwise non-functional head. If that is too complicated for you, you are beyond help. And if you voted for Trump and the MAGA crowd, you are definitely stupid. Most of the actual MAGA politicians, with a few exceptions, are in the lower right quadrant: pirates: where they are somewhat-to-very-intelligent, but intend to do harm to the rest of us. That group rarely does much damage to the “harmless” crowd because they are not infected with entitlement and greed and are always opposed by the “intelligent” minority. But in fascist environment, the intelligent opposition is the first to go against the wall and that has been true since the first largely-stupid  tribe selected a pirate leader throughout history.

And, now, here we are, Dumbfuckistan led by a pack of MAGA pirates diving stupidly into fascism with empty heads held high and happily dismantling 250 years of bursts of random steps forward and lots of stupid steps backward. We have reached the critical mass of more than enough people who can be fooled all of the time, a corporate controlled national media more effective at delivering misinformation and propaganda than anything Moscow or Beijing ever dreamed of producing (because the citizens of Dumbfuckistan willingly pay for their misinformation), and all the elected branches of the federal government controlled by the tools (and fools) of fascism. I don’t see any way out of this mess without violence, luck, and outside assistance and none of that is visible anywhere on the horizon. So, as Jeff so accurately wrote, “Welcome to the United States of Dumbfuckistan.”