Are the People in Charge Trying to Destroy America or Are They Just Incompetent?

Actually, the real problem is something else.

So, Jake Shields asked this question on X:

It’s a question you hear a lot of people asking in a time when our government is not just performing poorly but is knowingly allowing millions of people to cross our border illegally, spending TRILLIONS we don’t have, allowing criminals to break the law with impunity, inflating the dollar into oblivion, deliberately trying to confuse children about their gender, and is increasingly hostile to the taxpayers and citizenry in general. Pretty clearly, we do not have good or competent people running things in America, but are they that incompetent or are they doing it deliberately?

Granted, it would be great if there was a simple answer to that question. If the people in charge were trying to destroy America, then we could just guillotine them all and the problems they’re creating would just go away. On the other hand, if they were just incompetent, you’d expect them to be voted out of office, right? Unfortunately, even if we replaced every last Republican and Democrat in DC during this year’s election, it would be unlikely to fix most of their bad behavior.

Why?

Well, just to answer the central question above, most of them are not trying to destroy America per se. Most of them. There are certainly some bad actors and yes, I would agree with Elon Musk that George Soros is one of them.

You could also argue that Soros is just a sociopath or incredibly misguided, but I’m of the opinion he’s generally an awful person who knows the damage he causes and sees that as a feature, not a bug. There are other figures, mostly on the Left, you could similarly classify as misanthropes, anti-American, or the sort of naïve idealists who want to tear America down and rebuild it from scratch because it doesn’t measure up to some sort of imaginary, made-up socialist utopia in their heads. These people would like to see America destroyed, but are they a majority? They certainly don’t seem to be.

So, is incompetence the main problem then?

After all, the government is unquestionably far less competent than the private sector for a variety of reasons. Certainly, the best people go into the private sector, not the government. Additionally, the government puts inefficient, hidebound, heavily regulated, poorly run bureaucracies staffed with the sort of mediocrities who find working in that kind of environment to be appealing in charge of many things. Furthermore, we can never forget that they toss around billions of dollars like monopoly money because it’s not THEIR MONEY and they need to spend every dime they’re allocated, so they have an excuse to allocate more money next year. Nobody who wants something done cheaply, efficiently, or well wants the government involved in it because that’s not what they do. Everything they do, they do slowly, poorly, and at a high cost compared to the market.

However, it still doesn’t feel like we’ve gotten to the crux of the problem, does it? But, how can that be? After all, we’ve already talked about incompetence AND malevolence. So, what else is there?

Well, there’s us. You, me, and the rest of us along with a perverse set of incentives we’ve created.

Not consciously. Not deliberately. But, yet and still, those incentives for bad political behavior are now there.

What incentives? How did they get put in place?

Well, over the last few decades, many Americans have moved to places where they feel more politically at home.

I see this all the time in Myrtle Beach. There are LEGIONS of people from New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania here. Some of them are liberal, but most of them are conservative. Meanwhile, you’re undoubtedly going to see some liberals moving away from abortion or trans restrictions in red states. We can’t quantify exactly how much of this has happened, but it has been going on for several decades now and there is no question it has involved large numbers of Americans.

This certainly doesn’t capture the entirety of what’s happening, but it does show you the tip of the iceberg. It’s the number of “super landslide” counties where one party or the other took 80% of the vote. The Republican counties of this sort tend to be small and rural while the Democrat counties tend to be urban and contain large cities:

Of course, this sorting of voters goes far beyond these 685 counties – and it’s also happening online because of social media. After all, how does social media work for MOST people? They follow people they like, right? Who do most people like? People who already agree with them. In fact, a lot of people will unfollow someone for saying too many things they disagree with. So, people are sorting themselves offline AND online.

This is very important, because as Bill Bishop notes in his classic book, The Big Sort, the more ideologically similar a group becomes, the more they naturally move to the extremes of whatever their position happens to be:

There have been hundreds of group polarization experiments, all finding that like-minded groups, over time, grow more extreme in the direction of the majority view. The lesson for politics and culture is pretty clear: It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re a frat boy, a French high school student, a petty criminal, or a federal appeals court judge. Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes. ...Like-minded groups create a kind of self-propelled, self-reinforcing loop. Group members send signals bolstering existing beliefs as they all vie to stand out as the most Republican or most Democratic in the group. And that sets off a new round of unspoken competition.

You can quickly and easily see how this might impact the stances of politicians.

A politician in a state that’s 65% Republican is probably going to need to take very different positions to get elected than a Republican in a purple state that’s 50/50 or worse yet, a Democrat-leaning district. Similarly, Joe Manchin couldn’t get elected in AOC’s far left-wing district just as AOC couldn’t get elected as a senator in a more centrist state like West Virginia. This ideological sorting has a huge impact on our politics.

Additionally, in a polarized state or district, the only way a politician can generally be defeated is by offending activists and powerful interest groups in their own party, who will fund a primary challenger to take them out. Now ask yourself what kind of people are activists or are in interest groups? Usually, people who take extreme positions on certain issues and aren’t inclined to compromise.

What this means for politicians in America is if they want to keep their jobs, they’re going to feel a lot of pressure to take extreme positions and they will have very little room to maneuver or reason to care what the other side thinks.

Know what type of person has no moral problems with doing this and, as a bonus, is great at telling the sort of lies that help a politician get elected? Sociopaths. Not all politicians are sociopaths, but my guess is you wouldn’t see a lot of difference between the number of sociopaths in Congress and prison – and in both cases, the morals of most of the other people there probably aren’t that good either.

Now combine all this with the fact that over the last few decades, the American people have become less moral, more selfish, less civic-minded, and almost indifferent to the flaws of politicians as long as they “vote the right way,” and you end up with moral-free politicians who are perfectly content to put the country last to keep their cushy jobs or benefit their side.

If you don’t believe that, think about some of the most egregious bad government decisions we started the article with and think about them in these terms.

Why don’t Democrats want to secure the border? Because they believe that if they can let millions of illegals into the country and turn them into citizens one day, it will help lock them into power.

Why do so many liberal cities go so light on criminals? Because it’s popular with the interest groups and activists on their side. The liberals who don’t live in gated communities or have bodyguards may not like it as much, but what are they going to do, vote for a Republican over it? Nope.

Why has our government been content to watch the Fed inflate the dollar? Because it benefits them in the short term. When that new money pours into the economy, it gives the economy a temporary bump and makes it more likely to get them reelected. Then, down the road, they can blame corporations, claim inflation is fine now, or pass an “Inflation Reduction Act” that has nothing to do with inflation and claim it fixed the problem.

Why doesn’t the government worry about our unsustainable level of spending? Because in actuality, controlling government spending would require cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Defense, among other things, and that’s wildly unpopular. Ultimately, even Republican voters wouldn’t support that. Besides, if the country collapses, the politicians will just move to Europe. So, while you're slugging it out in the streets for a bag of rice from an aid truck, they’ll be sipping wine at a cafe in Paris.

Why are Democrats working so hard to confuse children about their gender? Not only do their activists approve of it, but they assume that the more kids they turn gay and trans, the more of them will vote Democrat one day.

In other words, if you assume that you’re dealing with conscience-free politicians whose only concern is keeping their jobs, even if it hurts the country or destroys a lot of people, many of the things our government is doing that seem insane on the surface start to make perfect sense. No incompetence is needed. No deliberate attempt to destroy America. Just immoral people willing to sacrifice you, me, our kids, and our country to stay in power.

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