Political Stupidity: A Bipartisan Confederacy of Dunces

On political stupidity — the one truly bipartisan institution the republic has ever managed to build.

Let us be scrupulously fair, because the subject demands it: stupidity in high office is not the property of any party. It is the republic's only genuinely bipartisan achievement, drawn impartially from every faction, every chamber, every wing — a bottomless and politically balanced reservoir of confident men who have been elected to govern things they have declined to understand. What follows is a taxonomy of the species as it appears in its natural habitat, the committee hearing, where the governed may watch the governing demonstrate, on the permanent record and under oath, that they did not read the briefing. The blade aims at the arrogance of power without comprehension — left, right, and center, in exactly equal measure.

The Regulator of the Unknown

He proposes to legislate a technology he cannot define. He has been briefed; he retained nothing; and his questions to the witness reveal, sentence by sentence, that he believes the thing he intends to govern is a physical object one might hold, or a single building, or a person who could be summoned and told to behave.

The verdict: He will write the rules for a machine he could not switch on, and the machine, and everyone who understands it, will route around him as around damage.

The Geographer

He is serenely confident about the location, the size, or the very existence of a place — a border, an island, an ocean, an ally — in flat defiance of any map ever drawn. The error is not a slip of the tongue. It is load-bearing; an entire argument, and possibly a policy, rests upon it.

The verdict: A man may be forgiven for not knowing a thing. He may not be forgiven for legislating about it anyway, loudly, with a finger on a map he is holding upside down.

The Constitutional Scholar

He cites, with the gravity of a man quoting scripture, a clause that is not in the document. He attributes to the Founders a sentence written by no one, in no century, and builds upon this invented foundation a structure of grievance and certainty that no amount of actual text can dislodge.

The verdict: He has not read the document he has sworn to defend, which would matter less if he were not, at this moment, defending it against the document itself.

The Arithmetician

He deploys, with total assurance, a number — a budget, a population, a death toll, a percentage — that is wrong not by a little but by several orders of magnitude. Confronted, he does not check it. He repeats it, louder, because the number's only real job was to sound large, and it is still doing that job.

The verdict: He is off by a factor of a thousand and unbothered, because he was never reasoning from the number. He was reasoning toward the conclusion, and grabbed the nearest digit on the way.

The Questioner

Granted five minutes to extract truth from a witness, he uses them instead to establish, conclusively and for posterity, that he did not prepare. He asks the question already answered in the opening statement. He demands a document already entered into evidence. He performs interrogation as a man performs a language he does not speak.

The verdict: The hearing exists to inform the public. He has used his share of it to inform the public of exactly one fact: that he should not have been given the share.

The Historian

He invokes, as the cornerstone of a solemn argument, an event that did not occur, a war assigned to the wrong century, a leader who never lived, or a quotation no one ever said. The history is not decoration. It is the proof, and the proof is fiction, delivered with the unshakable confidence of a man who has never once been corrected to his face.

The verdict: He has summoned the past as a witness for his case, and the past, had it been consulted, would have testified for the other side.

The Self-Owner

Handed a talking point by a staffer, he reads it aloud into the permanent record without first checking whether it says what he believes it says. It does not. It says, on close inspection, the opposite — and he discovers this at the same moment as the cameras, the transcript, and posterity, his own mouth having sprung the trap.

The verdict: He was defeated by no opponent. He was handed a sentence, agreed to say it sight unseen, and lost the argument to the act of finishing it.

The Expert

He has sat on the committee governing an industry for thirty years, and proves, under the mildest possible questioning, that he has never in those three decades understood what the industry actually does. The tenure was real. The seniority was real. The comprehension was, the entire time, a polite collective assumption no one had thought to test.

The verdict: Thirty years of oversight, and the oversight turns out to have run in one direction only: everyone assumed he knew, and he, generously, declined to correct them.

Reread the list and notice what is missing: a party. Not one of these failures belongs to a side, because the disease is not ideological — it is the specific arrogance of the powerful who have concluded that understanding a thing is beneath the dignity of governing it. The voter changes the faces every few years and is perpetually surprised to find the chair refilled with the identical confidence. It is not bad luck, and it is not one team. It is the office doing to the occupant what the office reliably does — and the only safeguard ever devised against it, an attentive public that reads what its representatives will not, is the thing the rectangle in your pocket was built to prevent.

A Confederacy of Dunces