Idiot vs Idiot

 

Francisco Goya, Fight With Cudgels, 1820-23

Chris Hedges has just published an essay titled "The Rule of Idiots," which starts with these paragraphs:

The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.

Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life; and a feckless Tsarist court that sat around reading tarot cards and attending séances as Russia was decimated by a war that consumed over two million lives and revolution brewed in the streets.

In “Hitler and the Germans,” the political philosopher Eric Voegelin dismisses the idea that Hitler — gifted in oratory and political opportunism, but poorly educated and vulgar — mesmerized and seduced the German people. The Germans, he writes, supported Hitler and the “grotesque, marginal figures,” surrounding him because he embodied the pathologies of a diseased society, one beset by economic collapse and hopelessness. Voegelin defines stupidity as a “loss of reality.” The loss of reality means a “stupid” person cannot “rightly orient his action in the world, in which he lives.” The demagogue, who is always an idiote, is not a freak or social mutation. The demagogue expresses the society’s zeitgeist, its collective departure from a rational world of verifiable fact. 

True enough, but if we are to follow up on the idea that "dying empires are dominated by idiots" we ought also to take account of the idiocy of what has been offered as alternative to Donald Trump: the pussy hat wearers, the DEI grifters who want to replace merit with identity, the people who profess to not know what a woman is, the universities who have inverted every canon and idolized perversion, the censorious rabble eager to find offence in every public utterance insufficiently submissive to batshit-crazy woke racial and feminist dogma, a harridan so repellent she managed, against all odds, to lose a presidential race against a buffoon and then went on to excuse her defeat by inventing a monstrous lie about Russian interference that has brought two superpowers even closer to open conflict than they were during the Cold War . . . This is the "Resistance" to Donald Trump.

So, yes, in the terminal state of the American empire, idiocy abounds, but Donald Trump owns only half of it and the few of us who have not completely lost our minds must look helplessly on as two equally mindless and destructive factions of the ruling class flail at each other heedless of the disaster about to engulf both of them.