are your country's politicians getting louder and dumber? check your gini index...
New research shows that the worse a country's income inequality, the more tolerance it has for buffoons in charge, and sometimes, actually prefers them.
Watching the histrionic antics of Ohio Republican Jim Jordan pretending that what he does is government oversight — while in reality he’s creating outrage content for Fox News and Newsmax — makes you think that the only thing he should be overseeing is a locker room. Unfortunately, he tried that job too, and the results were… not great, to put in mildly. So, if this weapons grade clown with three capital k’s isn’t even fit to be a bathroom monitor, then what, pray tell, in Khorne’s hemorrhoids is he doing in federal office, where his legislative output is zero at best?
Believe it or not, the answer is income inequality. No, seriously. As it so turns out, the higher income inequality a country experiences, the more tolerance its citizens could have for incompetent leaders, and in some cases, they might even prefer to have a gaggle of idiots in charge. Yes, I know, that doesn’t seem like it would make sense in any way, shape, or form, but when you consider the responses from the test subjects in the experiments, you can see why they’d lean that way.
So, first and foremost, I should point out that this was a study involving 1,907 people from the UK and China given seemingly hypothetical situations which were based on real world political issues, and asked to rate important attributes about who they want in office from different positions in increasingly unequal societies. As the inequality went up, the subjects started to see more of their options as more likely to be abusive and exploitative at worst, or uncaring and apathetic at best. Rather than see a choice between status quo and progress, they thought in terms of “who’ll fuck me over less?”
Worse yet, the results seem to match the shift towards authoritarianism, populism, and clownish politicians in nations where income inequality is growing. This is why economists, political scientists, and researchers who specialize in social psychology all say that runaway income and wealth inequality — as measured by the Gini Index — is corrosive to societies. They seem to quite literally unravel as citizens turn against each other and their leaders.
the double edged sword of political nihilism
There’s actually a term for the exact kind of government that often results from such an approach: kakistocracy. Translated literally from Greek, it means rule of the worst, and is used by political scientists to describe countries where positions of power are occupied by people like “Gym“ Jordan, or Margerie “Jewish Space Laser“ Greene, or Lauren “Grandma Beetlejuice” Boebert, or Matt (Pedo)Gaetz, or any of the rest of the absurd sideshow that grandiosely refers to itself as the Freedom Caucus.
But as we’ve seen over the last two years, there’s a major problem with the notion of putting idiots in charge of a government that doesn’t care about its people to prevent further looting. If they’re too stupid to exploit the voters, they may also be too stupid to actually govern in between trying to make spectacles of themselves, wasting the country’s time and resources on their absurd tantrums.
They’ve kept us balancing on the edge of shutdown, took weeks to elect a Speaker of the House in a series of votes during which America’s dumbest politicians performed their best impressions of a WWE heel’s pre-fight monologue, kicked the Speaker out, took weeks to elect another, and now want to kick him out for… uh… let me check my notes here… oh yeah, passing critical bills with broad bipartisan support, which is, you know, his job.
It may seem like going with the dumbest options is good in abstract theory, but a total shitshow in practice. Which prompts the question, what can we learn from what both science and our own eyes and ears are telling us?
Simply put, a government that doesn’t take care of its citizens and refuses to provide them the basics for a comfortable life and reasons to be confident about the future is going to lose legitimacy with voters. Instead of voting being a civic duty, it becomes an offensive act, a way to rage against fellow citizens, a way to punish politicians who let it happen by electing living caricatures in their place, or a way to burn it all down by deliberately making the most destructive choices possible.
a country that works together, stays together
When my foreign friends ask me what’s going on with America today, I tell them that it’s actually very simple. The government hates its people, and its people hate it right back. Weird how that happened when one of the ruling parties’ base openly rejects the very fundamentals of civilized society, and its politicians are busy reenacting the Satanic Panic with just a splash of Blood Libel thrown in for extra bitterness, huh?
And since so many of us no longer expect anyone in charge to give a damn, acting as if they rule rather than govern, we’re lashing out in all directions as research shows is an apparently expected reaction under the circumstances. What we get as a result is more dysfunction as hyper-competent looters like Lich… err… Mitch McConnell fight not only with Senate and House Democrats, but his own party’s MAGA circus.
No one wins except lazy access journalists dishing on the hot goss up on the Hill, and we get treated to insufferable social media know-it-alls who can’t wait to tell us how “The two party system is a scam, man! Why even bother voting?”
Yet, at the same time, roads still have to be paved, kids still need to learn how to read, and the fire department still needs to show up when something is ablaze. People still need society around them to function, which is the lesson learned by towns which at one point or another embraced hyper-libertarianism. Electing idiots, saboteurs, and shock jocks to state and federal offices is essentially repeating the same mistakes as those towns, but increasing the blast radius to tens of millions of people.
And this is why if we want to see a return to any sort of normalcy, with key offices in government occupied by reasonable, competent adults instead of evil, cartoonishly corrupt clowns or totalitarian wannabes, the average American needs to feel heard, safe, and respected instead of hanging on by a thread and watching their quality of life plummet further and further down the toilet every year.
See: Long, F., et al. (2024). Economic inequality reduces preferences for competent leaders. Personality and Social Psychology, DOI: 10.1177/01461672241235381