When I was in seventh grade, my Social Studies teacher decided to hold a mock trial as part of the curriculum. I don’t remember what the academic purpose of the whole thing was, whether the trial was based on some actual, historical event. All of that is lost to me. What I do remember is that I was the prosecuting attorney (a position I was very proud of, as my father was a law school professor), and that the whole trial was a shambles.
Why was it a shambles? Because were in seventh grade, and
seventh graders—especially seventh grade boys—don’t care about much that the
adult world finds important. To make a mock trial work, people have to take
their roles semi-seriously. The witnesses have to read their depositions and
learn their story. They have to be able (and willing) to work with their lawyer
to create a direct examination that runs through the evidence. They have to be
able (and willing) to improvise coherently when cross-examined by the other lawyer.
That’s the only way the storytelling works. And, of course, the jury has to
take its job semi-seriously and care about rendering a fair verdict.
You can already see where this is going. I took my job
seriously, and few others did. I managed to hold my witnesses together
reasonably well, and it was easy (and fun) to cross-examine the opposing witnesses,
who couldn’t keep their stories straight and didn’t much care if they were caught
in a “lie.” I made my case; the other side barely tried. It was open-and-shut.
And then the jury returned a verdict against me.
Unanimously. I couldn’t believe it. So I went up to the kid who had served as
jury foreman and asked him what had happened. “I had all the evidence on my
side!” I cried. “Yeah,” he said, “but you’re a nerd, so fuck you.”
In today’s case of “The United States vs. Political
Seriousness,” I offer this anecdote as Exhibit A.
Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because people thought she was corrupt,
or because of her emails, or because of her pantsuits. She lost because she was
a wonk, a nerd, someone who took the job way too seriously. Donald Trump
was the class clown. He offered no coherent policies, no real rebuttals to
Clinton’s positions. He offered a raspberry and a fart joke. He said, “fuck
you, nerd.” And enough people laughed along with him to let him win.
That’s my theory of the case, and you can see it playing out
all over again. Joe Biden’s approval rating is slipping, and yet he’s
delivering on everything he said he’d do. In a rocky, stumbling, chaotic way,
sure—but that’s democracy for you. We don’t run our country the way the Chinese
Communist Party runs theirs. He said he’d get vaccines out; he got vaccines out.
He said he’d withdraw from Afghanistan; he withdrew from Afghanistan. He
promised an infrastructure bill; he passed it with bipartisan support. He
promised a spending plan; he’s on the verge of passing it. And no one seems to
care.
Pundits are blaming the administration and the Democratic
party for poor messaging, and I’m sure that’s a part of the problem. But I
think the larger problem is that we’re a bunch of seventh-grade boys, and we
find competent administration of government boring and stupid. Bomb-throwers
and rioters and propagandists are cool. Outrageous liars are interesting—and when
they get away with outlandish, incomprehensible lies, we think they’re too cool
for school. If someone tells us that those people are doing damage to our
culture or our politics, we say, “fuck you, nerd.” Seventh-grade boys don’t
think about what will happen tomorrow if they burn down the school today, as
long as they get to laugh at all the nerds trying to carry books and lab equipment
outside to safety.
There’s nothing nerdier or wonkier than thinking about causation
and correlation, assessing the future effects of possible actions today. Cool
kids don’t assess; they act without thinking, and they let the chips fall where
they may. Acting without accountability is cool; rigging things so that
everyone else is left holding the bag, while they walk away scot-free, is
the ultimate act of cool. We celebrate the bomb-throwers, not the people who
have to clean up the mess afterwards. We sneer at the people stupid enough to
care enough to clean up the mess.
We’ve worked hard, as a culture, to erase distinctions
between childhood and adulthood, and this, perhaps, is one of the results. We
do not put away childish thing and we do not look up to people who behave like
adults. Pete Buttigieg will likely not be a viable presidential candidate—not because
he’s gay, amazingly enough, but because he takes his job too seriously. If Joe
Rogan chose to run for something, though…I don’t know if he’d win anything, but
he’d certainly be a contender. If you’re on TV and you’re a loudmouth who loves
to score cheap rhetorical points against “guests,” you have a shot. If you’re
on TV in any capacity, even if you’re a shady doctor selling crap supplements
to the gullible, you have a shot. In fact, the more obvious it is that your
supplements are crap, the higher esteem you’ll be held in. We will
admire you for fooling the sheep (who are always “them,” never “us”), just as many
of us admired Trump.
We don’t care if our problems are solved. We don’t care if
our roads have holes. We don’t care if the poor go hungry. All we want to do is
point at the grownups and the nerds, like Nelson on “The Simpsons,” and laugh.
