Why I Am Not Surprised

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.