Idiocracy

One idiot, one vote; or one idiot, twenty votes.

Eurovision has always been a canary in the coalmine of the world’s progressive stupefaction. In 1968, as the Beatles released Hey Jude and the White Album, Spain was celebrating its last Eurovision success with La La La. In 1975, as Bruce Springsteen released Born to Run, Ding-a-Dong was triumphing at Eurovision.

But while the quality of songs has, to the Goat’s crude and tinnitus-ridden ears, generally improved, the introduction of public voting has reminded us just how dumb some of the people are that we have to share the planet with. Last night’s contest, a generally dull affair of excessive lighting, chord and tempo changes, was won for the second year running by an overblown cod-operatic mess of a song impressively performed by a male soprano. But it was notable primarily for the bizarreness of the public vote. Also for the second year running, the UK received no votes from the public (so far, so sensible) but again for the second year running, Israel received the most votes from the public, for a bland, earnest ballad, creditably sung by a survivor of the October 7 atrocity. Israel topped the public poll in 13 countries, including the UK.

Opinion seems divided why this happened - whether these are sympathisers of Netanyahu’s regime, Jewish or otherwise, each voting up to the permitted 20 times to make a grim political point in a wholly inappropriate context, or if it’s some sort of votebot army organised by an Israeli regime famous for its technological prowess and which blew up thousands of Hezbollah pagers remotely last year, killing dozens and blinding hundreds of men, women and children. This time using their expertise less explosively. Your kettle may have voted for Israel twenty times and it didn’t even ask the billpayer’s permission.

A more plausible explanation is that people voted for Israel to “own the libs”, as they say in America, to deliberately goad the segment of the population somewhat troubled by pictures on the news of Israel’s beautiful, smiling contestant followed by reports of children being deliberately starved to death by her government.

I’m not getting into the rights and wrongs of whether Israel should be in it, but voting for them to deliberately annoy another section of the population seems particularly imbecilic, even worse than casting a vote for the execrable Estonian entry, Espresso Macchiato, which came second in the public vote.

Owning the libs often backfires, to a soft backdrop of ultra-miniature violins.

The Goat is a lib, crying out to be owned. I get it. I’m a smug, hand-wringing, middle class ponce who thinks he is better than us. I was one of the keenos in the fast stream, despised by the thicko slow-streamer herd who voted in their droves for Brexit and Trump. I get it. If I had been a slow-streamer I too may have become motivated by the deep-seated resentment my sense of inferiority had generated.

But when democracy gets hijacked by populists exploiting these sentiments we are in trouble.

It’s what happened in Brexit when we had “had enough of experts” and wanted to take back control of our borders. Not only has legal immigration ballooned (causing “incalculable damage to British society” according to our Prime Minister, a fresh anti-immigration convert) but it turns out that Brexit actually made illegal immigration worse because we lost the ability to return immigrants under the Dublin Regulation. Chris Philp, former Tory immigration minister, admitted this week in a leaked tape that up to half of the illegal immigrants that entered the UK could have been sent back pre-Brexit but could not be afterwards. So yet again Brexit had exactly the opposite effects to those predicted by its proponents. It’s worth sharing this video again to marvel at just how wrong it has turned out to be in everything it says.

Presumably the architect of Brexit, Mr Nigel Farage, is now in utter disgrace, after so gravely misleading the people of Britain? Er, no, he is now the bookmakers’ hot favourite to become the next Prime Minister, and his party recently won 31% of the vote in the local elections. He’s a man you can sit down and enjoy a pint with. That’s what people say. It’s a strange criterion to decide who is best to entrust your future to as leader of the country. If you are having a triple heart bypass and have a choice of surgeons, do you choose the rather humourless specialist surgeon who has performed hundreds of similar operations successfully, or your mate down the pub who is a real laugh? Given recent evidence, I’m honestly not sure how many people would answer the question as I once would have expected.

The whole world over, people are voting for far-right populists and probably quite often for terrible reasons. In Europe, as well as voting for Israel and espresso macchiato, voters are favouring far right parties. Romania is set to elect a far-right President today Far right parties are already in power in Austria, Netherlands and Italy and share power in Finland and Croatia. AFD came second in the German election and it is likely that the next French President will be a National Rally candidate, either Le Pen or Bardella.

That’s not to say all these voters are necessarily idiots (though undoubtedly some of them are). Europe does need to get a handle on immigration, even if these far-right populists are shamelessly scapegoating immigrants for the economic woes of people struggling with the effects of globalisation and aging populations.

But we can agree on one idiot and 77 million others who need to take a very close look at themselves. Donald Trump received over 77 million votes in the 2024 presidential election. 77 million people, who had reached the age of majority and were nominally of sound mind, actively exercised their democratic rights with the intention that Donald Trump would become their president. In an upside scenario, children of the future will have to study this phenomenon, like the origins of the first world war, the rise of Hitler and the commissioning of Mrs Brown’s Boys, so we can say “never again”.

But I rather fear the downside scenario, in which there is a future American president so inept and loathsome that people look back with misty-eyed regret at the halcyon days of the great Donald J. Trump, his face carved into Mount Rushmore and on the $100 bill and his name replacing John Dulles’ at Washington airport (all proposals from Trump’s lackeys this year).

You should watch the movie Idiocracy, a 2006 film in which an average soldier is volunteered for an experiment to wake up a year later, but due to a mistake wakes up 500 years later to find America has become hopelessly stupid and he is the cleverest man alive. More intelligent people have been too concerned about the future to reproduce whereas those of low intelligence have reproduced copiously and survived, now that we lack natural predators to thin the herd. It’s now not far off a documentary, especially the amusing scenes featuring the President’s moronic cabinet, who are not dissimilar to the current crew. The fictional president is alas a considerable improvement on the real one currently in situ.

I’m not sure what the solution is - as Churchill said (repeating something already in parlance) “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time”. But was democracy designed for this era of goldfish-attention spans where people can’t even be bothered to watch whole YouTube videos and so YouTube Shorts has emerged? Where the ubiquity of sophisticated search tools like ChatGPT means that the whole concept of what’s true start to get eroded - see TruthRIP.

Setting basic general knowledge or mental competency tests is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect a fast-streamer to come up with, calculated to spur on the masses from owning the libs to full-on libtard massacres. We might try to crack down on lies and misleading statements by political candidates? Good luck with that. In Trump’s first term he apparently made 30,573 false or misleading claims. It would have been easier to count the times he wasn’t lying. If there was a full crackdown on lies he and most other politicians in the world would hardly open their mouths. Now there’s an idea.

But surely we need to do something as we sink further into a world of idiocy. We may end up in a second dark age where skills and knowledge are gradually forgotten. Already in large parts of the country basic DIY skills are dying out with your dad’s and father-in-law’s generation. In Idiocracy, the hero urged his time-travelling companion to go back in time and warn people of the imbecility that lay ahead, encourage them to read books and use their brains before it was too late. And maybe stop watching Eurovision and stop your kettle voting. It’s not too late, yet.