No, Idiocracy is Not a Documentary, but…
... it may be based on a true story.
1. First off, it wasn’t the “poors” who got us here; they don’t hold that kind of power.
A few days after the Republican National Convention, I had the urge to rewatch Idiocracy. I’m probably not the only one. Hulk Hogan, wheezing through his famed t-shirt-ripping act, bore an uncanny resemblance to the character of President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho. Of course, the parallels between real life and the film are inexact. Hulk Hogan is merely a pitchman. He’s not the president… yet. But after rewatching the movie, I see again why the Idiocracy narrative is so compelling. In some ways we’re already living in a real-life idiocracy, albeit one with some important differences from the film. I want to get into some of those differences.
For those unfamiliar, Idiocracy follows a man of average intelligence who is cryogenically frozen and wakes up several hundred years into the future to find he’s the smartest man alive. Dysgenics is the main driver of the movie Idiocracy, but it can’t account for our idiocracy. There simply hasn’t been enough time.
Beyond the issue of time, there’s a deeper problem. Sure, it feels nice to blame the world’s ills on those at the bottom rungs of society, but in this case, theory doesn’t stand up to fact. In 2020, about 66% of the eligible population turned out to vote; that’s on the high-end for U.S. elections. It’s usually about half. More importantly, the voting population is older, richer, whiter and more educated than the non-voting population. Turns out, the people who would supposedly save us from our slide towards idiocracy by outbreeding the poors are the very people steering this great big stupid ship towards oblivion.
Any chance to right the ship’s course and sail it somewhere less stupid has to start with acknowledging who turned our political culture to shit. It wasn’t the poor and the stupid. It was the professionals, the chattering classes, the “top men” and women. The great myth is that Americans don’t recognize class. The truth is that just about everything Americans do is class conscious and our political system has formed around that consciousness.
To put it another way, our contemporary political culture is largely a story of different groups of elites battling for power. Some of those elites favor the Democratic Party and some favor the Republicans. Some of them have been known to decapitate dead whales or stage accidents between bear cubs and bicycles in Central Park, and those types flutter around to wherever their contrarian hearts lead them. The larger point here is that whoever they are, they pay lip service to the concerns of the poor and the working class to justify their own positions within the professional managerial class.
Think about it. Have you ever worked in a large bureaucratic organization? How did accountability work? Chances are shit rolled downhill. Are you American? Guess what. You live in a large bureaucratic organization. You find yourself with shit on your head, chances are it came from above and not below.
As ill-fitting as the Idiocracy narrative is, there remains something uncanny about how much the world of Idiocracy mirrors our present-day political culture. So, what’s up with that?
2. What Idiocracy does get right is the stunted emotional maturity of the moment.
I remember the day I realized Donald Trump had a chance of winning the 2016 presidential election. It was December of 2015 and I was in London on business. While walking on a backstreet near Hatton Garden, I saw one of the signs pictured above.
I hope you see the irony, as the person who posted it likely did not. Donald Trump was the last thing on my mind, until I saw that sign. The moment those words went up, that space became the opposite of what the sign professed it to be. It went from being “Trump-free” to being “full-of-Trump.”
Part of why Idiocracy, the movie, feels so familiar is the way its characters communicate in the most facile ways imaginable, full of utterances that convey no useful information. In the film, Costco has become the “everything app” (Dax Shepard’s character went to law school there); as you enter, greeters tell you they love you. Characters append “brought to you by Carl’s Jr.” to sentences for no apparent reason. And the main plot arc involves a sports drink that has taken the place of water, because “it’s got electrolytes.” The movie’s characters are constantly saying things they don’t understand for reasons they don’t understand. What’s more, the characters often think repeating these slogans makes them look intelligent when in fact it marks them as blisteringly stupid. Perhaps I’m overly cynical, but that’s exactly what I see every time I turn on the news or scroll the timeline.
That our political spaces are characterized by empty rhetoric is hardly a novel insight. What I am suggesting, however, is that the empty rhetoric, the proliferation of meaningless utterances, the deployment of signifiers devoid of significance, are features and not bugs. My belief isn’t conspiratorial. There’s no evil cabal of global elites with a master plan to destroy meaning and replace it with verbiage. Rather, this is the way the ecosystem has evolved, and we’ve all helped to move it in this direction.
Whoever posted the “Trump Free Zone” sign likely believed they were making a clear anti-Trump statement, when in fact, it probably did more to boost Trump’s chances. Trump succeeds because he pisses off the kind of people his base wants to see pissed off. It’s this kind of maladaptation that proliferates. Our political culture is full of acts like this, that don’t convey any useful information, that aren’t made to be persuasive, that don’t do any actual political work at all, acts that merely feel good to the person doing them.
This is why the Idiocracy narrative feels so compelling. Our political class has not become stupid, but they find themselves with incentive to play stupid and have become more than willing to do so.
3. We’ve made our beds and now we must lie in them.
Even after seeing that sign in London, I wasn’t convinced that Trump was going to win in 2016, but it did tell me he was probably going to win the Republican nomination, and with that secured, his odds at the presidency became 50:50. Yes, the polls said differently, but there’s no need to get into a long-winded discussion about the reliability of polling. The larger point is simply this: in a nation of ridiculous narcissists, we shouldn’t be surprised when the most ridiculous narcissist rises to the top.
I’ll go further. Clinton v Trump was in fact the most depressingly American faceoff possible. On one side, an army of eager, earnest strivers donning their pants suits to celebrate the inevitable triumph of the final girl boss and, on the other side, an angry, aggrieved mob powered by big incel energy ready to take back the country they never had in the first place.
The 2024 presidential election is anti-climactic, but that’s not to say it’s unimportant. There are very important issues at stake. Abortion, immigration, the proper size and scope of the administrative state, all issues with which we ought to wrestle and reasons I lament our move towards a politics based on self-actualization rather than sober contemplation of the issues.
As a wise man once put it, we are “on the precipice of enormous crossroads.” I don’t know if Donald Trump is going to win this election. I hope not. Once should have been enough. But even if he doesn’t, much of the damage has already been done. Trump is a symptom more than he is a cause. Until we’re willing to deal with the underlying causes, until we’re willing to do away with the politics of solipsism, we’re likely to get more of the same. And that won’t end well.
Anyway, welcome to the future! As for the outcome of the election, “congratulations!” or “I’m sorry for your loss,” whichever applies.