I recently listened to a really illuminating conversation between Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen and Ezra Klein, which led me to order Gessen’s latest book, Surviving Autocracy. The bike ride over to Denver’s beloved Tattered Cover bookstore to pick it up was filled with stark reminders of our increasingly dystopian reality—the closed rec center with the lap pool I desperately miss; pedestrians, with their expressions blocked by masks; the tentative, cautious feeling in the bookstore as customers navigated the aisles, working to keep six feet of distance at all times. I find all of it depressing.
As soon as I came home, I started plowing through the book. I’m hungry for ways to try to get my head around what’s happening, not only for my own sanity, but in hopes of being able to provide analytical frames for my students in my intro to political theory course in the fall.
I got to page 34 and pulled up short at “Trump’s incompetence is militant.”
I had to read it a few times to let it sink in.
Perhaps part of the shock of the line is that in the context of authoritarianism we’re used to the refrain about how Mussolini made the trains run on time. (Fun Snopes essay on the accuracy of this here.) Americans are now learning first-hand that the effacement of democratic institutions by autocratic regimes can be a jagged, undisciplined process. Gessen works to correct the retrospective historiography that render figures like Hitler as evil geniuses rather than often inept, bumbling actors.
Even as we can observe the threats to American democracy mounting, it’s clear that Trump and so many of his appointees are often banging around in a dark room, clueless about how to do their jobs. The sentence comes in a chapter that floats “kakistocracy”—government by the worst people—as a descriptor of the Trump administration. Gessen points out that even within the first few days, when it became clear to Trump that the office of the presidency involved far more skills and work than he had bargained for, he refused allow the scale of responsibility to humble him. Instead, he set about wrecking the agencies, processes, and institutions he found inconvenient for his style of “management.” (If you want to know what all of this has to do with a ridiculous Styrofoam cake, read this.)
The majority of Americans who voted against him in 2016 knew Donald Trump would be an incompetent president. But that first year, the fears of an authoritarian governing style seemed to give way to resignation that mostly his administration would distinguish itself through incompetence. Nearly four years later, that incompetence is increasingly legible as malevolent, metastatic. It is designed to destroy as much as it can—not just every policy Obama enacted that Trump dislikes, but also whole institutions, including the Office of Government Ethics and most of the State Department—while earning Trump the maximum of attention for his bottomless narcissism, and his cronies material rewards. This has become catastrophically lethal with the deliberate mismanagement of the pandemic.
The aggressive, extremist, confrontational, badgering nature of Trump’s incompetence is staggering. His health policy experts warn him that a pandemic has likely been taking root in the U.S. and will spread without concerted efforts? Their own president brushes it off as a hoax. Data demonstrates the virus has infected tens of thousands? He suggests it will disappear when it gets warmer. States have inadequate PPE and hospital resources? He refuses federal responsibility and forces governors to compete with one another on the open market. And now nearly 150,000 people have perished needlessly, and the U.S. is the outlier of the global pandemic response.
Even when his incompetence misfires spectacularly and directly threatens the support of his enablers, as when he brought the National Guard and D.C. police out on Black Lives Matter protesters in Lafayette Square, or when his policies lead to dire outbreaks in Southern states—he doubles down, refuses to acknowledge a misstep. And now he is showing 9-15 points behind Biden in the polls, and some governors are breaking from him publicly. This only makes him more fervent in his reckless abandon.
I think it’s the militant incompetence that has so many of us feeling dumbstruck here in the summer of 2020. Anyone who has ever had to demonstrate competence to preserve their employment, everyone who has had to be evaluated and reviewed, to justify the designs of their plans, to uphold standards of excellence just to perform well in their daily lives would, I would think, be furious in the face of this. (But not everyone is. Perhaps Trump supporters instead feel liberated by this, as it’s sort of a fuck off to the tyranny of management metrics everywhere. And the feeling might be especially strong among those white men who didn’t have access, aptitude, or other resources to attend college and rendered ineligible for many white-collar jobs.)
Most of us, especially in the realm of paid labor, will be penalized for any evidence of incompetence, even with the loss of our jobs. As a professor I know that incompetence can, will and should be used against us—or at least to correct our work. Members of historically marginalized populations have to prove themselves hypercompetent when they gain access to high status jobs. President Obama, whatever one’s critiques of him, was the quintessential case in point.
Yet this president, the caricature of a tantrum-throwing white boy unable to sustain the slightest direct criticism, a profoundly stunted person entirely without empathy or leadership skill, gets to be militantly incompetent. And he has the most powerful military forces on the globe under his command.This is just one of the shocks of democratic erosion, that it could begin, and continue to gain ground, through militant incompetence.
Photo from Alternet.org