The Tea Party’s March of Folly: Idiocracy, Here We Come

In her Los Angeles Times column on Thursday, Meghan Daum made note of the rise references in political commentary to the movie “Idiocracy,” a 2006 burp-and-fart, sci-fi political comedy set 500 years in the future, written and directed by Mike Judge, the creator of the animated series “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill”:

References to the film seem to be everywhere, and not just in op-eds penned by cranky columnists (I mentioned it in a column last year about public spaces being sold as advertising space). The latest issue of the Economist has an article about the business-sabotaging effects of the battles in Washington, headlined “American Idiocracy.”

A recent blog post on the Psychology Today website was headlined “Idiocracy: Can We Reverse It?” Meanwhile, it’s popping up in causal conversations, Internet comments and, most notably, on Twitter, where it often appears as a hashtagged topic…

Daum suggests that the movie has been given a second life — it bombed at the box office — because are behaving like idiots. She cites the sexual antics of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the right and Anthony Weiner on left, as well as “a Congress that gets the nation’s credit rating lowered thanks to toddler-like stubbornness over an issue that many of its members barely seem to grasp?”

Daum’s hope is that interest in “Idiocracy” and the shock of recognition of that society is being driven toward the future it predicts will give pause to partisans on both sides and bring them to their senses.

“Maybe it’s naive,” she writes, “to think that ideological opponents can be brought together by a common fear of mass stupidity: Call it idiocraphobia.”

But, see, the problem here is not naivete. The problem with this analysis is a reflexive reliance among media types on the equivalency meme: both sides are equally guilty, equally bad. A pox on both your houses.

There is no equivalence between Arnold Schwarzenegger’s serial extramarital adventures in unprotected sex and Anthony Weiner’s TMI Twitpix. Sure, both are examples of politicians exercising poor judgment, but the damage wreaked by Schwarzenegger’s philandering on his wife and their four children and his (only acknowledged) baby-mama and their child cannot be compared with the harm done to his marriage by Weiner, who has no children and didn’t even have sex.

More importantly, it wasn’t “Congress” that behaved like stubborn toddlers. It wasn’t Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and their caucuses who seized control of the debt-ceiling debate and drove the United States’ full faith and credit toward the brink of default.

Objectively, this stubborn behavior was only found among one discrete faction: The radical know-nothing tea partyists.

There is no equivalency between any group on the left or in the middle and the tea party. No one else is so pliably dim-witted, so unmoored from reality that they take it as faith that Jesus rode dinosaurs and the earth is just 7,000 years old.

Based on the flimsiest tissues of obvious bogus-ness, they convinced themselves that Pres. Obama, a mild-mannered DLC centrist Democrat is in reality a terrifying Kenyan anti-colonialist Marxist Muslim Nazi fascist illegal alien.

It is not surprising that Republican fatcat operatives have had no trouble duping the tea partyists into believing that, for example, it was the government, not big business, that caused the financial collapse in 2008. That tax cuts create jobs, and corporations are people.

It is these people, the tea partyists — not Democrats, liberals, independents or even moderate Republicans — who are the idiocrats among us.

If you have not seen “Idiocracy,” here is Daum’s quick synopsis:

The premise of “Idiocracy” is that a guy named Joe, with a “perfectly average IQ,” is selected — along with a prostitute — for a hibernation experiment that inadvertently keeps him asleep until 2505, when he awakes to a world where, as the prologue explains, evolution “began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.” The result is a trash-strewn society in which crops are watered with a sports drink called Brawndo, people have names like Frito and Mountain Dew, and the most popular form of entertainment is a reality show called “Ow, My Balls,” which consists of footage of a man repeatedly getting whacked in the groin. Meanwhile, Costco is where you go for toilet paper and a university education, and IQs are so low that “average Joe” is considered a genius.

“Idiocracy” is also political allegory — and, yes, that’s a highfalutin word to use to describe a movie riddled with fart jokes. It depicts a future that has been won by the proud anti-intellectuals of our time — the George Bushes, Sarah Palins, Rick Perrys, Michele Bachmanns and Joe the Plumbers. As a result, America has devolved into a festering dystopia populated by dumbasses.

Political debates are settled with arena cage matches. Corporatism runs amok, and marketing catch phrases have replaced independent thinking. Systems we take for granted today — transportation, health care and even agriculture — have collapsed. And because intelligence has been bred out of the human species, no one has the intellectual fire power to solve problems. The only artifact from the current era that remains more or less intact is Fox News.

When the tea party first came onto the scene in the summer of 2009 with their staged hissy fits over health-care reform, they and the Republican propagandists at Fox insisted that the tea party was a remarkable new political phenomenon. The tea party, they insisted, represented a spontaneous, grassroots movement made up of secular, post-partisan patriots who eschewed both parties. The tea party was not about social issues, the propagandists said. They only cared about fiscal responsibility.

But it was hard to ignore the fact that these old white, racist Christian nationalists looked eerily similar to the same old white, racist Christian nationalists who had been last seen displaying cultish, undying devotion to George Bush — that is, until he became, hands down, the most unpopular president in the history of presidential polling.

Of course, if you followed the millions being showered on these purportedly post-partisan grassroots groups, the trail led to Republican Party corporatists like Dick Armey, the Koch brothers and Russo & Marsh, the GOP consulting firm that operates Tea Party Express.

Earlier this week, a new report on the tea party confirmed these early doubts about the tea party’s post-partisanship. The study — which was produced by David E. Campbell, an associate professor of political science at Notre Dame, and Robert D. Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard, are the authors of “American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us” — was based on surveys of the group that would coalesce into the tea party starting in 2006, the same year that “Idiocracy” was released:

So what do tea partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.

More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a tea party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. And tea partiers continue to hold these views: they seek “deeply religious” elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates. The tea party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

This inclination among the tea party faithful to mix religion and politics explains their support for Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Their appeal to tea partiers lies less in what they say about the budget or taxes, and more in their overt use of religious language and imagery, including Mrs. Bachmann’s lengthy prayers at campaign stops and Mr. Perry’s prayer rally in Houston.

Yet it is precisely this infusion of religion into politics that most Americans increasingly oppose. While over the last five years Americans have become slightly more conservative economically, they have swung even further in opposition to mingling religion and politics. It thus makes sense that the tea party ranks alongside the Christian Right in unpopularity.

On everything but the size of government, tea party supporters are increasingly out of step with most Americans, even many Republicans.

A recent poll found that while around 20 percent of voters say they support the tea party, just 4 percent said they had attended a mob rally or donated to a tea party group. Other polls show that the tea party is as unpopular as any other party. Their disapproval/approval rating is clocking in at around two to one.

And yet, each new day of campaigning in the Republican primary produces yet more evidence that this tiny cabal of unsmart Americans has seized control of American politics.

Earlier this week, Rick Perry suggested that scientists are lying about climate change for money. Later, he told a young child that evolution and creationism are equivalent scientific theories.

On Tuesday, Michele Bachmann wished Elvis Presley “Happy Birthday” on the day he died. Yesterday, she said that Americans live in fear of the Soviet Union.

Current trends suggests that our society really is on a march toward idiocracy — or to say it in a more objective way, that moneyed interests are financing a counter-cultural insurgency as a means of achieving political objectives that will benefit themselves to the detriment of the greater good.

This is not the time to pull punches. This is a time when the reflexive impulse of legacy-media journalists and pundits to be “fair” to both the liberal and conservative halves of our culture risks giving aid and comfort to those who seek to destroy the whole.

The first step toward a cure is an accurate diagnosis. It is time to stop flogging the equivalency meme and name the names:

We have seen the idiocrats, and they are the tea party.