Point of order

This is America today:

A snippet from a book I’m writing on the current triumph of stupidity:

Curiously enough, Sarah Palin’s career as a right-wing political celebrity turned out to be short-lived.  Despite the enormous publicity boost the combination of the presidential campaign, her shameless demagogic pandering, and her conventional good looks gave her, she was apparently too lazy, undisciplined, and disorganized to make it as a conservative media grifter in the post-McCain Republican party.  This is more or less equivalent to failing as a cocaine dealer at a Led Zeppelin afterparty in 1977, which is to say it was an impressive negative achievement in its own right.

Sarah Palin’s big mistake, it would seem, was being born about 15 years too early.  If she had emerged in say 2023, with the looks she had at age 44, and what seemed for a moment like plain-spoken real American folk wisdom, she might well have been on the fast track to the White House.

In 2008, the idea that being a complete idiot was bad still had some sway in national politics.  It was declining rapidly, but it was still there.  Palin fell from prominence by showing she was too stupid to be taken seriously as a national political figure within the Republican party.  It’s much harder, if not impossible, for that to happen now.

Today you have a Congress full of Palins, except they have names like Gaetz, and Tuberville, and Ron Johnson, and Boebert, and Gosar, and Taylor Greene.  For these people, aggressively performative stupidity is the opposite of a political handicap:  It is their trademark, their calling card, their demagogic bread and butter.