Don't underestimate ridiculous
Incompetence and preposterousness make dangerous people seem harmless... until they aren't
In 1981 neo-noir classic Body Heat, directed by Lawrance Kasdan, the district attorney interpreted by Ted Danson says to the shyster lawyer played by William Hurt: “You turned your incompetence into a weapon”. This line stuck in my mind when I first saw the movie decades ago — and came back to me last week, while I was reading the article “What the Press Got Wrong About Hitler", by historian Timothy W. Ryback, in The Atlantic.
Ryback writes that serious journalists who interviewed Hitler before his ascendance to power left the room feeling relief — because they saw that the guy was a monster, yes, but also a complete idiot, a bumbling moron who'd never achieve anything. He tells of a German newspaper that published a cartoon of Hitler inside the grave of Nazism, the demise of his political ambitions — one week before he was made chancellor.
In Brazil, we had a similar situation with the election of former president Jair Bolsonaro. The guy spent decades in the House of Representatives as a kind of bad joke, elected and re-elected by a clique of right-wing extremists and what we call “dictatorship widowers”, ex-military and police types who missed the days they could rape and beat and torture at will without being hassled by stuff like due process or human rights. He was, literally, the butt of humiliating pranks played on him by late-night Jackass-style TV shows.
And then, BANG! The man becomes President. I remember the first time I heard from people I know and whose intelligence I respect that they would vote for him. I believe it was the closest I ever got to knowing what it means to be in the Twilight Zone. How could you?
Intelligent and non-sociopathic Bolsonaro voters tended to rationalize their decision in one of three ways, or a mix of them: (1) he was just a front and would be “contained” — like the King of England, he'd reign but not rule; the “real” government would be a cadre of technocrats and other “serious” people who, unfortunately, needed to associate with a repugnant populist clown to get into power because most voters, you know, are stupid and love the circus; (2) he wasn't really serious in all his rantings and threats, it was just for show and, if he were serious after all, the Constitution, the courts and the harsh realities of policy-making and political bargaining would stop him from doing any real harm; (3) nothing could be worse than a return to power of the economically-deluded, woke-infested and morally-bankrupt Workers Party.
History shows that all three hypotheses were fantastically, epically wrong. The “containment” one was just quaint; the “he really doesn't mean it” was delusional; the “nothing could be worse” just underestimated the depths of human depravity. But, in hindsight, it was exactly Bolsonaro’s obvious intellectual limitations and bumbling style that gave all three a veneer of plausibility.
People thought they could keep him distracted, trying to eat ice cream without shoving the cone on his own eye while ranting about gays or communists or whatever on YouTube, and in the meantime, the “serious” men (they were almost all men) would attend to the business of ruling the country.
He used his incompetence as a weapon! And a majority of voters fell for it.
On a personal note, I shouldn't have been surprised when I saw smart people buying into all that crap. Three decades of fighting against pseudosciences really familiarized me with the “it's harmless because it's ridiculous” fallacy; every time I write something about astrology or homeopathy, someone from the intellectual mainstream pops up to tell me I am wasting my time because — you know? — nobody takes this crap seriously enough to be harmed by it.
But they do. People lose job opportunities because HR doesn't like what Virgo is supposedly doing in their astral charts; children suffer unnecessarily (or even die) because common bacterial infections are treated with what amounts to magic water. Forgetting that the laughable can be lethal enabled the worst criminals and caused the biggest tragedy of the last century. And it may as well doom this one.