I’ve been thinking, this week, about how we talk about the people who rule us.
I think often we have trouble recognizing the fact that most of the people with power in our society — the political leaders, the business magnates, and so on — are just ordinary people. Sure, once in awhile one comes along with truly remarkable capacities, but that’s true of people in all walks of life. What many of them actually have in common is a set of cultural practices and signals, a set of ways of performing themselves in public, associated with their class position and often with whiteness, that we get taught to treat as markers of brains, capacity, and legitimacy. But they’re not. Those people aren’t any smarter or more capable than you, or me, or the people in our workplace, or the people we drink with down at the pub.
And this isn’t a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s a good thing. In the words of CLR James, “every cook can govern” — the fact that powerful people aren’t any cleverer than the rest of us shows that, really, we can all play a role in shaping our communities and our world. Or, at least, we could if our society wasn’t organized to prevent it.
So. With things like the disaster that is the current regime in the United States, you always get people who look at, say, the actions of the regime that are crashing the global economy, or at the opposition to the regime by the Democrats that has so far been fluctuating between ridiculously ineffectual and completely nonexistent, and say, oh, well, what they’re doing might look bad, but actually they’re playing twelve dimensional chess, and we just don’t understand their plan. But I don’t think that’s a good explanation for anything.
On the other hand, there’s a related tendency to go in the other direction. It can be hard to look at things like the mass firing of government workers one day followed by re-hiring a bunch of them the next because it turns out they’re actually necessary, or at the ridiculous way the April 2nd tariff amounts were calculated, and reach any conclusion other than the fact that the world is being run by very, very silly and not-very-competent people. But I don’t think that’s true either.
It is the case that there is a certain kind of performance of polish that we’ve learned to expect that the current regime has no interest in. But that’s not about incompetence, it’s about different goals and values. The firing/rehiring business, for example, isn’t about inept leadership, it’s because the regime recognizes that they are more likely to accomplish their goal of re-making the federal state if they act very, very fast, so they that’s what they’re doing…even if that means making mistakes that, from their perspective, are of minimal importance. And it didn’t matter to them that the tariff numbers were calculated in a very silly way because the details of those numbers are irrelevant to what they want to accomplish, and they just don’t care if it looks silly.
The leading figures in the regime to the south are not smarter than us or dumber than us, they’re just ordinary people who happen to have a vision for radically altering how power works in the world, and who are brute-forcing that vision into reality. There’s a logic to what they’re doing, and not a super-secret one either. If we get too caught up in attributing seemingly inexplicable actions by those in charge to either them being really smart and having secret plans, or them being really dumb and incompetent, it makes it harder for us to see that social and political logic, and harder to make good choices about acting in response.