Dateline: D.C.—The Machiavelli Institute of Political Pseudoscience shocked the world when it revealed the results of its study that compared the intelligence level of President Trump’s diehard supporters to that of his critics on the left and the right, including “the Resistance” and “Never Trumpers.”
The study found that whereas Trump’s supporters “know their ass from their elbow,” anti-Trump Americans “have their head in the clouds.” Trump’s supporters are mostly members of the hard-pressed working class and thus have street smarts, whereas the critics excel in abstract, academic book-learning. His supporters are “intellectually unsophisticated,” while the critics are more “professional” in presenting their opinions.
But what the supporters learned, along with members of the left-wing insurgency who had supported Bernie Sanders, is that the efficient, licensed elites of the neoliberal class in America had unwittingly betrayed the majority of Americans by not understanding the full consequences of the unfettered capitalism they had championed since the 1980s under Ronald Reagan.
Recognizing that the United States is currently a failed democracy, Mr. Trump’s supporters differ from the millions upon millions of Americans who didn’t vote in 2016 and throughout the twentieth century only in one respect, according to the pseudoscientific study. The Trump voters and the non-voters agree that their political and economic systems are rigged by plutocrats, and that voting for either Democrats or Republicans is thus fruitless for progressive purposes.
“Whereas President Trump may be a useful idiot of Russia,” the study points out, “the American professional classes of liberals and moderate Republicans consist of useful idiots of the sociopathic top one percent who alone can thrive under the amoral conditions of corporate capitalism.”
The key difference is that those who voted for Trump get their entertainment primarily from politics and the daily news.
By contrast, the nonvoters are opioid junkies or gambling or porn addicts, not news junkies. Thus, Trump’s supporters demonstrated their superior practical intelligence by understanding the hopelessness of their country’s situation, and by insisting, as one Trump voter put it, “that if the American middle class is bound to lose out when the American empire contracts, American consumers can at least attempt to arrange things so that we’ll be amused along our way to certain destruction.”
The entertainment value of President Trump’s antics towers over that of any other politician’s in American history. Even Mr. Trump’s opponents are fascinated by the spectacle of his inhumanity. According to the study, Mr. Trump’s die-hard supporters cast their votes for him not because they expected him to make America great again, contrary to his 2016 campaign slogan, but to avenge themselves against the neoliberal, professional class.
“The vengeance is achieved,” said a spokesperson for the team of pseudoscientists, “when the more realistic voters who brought about the appalling reality of Trump’s presidency force the benighted liberals to realize that the American way of life is precisely as absurd as that reality.” As liberals and deep-state Republican bureaucrats are sickened by the reflection of their Jungian shadow in Trump’s monstrosity, they may become as demoralized as the victims of global free trade and of social-Darwinian capitalism.
Together, then, the majority of Americans can comfort themselves in knowing that while their system can’t be reformed, like any organization run by a cabal of self-destructive psychopaths, such as Lehman Brothers or Enron, the American establishment will collapse of its own accord. Moreover, to compensate for the ruination of their country and of their dreams for a better tomorrow, Americans have at least the prospect of premium entertainment—as long as they continue to vote Republican.
According to the Democratic brand, government works and can get stuff done. But the American working class understand, given their superior wherewithal, that the “stuff” the American systems have gotten done has been the screwing over of the majority of Americans, who haven’t seen their real wages improve in decades and who lost their industrial jobs to hordes of slave labourers in China, India, and elsewhere.
Meanwhile, the Republican brand is effectively to entertain Americans on their way out, with that party’s displays of unsurpassed villainy. Even many non-Americans are hooked on the reality TV of American politics, whereas the average American could never even conceive of attending, for example, to a moment of Canadian politics.
“That asymmetry brought Donald Trump to power,” said the team’s spokesperson, “because the majority of Americans aren’t as stupid as many cynical liberals believe. Most Americans either don’t vote at all or vote purely to entertain themselves, knowing that their country has already been debased beyond repair.”