Living in the Honey Boo Boo World

 

 

When people ruefully speak of the "post truth" world, they are speaking of the class divide between those who went to school, where they learned how to formulate an argument, which, of course, begins with assembling a set of "facts" to support your point and those who never quite got that far.
In his interview with David Remnick of the New Yorker, President Obama noted that when someone posts a comment which asserts Obama was born on Mars or in Kenya or when someone claims Hillary is a crook, it looks the same, same format, same font even, as the assertion that this is all foolishness. The internet validates every opinion, no matter how unsubstantiated or how absurd.
Which is another way of saying the authorities have lost control of the discussion.
Gary Trudeau hit on the problem with his wonderful cartoon showing passengers on an airplane listening to Donald Trump as their pilot saying he was going to fly the airplane and, of course, the passengers are distraught, because clearly he is incompetent to do this.  In this Trudeau highlighted the problem with incompetence.


But, of course, there are spheres of activity in which competence is necessary--flying an airplane, doing heart surgery or brain surgery, building a bridge, wiring a building for electricity, doing the computers for the office. And then there are spheres in which no license, no exam is required, like being President of the United States or being Commerce Secretary or Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, where all you need is to win.

The problems arise when the two spheres intersect: When you get an economic incompetent like Paul Ryan saying we need to make Medicare into a voucher program or when you get Republicans crying out to destroy Obamacare and to replace with a voucher program or no program at all, well, there may be some suffering, but it may take a few years and several election cycles before the unsophisticated figure out they've been hurt.

Well, we'll find out just how important competence is in government. Republicans have been saying since Reagan, government is not the solution, it is the problem. We are about to see government as the problem.