Surviving the Age of Idiocracy

ATLANTA -- Really, nobody should be surprised.

We elected a man who rode to political prominence by claiming that Barack Obama isn't a natural-born citizen, who dismissed the substantial documentation of Obama's Hawaii birth as some sort of international conspiracy that was hatched way back in 1961 to prepare for Obama's illegitimate election as president some 47 years later.

Seriously. That was the claim. And Donald Trump took that bizarre theory and sold it to millions of voters who swallowed it as eagerly and haplessly as those dunces who had enrolled in "Trump University," thinking it would turn them into millionaires. As recently as last December, some 57 percent of Trump voters still were saying that Obama had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii.

We also should not forget that during the campaign, Trump publicly accused Rafael Cruz, father of U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, of conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate John F. Kennedy. That too had absolutely no grounding in fact.

In a rational era, with a somewhat rational American electorate, any candidate who had even hinted at such preposterous, irresponsible allegations would be laughed out of political life and reduced to selling supplements and prepper kits on some late-night talk-radio show, in between segments denying the Apollo moon landing, claiming the pyramids were built by aliens and warning that Hillary Clinton was running a child-pornography ring from the basement of a Washington pizza parlor.

But alas, we are not blessed to live in such an era. This is the Age of Idiocracy, and in the Age of Idiocracy, Trump wasn't condemned to being another Art Bell or Alex Jones, he became the most powerful person on earth. In the Age of Idiocracy, the most powerful person in the world sends out tweets like this:

"Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before! What goes around, comes around!"

That's right, a criminal deep state, or more accurately "Criminal Deep State." The president of the United States of America is telling the country and the world that the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and other U.S. intelligence agencies comprise a criminal enterprise that carried out a conspiracy against him intended to overturn the decision of the American people, and that those agencies continue to cover up that conspiracy despite the fact that they are all led by people whom Trump himself appointed.

No facts exist to back that up; no logic explains how it could be true. But pay particular attention to Trump's use of the word "criminal," because it looms large. If you go to a Trump rally and look out over the crowd, the most gullible person in the room, the person most likely to believe and internalize every crazy thing that Trump says, is the man standing at the microphone, gesticulating wildly. We've all known BS artists, but in my experience Trump is unique in how quickly and completely he accepts the words tumbling out of his mouth as absolute fact and truth.

In this case, he may have seized on this deep-state malarkey as a tactic to discredit those investigating him, but egged on by Fox News and others, I think he has come to believe it fully and has begun to act on it. He has come to believe in the reality of this criminal conspiracy, and he will demand prosecution. This is the path he has taken, and he has gone too far to turn back now.

And of course, others believe it too. They believe him now for the same reason that they believed the birther story: Because they WANT to believe it. They need to believe it. And that want and need to believe are so great that they overwhelm all facts and logic to the contrary.

It was reassuring for them to believe that Barack Obama's presidency was the product of a 50-year international conspiracy against America, because the alternative was believing that a black man named Barack Obama had been legitimately elected by America, their America. Given a choice, it was that second thought that was too painful to bear, that second thought that violated too much of what they thought they knew, so it was the first thought they embraced.

The same is true now. They can believe that Trump is an incompetent, corrupt, amoral con man who was elected with Russian help and has no idea of how to run the country, or they can take Trump's offer and believe that all such talk and evidence and facts are the product of a criminal deep state conspiracy, assisted by a lying mainstream media. The second choice causes them less pain and embarrassment, so that is the choice they have made.

I don't know how or when this madness breaks; I know only that it must and that it won't be pretty. As Ray Bradbury warned us in "Fahrenheit 451," "you can't make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can't last."

It can't, and won't.

Jay Bookman writes for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Email: jbookman(at)ajc.com.

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