They say god never gives you a burden you cannot carry. I suspect this is overstated—what if the burden is an avalanche on your head?—but true, at least, in spirit. For example, everyone who cares about things like “rights” and “justice” and “democracy” may find the daily deluge of goading, right wing government aggression to be disorienting and overwhelming. Yet in its chaotic anger, I recognize something that life has well prepared me for: getting yelled at by dumbasses. The dumbasses are emboldened, and their ambitions are greater, but the nature of the fascists is, it turns out, nothing that we haven’t seen before.
If you create things for the public, you will get yelled at by dumbasses. Indeed, this is the primary experience of being the sort of writer that I am. If you make a joke, they won’t get it. If you use sarcasm, they won’t detect it. If you exaggerate for effect, you will be taken literally, and if you try to be understated, you will be accused of a contemptible lack of urgency. If you make a reference, it will not be understood; if you choose one topic, they will wonder why you didn’t choose another; if you try to focus on one thing, they will ask why you didn’t focus on something else. Your high-minded arguments will be dismissed as inscrutable, your simple arguments will be dismissed as unsophisticated, and you, personally, will be dismissed as the sort of lightweight who should try getting a real job. Ever thought of that?
Your book should be shorter. Your essay should be longer. Your harsh words should be nicer, and your nice words should be more pointed. You wrote about this thing, but why are you ignoring that thing? If you want to know how you could have done better, here is an essay I wrote instead—can you take a look?
Let me hasten to say that the constant presence of feedback from dumbasses does not imply that you, the writer, are not a dumbass as well. Often you are! Anyone who speaks publicly for long enough cannot escape this fate. The experience of being yelled at by dumbasses is not an occasion to ruminate on your own superiority. Rather, it is an opportunity for personal growth. Like a depressed explorer trapped in the Arctic, you soon come to realize that your plight is not a discrete event, but rather a state of nature. If you want to find the North Pole you gotta get cold, and if you want to write stuff, you gotta get yelled at. You asked for it! With this understanding comes a subsequent release of stress. There is no reason to fear getting yelled at by dumbasses. It is inevitable. Many people will read what you write, and the ones who will be most motivated to take the time to say anything about it are the ones who think it sucks. And they might be right! We are all just clocking into our jobs at the yakking factory and playing our respective roles. What else are we supposed to do all day? Yoga? This is what life is.
America’s entire power structure has been taken over by the very same sort of dumbasses who have been yelling at all of us on the internet for years. Perhaps this was all foreordained from the very first day that email and message boards were invented. I don’t know. What I do know is that there is no need to look upon the dull, vindictive, racist monsters running our government as a new or inexplicable sort of villain. I see in them a much more familiar identity: internet commenters.
The shoddiness of their work, their love of spectacle, their constant speechifying, their disproportionate reaction to all setbacks, their dishonesty, their prejudices, their disdain for expertise, their willingness to trust quacks, their scapegoating of the less powerful, their embrace of performative gestures at the expense of substance, their misogyny, their ill-concealed social awkwardness funneled into needless displays of aggression—yes, this is all very much in character. The good news is that it is easy to diagnose this disease. The bad news is that if we don’t get it cleared up, our nation’s 250-year history will culminate in the same sort of recriminatory meltdown as an internet comment thread that spirals from “What did you do today?” to full Nazism with stunning speed.
The weapons of fascism—the masked secret police, the corruption, the crackdowns on civil society, the mocking disregard for law—are but the emboldened physical manifestations of Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses. You may object that this takes things too lightly. Isn’t it absurd, even grotesque, to draw a line from idiots typing out enraged and error-riddled arguments to the profound real-world oppression we are now experiencing? Yes! Oh, yes it is! This absurdity, in fact, is at the very heart of fascist violence. It is the final twist of the knife, the head-shaking feeling of disbelief right before you are tossed in the prison van. It’s not just that we are being destroyed, it’s that we are being destroyed for incredibly stupid reasons. There lies the ultimate triumph of the dumbasses!
Stalin. Hitler. Mussolini. Trump. All sort of buffoonish men, genuinely disturbed and disturbing men whose own lack of human empathy was capitalized upon by surrounding hordes of enablers, grifters, and sociopaths. The authoritarian strongman figure at the heart of awful regimes may possess some unique and interesting, if horrifying, characteristics, but the regimes themselves are built, always, of mean and damaged dumbasses who see in the breakdown of society a chance to finally let their own stupid voices be heard. (There are, too, always a class of smart, calculating, and completely amoral men who believe that they can cynically exploit the strongman for their own ends. Historically most of these people end up in a ditch.)
The good news, my friends, is that long experience shows us that while dumbasses are capable of wreaking great havoc, they are not capable of sustaining their supremacy over time. The President is a reality TV star, the vice president is an aspiring podcaster, and the security state is run by a collection of bumbling media figures whose incompetence cannot be concealed by the largest budgets in the world. The same mastery of noisemaking which allowed these people to ascend to their current positions will, soon enough, drag them right back down. These dumbasses, you see, know how to get attention, but they don’t know how to do things. If they did, they would not have adapted so well to the troll’s lifestyle in the first place. The empty, sweaty idiocy at their core leaves them comically ill-equipped to carry out their current duties, like kids who played a lot of jet fighter video games being asked to pilot a 747 with one engine out. Sure, their ineptitude will kill many people. But after five or ten or a hundred crashes, they probably won’t be asked to continue as our chosen pilots.
Well well well, look who it is. The gestapo. Finally come to get me, have you? Let me tell you something, fellas—I know who you really are. Dumbasses. Those masks can’t hide it. That tactical gear will never make you cool. That badge will never make you right. You may snatch me up and send me to the gulag, but you will never, ever escape your true nature. Big, stupid, idiots. So if you really think about it, the real winner here is going to be… well. I guess it kind of sucks for everyone.
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Related reading: You’re A Bunch of Cowards!; Welcome to the Age of Disappearance; The Land of Greater Fools.
If you like to get out of the house once in a while, and you’re in Atlanta, you can come see me speak about FASCISTS at the Douglass-Debs Dinner this Saturday night at 7 pm. If you’re in New York City, you can come hear me and a bunch of smarter journalists speak about reporting on inequality at a half-day event at Columbia University on September 29. If you prefer to stay in the house, you can still buy a cool t-shirt.
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A million likes! I can't tell you how much I love this post and how important it is. Thank you a zillion! 😘😘
I keep saying that the worst part about all the fascism is how fucking stupid it is. This sums it up!