A confederacy of dunces

With gratitude to Toole and Swift. A succinct prediction, from across literary ages, of the current state of our professional class.

Idiocracy, 20th Century Fox. We’re ahead of the film’s timeline by a few centuries.

I came across an article a few days ago in the Daily Wire, “We’re Living Under A Tyranny Of Mediocre Morons,” by Matt Walsh. As is usual with Walsh, there is no shortage of hyperbole (and, in this case, alliteration) to be found in his opinion piece, but he isn’t, by a long shot, all wrong. Dial it back a click or two, in fact, and I think he’s got it about right.

There’s no polite way of saying this, and there’s no use in beating around the bush, so let’s get to it: we are a nation where public life has become dominated by a professional class of dunces, knaves, charlatans, and cowards. When it comes to the powers that be, we are living in our own version of the Mos Eisley Spaceport, or Sodom and Gomorrah, whichever you find more persuasively terrible.

Walsh bases his thesis on Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is currently under investigation over whether she should be disqualified from an election fraud case in Georgia against former President Donald Trump and others.

It turns out that Willis and Nathan Wade, a special prosecutor Willis appointed in 2021 to prosecute Trump for attempting to "steal" the 2020 election, had an unseemly affair that, at the very least, displayed poor professional judgment, even by my extremely modest expectations of the legal profession.

Willis and Wade are accused of having the affair before and during the time they were investigating Trump. Willis and Wade admitted to having had a relationship, but they say it only began after Wade started working on the case (as if that makes a big difference). Wade was also accused of using some of the money he earned in the Trump case to squire Willis around several vacation resorts.

In her February 15 testimony, Willis was combative, legally dubious, and absolutely primed for a liberal TV audience of Trump haters. What most of the rest of us learned from it is that Willis is the last person from whom we’d ever seek legal advice. Considering the target-rich nature of the legal environment, this may be the most damning indictment of Willis I can come up with, short of a year’s worth of research.

Whether or not Willis will be disqualified from the Trump case is anyone’s guess, but it’s an absolute no-brainer that Wade should already be gone. If Willis had either any sense or a sense of professional decorum, she’d recuse herself. But her testimony demonstrated that isn’t going to happen. It virtually screamed, “If I continue, there’s no way I’ll let you down.”

True that. There’s no way you can.

Willis is just the latest in a long line of current public officials, many of whom are entrusted with enormous power and the discretion to use it as they see fit, who are obviously not ready for prime time. See Claudine Gay (former president of Harvard), waving at you as one of the most egregious yet least impactful examples.

Willis is in the queue with Joe Biden (senile POTUS whose single functioning brain cell seems transfixed on bribing millennials, who hate him over Israel, with billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness), Donald Trump (charlatan extraordinaire, potential felon former POTUS), Marjorie Taylor Greene (vapid idiot), Lauren Boebert (vaping idiot), Matt Gaetz (idiot on steroids), Rashida Tlaib (you’d love Hamas if you just got to know them idiot), Ilhan Omar (member of Congress despite questionable immigration status idiot), Cori Bush (Show Me idiot), Ayanna Pressley (defund ICE idiot), Kathy Hochul (we embrace sanctuary status until illegals actually show up idiot), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (idiot idiot).

Willis also shares the line with fellow legal luminaries Letitia James (New York AG, similarly fond of overcharging weak cases against political opponents) and Alvin Bragg (Manhattan DA, see Letitia James).

Also in the same line: Brandon Johnson (Mayor of Chicago), Eric Adams (Mayor of NYC), Alejandro Mayorkas (impeached Homeland Secretary), and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (newest missive to staff around the troubled world is to use ze/hir and ze/zir pronouns), to name but a few among many.

If this ignoble list means anything, it’s that riding duncehood to great power is aspirational for all races, creeds, and social strata. As it turns out, affirmative action does work. Just not quite the way it’s progenitors imagined. Instead of multicultural, broad social-spectrum excellence, we’ve achieved multicultural, broad social-spectrum mediocrity in our professional classes. It was hard work, but someone had to do it.

We got to where we are because we allowed social justice crusaders to spend several unimpeded decades selling a critical mass of the powers that be in academia, business, and government on the notion that merit wasn’t the preeminent qualification for professionalism. You reap what you sow. Even President Camacho could have seen this coming.

Worse, mediocrity has permeated even institutions where merit is an absolutely crucial component to keeping us all alive. Show me how our government and scientific institutions covered themselves in glory during the COVID pandemic. Do tell how our government is productively responding to the flood of illegal migrants, at least some of whom intend us harm, streaming over the southern border. Explain to me what we are doing to deal with the flow of illegal drugs into our country that are responsible for 100,000 dead Americans every year. Explain to me how reports to federal law enforcement agencies of students enrolled in American flight schools from countries known to harbor terrorists who wanted to learn how to fly but not how to land an airliner escaped all but perfunctory notice.

Do you know why you can’t? Because you are stuck on the notion that there ought to be reason at the other end of all of this. There isn’t, just professional idiocy.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.