The Age of Incompetence
By: Henry Wismayer
Tags: Society, Brexit, World, Trump, Politics

He wakes from another fevered dream, a puddle of sweat mixing with the permanent stain of bronzer on the silk bedsheet. This one was a corker: a humiliating walk naked across the White House lawn, his ignominy (Melania calls it his “Little Trumpet”) exposed to a chafing wind.

Ahead, clamoring at the railings, mobs of millennials and Communists rain spit and rotten fruit down on him from the curbside. Hillary Clinton walks behind him, lashing his flabby back with a sheaf of emails, crying, “Shame!” — such a cursed woman — “Shame! Shame!”

Donald Trump shudders. Walks to the bathroom, twists the diamante-studded faucets Melania recently had installed in the gaudy en suite. He splashes a palm full of water onto his face and looks in the mirror, purses his lips into a self-regarding pout, extends his neck to uncrease the double chin. Pats the hair implants into their iconic frozen wave…puffs out his chest, sucks in the gut…then exhales, a long mournful sigh.

And says to himself: “What the fuck am I doing?”

No one has the foggiest idea what they’re doing.

This is my new overarching theory to explain Trump, the universe, and everything. Not you, not me. Neither that dribbling moron over there, nor that tenured professor over there; no one really has a clue.

One of the weirdest things about engaging with modern political discourse in the age of social media and 24-hour news is how little seems certain anymore. The more society polarizes, the hazier it all becomes, a snowball of sophistry and confusion growing in size every time Seb Gorka barks “fake news.”

We are 7.4 billion points of view, each one undermined by its owner’s hypocrisy, hubris, and bias. How have we reached a stage where everyone’s opinion is equally open to question?

In pursuit of some kind of answer, let’s start by visiting my own intemperate shores: Great Britain. During the debates that preceded last year’s Brexit vote, then–Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a prominent advocate for Britain leaving the European Union, gave a television interview in which he uttered a line that reverberated around the country.

Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images

The exchange went like this:

Faisal Islam (interviewer): “The leaders of the U.S., India, China, Australia, every single one of our allies, the Bank of England, the IFS, the IMF, the CBI, five former NATO secretary generals, the chief executive of the NHS, and most of the leaders of the trade unions in Britain all say that you, Boris and Nigel, are wrong. Why should the public trust you over them?”

Michael Gove (forthright, jowly, condescending, I hate him): “I’m not asking the public to trust me. I’m asking the public to trust themselves…I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.”

And lo, there it was: the origin story of the Brexit.

The people of Britain were done with experts, the people who studied stuff and knew about shit. For those who voted Remain, Gove’s words encapsulated the way democracy was being subverted by idiocracy — an admission of the unreasoned, economically illiterate emotion characterizing the Leave campaign.

On the surface, the verdict seems damning; it doesn’t require an extensive trawl through the archives to see that undercurrents of anti-intellectualism have attended some of modern history’s most aberrant social phenomena: Mao, Stalin, Nazis, WWE.

But then what, precisely, had our propensity to defer to the experts achieved? The economy was creaking. Wealth inequality was rocketing. Two centuries of fossil-fuel dependence had choked the skies. For the first time in generations, children were set to have worse prospects than their parents. Ordinary people, increasingly, were spending great swathes of their brief lifetimes staring at little oblongs of liquid crystal. Our Oxbridge-educated politicians were short-termist charlatans. Our democracy had turned into a faltering production line pumping out the same old people advocating the same increasingly discredited free-market principles.

The experts used big words like “quantitative easing” and “stakeholder engagement.” But their supposed wisdom hadn’t resulted in a nation of contentment and common purpose. Far from it, as the referendum laid bare.

People, generally, don’t indulge in this kind of cynicism for fun. To some extent, a society’s inherent stability stems from its population’s often delusional willingness to collude in the idea that things are under control. In his recent film HyperNormalisation, the documentarian Adam Curtis described this impulse in relation to the twilight years of the former Soviet Union, where people cleaved to their leaders’ illusory reassurances even as the country crumbled.

“The Soviet Union became a society where everyone knew that what their leaders said was not real because they could see with their own eyes that the economy was falling apart. But everybody had to play along and pretend that it WAS real because no one could imagine any alternative…You were so much a part of the system that it was impossible to see beyond it.”

Today we are starting to witness what happens when such illusions shatter.

Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

One of the most remarkable things about modern life is the ambivalence many of us now feel toward public figures. In an age of all-pervasive media scrutiny, it’s getting harder to differentiate between good guys and bad. Yesterday’s heroes seem forever to be destined to become tomorrow’s villains, as former idols become tainted by mortal error. Multi-Oscar-winning film producers turn out to be serial sexual predators; iconic champion golfers mutate into puffy-eyed philanderers; former Nobel Peace Prize winners look at their feet as minorities fall victim to ethnic cleansing; queens, venerated for decades of selfless public service, become serial tax avoiders. We are wont to ask whether Gandhi would have stuck it out under today’s merciless public gaze, lest some rumor of historical impropriety sent him scuttling off to a Himalayan ashram in disgrace.

The tenet that underwrites representative democracy — that governance is best left to the grown-ups — looks forfeit when the grown-ups start to appear so irredeemably fallible. In this respect, the anti-elitism that was an animating force for Brexit, the Trump election, and the more general upsurge in political extremism that attended 2016 marks an understandable, if dangerous, response to the death of righteousness and all the moral authority that goes with it. Competence has begun to look like a performance art.

This precipitous collapse in trust in our political class and the vital institutions it oversees has arisen at an infelicitous time. Coupled with a global financial crisis that no one predicted, and amid the disorienting clamor of social media, it has surfaced an uncomfortable epiphany: the gathering realization that those who purport to be in control are, in fact, just powerless bystanders like the rest of us, beholden to their own personal knot of ignorance and bias.

We have come to know, in some visceral way, that the complexity of the modern world is so intractable that everyone — no matter their status in society — is more or less playing at being sober adults, when in reality we all exist in a state of permanent bewilderment. Like the inner child in the poet Ted Hughes’ famous letter to his son, each one of us has been exposed as “the wretchedly isolated undeveloped little being” we truly are.

“And that little creature is sitting there, behind the armour, peering through the slits. And in its own self, it is still unprotected, incapable, inexperienced.”

When a butterfly flaps its wings…who the fuck really knows?

The story of 2016 was in many ways the story of this awakening. As the fundamental social compact of the capitalist system — that if you work hard, you can have a home, family, a holiday each year and a pension in old age — starts to crumble, people everywhere have started wrestling with the idea that the promises that shaped their expectations were never guaranteed.

For some, the realization has yielded a sense of hopelessness and dread (and, given the scale of the challenges we face, one could argue that this response is the most rational one). For others, however, it has provoked an urge to suppress this realization, come what may.

Much of the recent political destabilization in the West can be ascribed to this reflexive denial — the replacement of one illusion with another. It is hard, after all, to accept that the world’s problems might be insoluble; much easier to believe that the challenges can be surmounted just as soon as we tear down the status quo.

In vying to wrestle some sense from our confounding times, people have retreated into whatever narrative most supports their preexisting prejudices.

Suddenly, global chaos no longer needs to be ascribed to a billion uncontrollable variables. Instead, it’s the Rothschilds. It’s the liberal elite. It’s the swamp. It’s the cucks. It’s Russia.

It’s the bots, the corpocracy, the deep state.

It’s a malignant nexus of the Kochs, Tea Party activists, and Fox News, with their 30-year project to infantilize the lumpen proles for their own avaricious ends. (Actually, I have some sympathy for this last one. But hey, I never claimed to be above this stuff myself.)

And, of course, it makes many of us beholden to the simple populist figure inured to introspection, who boils the multifaceted world down to simple binaries of good versus bad, us versus them. Whatever your political persuasion, most people would probably agree that there is an undefinable press about the modern world, an ineluctable crush of news, opinions, and information.

Donald Trump, the simplest man of all, is a cipher for all those millions of people straining to hit pause, or rewind, or any button that might repudiate this cacophonous, disorienting background noise. It is an atavistic urge so powerful that it even overrides all the obvious danger signs we see in Trump’s moral turpitude and our historical awareness of where divisive tribal politics can lead.

Because in a world where nothing is certain, we are all fools. And the people who think otherwise are the biggest fools of all.