A Note on the Candidate
"I would invite you to see these concerns, taken together, as a feature, rather than a bug."
Wow! That was wild, right? Did ... not … see … that … coming. (If you did, propofol shooters are on me next summer at [REDACTED]!)
In any case, as we get ready to bless this thing, we’re getting a lot of questions from this group about the candidate. Of course, we take questions from this group very seriously—couldn’t do it without them, is what I tell my team, they keep the cryo chambers chilling!—and really they are not so much questions as concerns.
Yes, truthfully, they are concerns.
Having bucketized these concerns, we found they fall into two buckets.
On the one hand, there are those who think the candidate is dangerous, while on the other there are those who think he is an “idiot.” (I use the word, and the quotation marks, advisedly. While the candidate’s potential dangerousness was characterized in a variety of ways, the “idiot” bucket was virtually unanimous in its preference for this epithet.)
But we hear you. You have been heard.
However, I would invite you to see these concerns, taken together, as a feature, rather than a bug—like [REDACTED] always says! In the past we have backed candidates who are dangerous and we have backed candidates who are idiots, but have shied away from backing candidates who are both. This made sense, given the information we had at the time, and I myself was of the opinion—as [REDACTED] keeps reminding me ; )—that running a candidate who was both dangerous and an idiot would be a lot. Too much, we thought, for the electorate to bear.
But here we are, and I think we have figured out why. (You know what they say about us political scientists. We’re always asking, “Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?”) It’s because, among those who oppose the candidate, those who think he is dangerous and those who think he is an idiot form two distinct groups.
This might seem counterintuitive. There is nothing inherently contradictory in the concept of a “dangerous idiot,” yet only a small percentage of the opposition appear to have embraced this synthesis. (Perhaps it is too frightening to contemplate, as some have suggested.)
Instead, those who see the candidate as dangerous and those who see him as an “idiot” tend to have such different worldviews that it has stymied their capacity for opposition.
The dangerous camp view the candidate as more than he seems, his erratic decision-making and spewing of nonsense masking a deep well of purpose, insight, and Iago-grade treachery that much be addressed at the source—whatever that might be. For this group, this source has never been discovered and is always just beyond reach.
Meanwhile, the idiocy camp views the candidate’s behavior as having no deeper meaning, being no more than a surface play of his (largely) biological impulses. In this case, there is nothing to be unearthed, no depths to be discovered, nothing to be addressed.
The unexpected outcome of this split is that while the opposition uniformly opposes the candidate’s utterances and his (thankfully infrequent) actions, they cannot agree on their causes or meaning, and so exhaust their energies arguing about both rather than developing a unified plan of action.
Furthermore, this rift seems irreconcilable at the level of politics, since both sides are talking about two different things, or—if you will—two different planes. One side talks personality, the other world-historical conspiracy. They are like materialists and idealists, haggling over the mind-body problem.
You might laugh at their foolishness—and the candidate’s good fortune—but note that the candidate has been subjected to a similar doubling by his supporters. There are those who he believe he is hapless but see value in this haplessness—we accelerationists, like most of you here—and those who believe he is a visionary (and we all know to keep our head down when those true believers get a hold of our Signal handles, am I right?)
The fact is that the candidate has been successful precisely because he is not single, but multiple, a contradiction, and—as any logician will tell you—everything follows from a contradiction, once the contradiction is allowed.
We could not have known this would be the case because, as I mentioned, we never tried it before. We backed [REDACTED] though he threatened nuclear war, and we backed [REDACTED] though he could not spell. I suppose it was timidity—or a lack of political imagination!—that prevented us from backing a candidate who combines the worst traits of both, only to find out, at this late date, that the combination possesses uncanny properties useful in the modern political arena.
One final note: While, as mentioned above, the synthesis “dangerous idiot” has little traction, a third camp bears watching: those who believe the candidate to be insane, for which a variety of colorful expressions are used. Senile, batshit, decompensated, etc. While closely related to the “idiot” camp, this group also has some overlap with the danger crowd, depending on how many times they have viewed The Manchurian Candidate in either iteration. The development of this group has the potential to split the opposition even further, should that be necessary, in the unlikely event of, say, a second term. ([REDACTED] help us.)
July 17, 2016
Cleveland, Ohio