The Advent of Idiocracy

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Kamala is dumb. I don’t intend this as an insult but as a cool-headed diagnosis. We could use more refined terminology, such as “intellectually unexceptional,” but we have a perfectly suitable, one-syllable word for her condition: dumb. I don’t mean that she would likely score in the mentally handicapped range on an IQ test, in the lowest decile, be legally considered in need of a guardian ad litem. Rather, relative to formally educated leaders, she is a dim bulb, not the brightest in the vice-presidential chandelier. She says stuff like, “When we talk about the children of the community, they are children of the community.” Really? Or, “Community banks are in the community.” It’s not just that she makes such self-evident declarations; it’s that she does so with the air of someone who believes she has stumbled upon a profound insight. She proclaimed, “We will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery effort.” She said Americans need to move on from the “failed policies” that “we have proven don’t work,” as if she were not the current Vice President. Did she forget? But who can forget her inspiring call for us to work together: “We will work together, and continue to work together, to address these issues . . . and to work together as we continue to work, operating from the new norms, rules, and agreements that we will convene to work together . . . we will work on this together.”

Yeah, Kamala is dumb. Observers have so frequently described her ramblings as “word salad” that it’s trite, although still apt. Ben Shapiro prefers “word coleslaw.” There’s more objective data. She attended a middling university (86 out of 436 USA universities) and a mediocre law school (82 out of 196). She didn’t distinguish herself. She wasn’t a valedictorian nor an editor of a legal journal. She failed the bar exam on her first attempt. Her entry into politics was not due to out-shining her peers but rather her . . . ahem . . . relationship with a married man, Willie Brown, then the Speaker of the California State Assembly and 31 years her senior. (For those in the Kamala IQ decile, that means that Brown, then 60, was thirty-one years older than Kamala, then 29.) Do we think Brown chose her as his paramour for her scintillating conversation?

But let’s give her some credit. Kamala Harris is just smart enough to realize that she’s too dumb to be subject to serious scrutiny, confining her few, brief interviews to sycophants like Stephanie Ruhle. When Ruhle asked her what she would do if a Republican Congress refused to raise taxes on those greedy corporations that suddenly started price gouging (which Kamala first mispronounced as “gauging”) during the Biden-Harris administration, she responded with all the confidence of a four-year-old being asked what she’d do if Santa didn’t come this year: “Well, but we’re going to have to raise corporate taxes.” But Santa Claus IS going to have to come. Then she lapsed into her mental tic of repeating, parrot-like, the term of the day, this time borrowing from her “mentor” Joe Biden: “fair share.” At other times it’s been “return on investment,” “the significance of the passage of time,” “holistic.” It’s Sesame Street-level vocabulary teaching, like her animated explanation to children, “You’re gonna literally see the craters on the moon with your own eyes!” Could they metaphorically see them, and with what else were they supposed to see them than their eyes? Or when she explained that Russia, a big country, invaded Ukraine, a small country, and that’s bad. She can naturally communicate in layman’s or even children’s terms because, well, you know.

This is new in American history. Previously, Democrat candidates portrayed themselves as “egg heads” (like Adlai Stephenson) and technocrats who sacrificed scholarly careers to guide us benighted hicks toward a paradise that never materialized. They smugly ridiculed Reagan as a simpleton actor, Dan Quayle for misspelling “potato,” and George W. Bush’s malapropisms. Democrat presidents were typically highly intelligent and respectably credentialed. Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. Obama graduated from Columbia University and then magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. Even the Democrat wannabes, like John Kerry (Yale University), Al Gore (Harvard), and Michael Dukakis (Harvard Law School), boasted impressive credentials. Democrats put forward candidates who were objectively brainy, even if they often harnessed their big brains to pull dumb causes. Clinton was morally impaired and Obama was handicapped by a twisted ideology but no honest critic could say they weren’t smart.

For Democrats it’s important that their leaders be verifiably well-educated. (Republicans care more for performance.) One of the defining characteristics of American liberalism is their pretensions to be “the best and the brightest.” They are, they think, the intelligentsia. They appeal to people who imagine themselves to be smarter than they truly are. Consequently, they are easily conned by claims that smart people believe men can become women; that if you pay people not to work, they won’t be incentivized not to work; that injecting trillions of dollars into the economy will not inflame inflation; that bureaucrats make better decisions than businesspeople; that legalizing all abortions results in fewer abortions, among other nonsense. The average Democrat voter doesn’t understand it. But he’s sure that that’s what the smart people have concluded. After all, their champion was a Rhodes Scholar or the editor of a prestigious Harvard journal. He’s smart for me, they thought.

Then, enter Joe Biden. Biden was “a poor student” in high school. (Wikipedia’s words, not mine.) Then he attended the University of Delaware in Newark (which at #76 is admittedly slightly better than Kamala’s alma mater) where he was “an unexceptional student.” (Wikipedia again, I’m not making this up.) Then he graduated from Syracuse University College of Law (120th, well behind Kamala’s law school) where he placed 76th in a class of 85, thus destined to be the kind of president who would ignite inflation with irresponsible spending, usher over 11 million illegal aliens into the country, and arm the U.S.’s enemy, the Taliban, with more than $7.1 billion in weapons. Probably much more. He gave us idiocracy.

What was new about Biden was that he was dumb. We’ve had presidents with dumb policies, like Johnson and Carter, but the men themselves weren’t dumb. But with Biden, that changed. He was only elected because of the coattails of Obama, the frenzy of 2020, the hysteria over COVID, mass censorship, and other shenanigans. On his path to the White House, he selected, by his own admission, a DEI hire for VP. A dumb man chose a dumb running mate for a dumb reason. He gradually lost support as his dumbness became increasingly obvious and then the bottom fell out as his senility stripped him of the mask of competence. “We beat Medicare,” indeed. The unforgivable sin on the Left is to appear dumb. He did.

Now we’re faced with the decision of whether to vote for the dumb candidate selected by the dumb man. It is not hard.

John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell substack.

Kamala Harris laughing