Know Your Enemy

I've had a number of conversations this week with people that I both love and respect that went something like this (paraphrasing, of course):

Other Person: "Wow, [insert morally reprehensible right-wing ideologue/policy here] is crazy. These people have no idea what they are doing. What a bunch of morons."

Me: "Well, I mean, we may not like what they are doing, but why does that mean they are unintelligent?"

Other Person: "No smart/sane person would do ______. They clearly don't understand how the world works."

Me: "So our ideological enemies are full-bore mentally inferior people because they are our ideological enemies?"

Other Person: "Yes. What other answer is possible?"

Now, don't take this as a slight against those I have had conversations with about this, especially as I know most of you will be reading this. Instead, it is an indictment of how the left has generally framed its opposition on the right for the better part of a decade - as a bunch of small-brained Tyrannosaurus Rex's flailing about with their tiny arms trying to grasp the levers of power and sometimes accidentally slipping on their prey to attain it.

And sure, diminishing your enemy is much easier when no feats of strength are involved. You can't just body slam racism, sexism, homophobia, or technocapital-utopianism and scream, "Booyakasha!" No Democratic talking head on cable news is going to try and professionally wrestle ghoulish characters like Steve Bannon, Curtis Yarvin, Steven Miller, or Russell Vought and the Heritage Foundation to a TKO in some sort of homoerotic political Royal Rumble to prove their opponent's obvious inferiority as thought leaders.

Although I'm sure Netflix would stream it live if they did.

The modern left has built itself on a foundation of obvious intellectual superiority and has done so to tragic fault.

If you listen to most right-of-center speeches, commentary, or news media, within all the overt and morally reprehensible othering of people who are not American enough, is the constant textual and subtextual drumbeat of "God, aren't these lefties annoying? Why would you vote for someone who tells you that they are better than you and who says that they know your self-interests better than you do? It's like, whatever, dad."

The right knows that the left thinks they are stupid, and they exploit it to the greatest of effects.

We diminish the intelligence of those who do not share our ideology at our peril. The things they believe may indeed be morally reprehensible, uncouth, sad, shocking, evil, and lacking grounding in common decency, but that does not mean they haven't studied for the test that they are taking, even if we don't personally want to take that test.

A professional sports team does not ascend to become a league champion by failing to train and practice.

The Chiefs and Eagles won't walk onto the field in this week's SuperBowl, hoping to be luckier than they are good.

They both know it's better to be lucky than good and that it's better still to be good and then get lucky.

The right understands this on a level so innately that their political machinations work in terms of decades, not in election cycles. They damn well make sure that when they eventually get lucky, they are already good.

Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Franco, Pol Pot, and Pinochet did not stumble ass-backward into positions of extreme power that allowed them to orchestrate boundless oppression and the systematic or consequential killings of tens of millions of people.

So why, then, do we assume that modern-day right-wing ideologues and leaders are completely feckless and unequipped with the mental faculties to perform similar intellectual feats of philosophy and politicking that could yield equally as - uh, compelling - results?

Mostly, this is because Trump himself acts as the physical and spiritual avatar for the entire right wing, from billionaire crypto-libertarian all the way down the drain to working-class neo-fascistic anti-Semites and misogynist school shooters.

He epitomizes the large, bumbling oafish boor of a strongman.

He's quite literally fat and gigantic and frequently mumbles through long and meandering trains of thought that make little to no sense.

He's a man for whom displays of strength are the coin of the realm, whether in deportations, abruptly cutting funding for school lunches, tariffs that will rock global markets, or threats of kinetic warfare.

He's the loudest voice in the room and commands our attention like the TV star he was and inarguably still is.

But, to quote The Usual Suspects, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."

While most of the left understandably experiences existential dread and anguish at the rolling back of decades of progressive policies (however incremental those policies might have been) - at least I know I experience that - the response to that outrage cannot be "ERMAGAHD HEZ SO DUM." We watch the sleight-of-hand magician's left hand, so we don't see him removing our watch with his right.

There are a great many highly educated and learned people working in and around the current administration and the broader conservative movement in general who have become so highly educated and learned precisely so they can do the things that they are doing, however much you or I unequivocally loathe those things.

This is a plea to not unilaterally disarm yourself with the assumption that no one who does bad things can also have a high level of intelligence. That's just a coping mechanism and one that reinforces a quite epic magic trick.

Poof! There goes your watch!

And democracy!

Instead, I implore you to build a defense mechanism by trying to understand the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of why they are doing what they are doing.

Believe it or not, they understand the historical and philosophical context in which they operate the political context.

While I realize it's not reassuring to think that "evil" is not just lucky but also really good at what it does and has spent years getting good at it, it's a thought we need to have lest we continually underestimate the depth and breadth of what is possible.

And it's so that we, too, can put in the work to become good.

And maybe, just maybe, we will get lucky one day, too.