Nekni, in the relevant left-wing magazine "In These Times" published in Chicago, an article by the famous left-wing author and journalist Hamilton Nolan appeared under the title "The Power of Dumb" or - as it is translated in the indispensable "Okno" , where the article is available in Macedonian - "The Power of Stupidity". In the article, Hamilton analyzes the stupidity that dominates the highest echelons of power, this time embodied in the re-elected American President Trump. "Facing the dawn of the Second Trump Era will require us to accept the uncomfortable truth that the Nonsense and the Important Things will soon merge into a single painful category of existence," writes Nolan, tying the silliness at the top of American politics to the rise of Donald Trump. . According to the author, it seems that the Important Things in the USA were tied only to Intelligence and Wisdom before 2016 - when Trump was first elected, and between 2021 and January 2025, when Trump will again sit in the Oval Office.
Because Nolan rather carelessly delved deep into my area of ​​expertise (readers are sure to be familiar with my capital work Critique of Pure Stupidity in 16 volumes of 1.600 pages each, published by the world-renowned Institute for the Study of Stupidity based in the capital of Macedonia Nord), I must note that his analysis suffers from acute amnesia, and therefore from severe methodological inconsistency. Namely, Nolan sees the phenomenon of stupidity at the top of power as if it was born a year ago, together with the first election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States. What's more, he considers stupidity to be a personal phenomenon, a trait of a person's character (and his chosen associates), but here he is also wrong: "Donald Trump is rude, overconfident, narcissistic, offended - a stupid person, who over time attracted to himself a field of asteroids, stupid allies, smaller versions of himself. His incessant drive to act without knowledge is stupid, as is his unwavering faith in his ridiculous reasoning. (…)He possesses a poisonous combination of great power and utter lack of responsibility."
As much as he is right in analyzing the president, the methodological error becomes more pronounced the more the author deals with individuals: "How did the most powerful nation in the world end up with a Fox News anchor as Secretary of Defense?" With a twisted anti-vaxxer as health minister? With a TV doctor who looks dangerously like a charlatan at the helm of Medicare, with a professional wrestler as Secretary of Education, with a small, failed sexual predator as Attorney General, with a billionaire, meme-poisoned bug king as Treasury Secretary?'' Hamilton Nolan, as if stupidity had entered the White House for the first or second time. But anyone who remembers a decade back will know well that stupidity and frivolity have long been the rule in the Oval Office, and that the last serious American presidents were Nixon and Carter, and with a little protection the era of Serious Presidents who recognized the Important Things might have barely to extend through the Reagan and Bush senior terms. From Clinton on, stupidity does not leave the most powerful house in the world, but the American society was also dumbing down somewhere at the same pace. So, contrary to Nolan's analysis, Trump is not the cause of the stupidity in the White House, but he is just one personification of it. America is not dumber because of Trump, but Trump is only a reflection of the state of consciousness of the majority of Americans, he is only their mascot.
The Age of Stupidity had already begun to erupt with the presidency of Bill Clinton. And here I do not mean the humiliating stupidity when he swore in front of the cameras that he had not had sex in the ovulation room (as someone maliciously called it at the time) with his young colleague Lewinska, when he probably convinced himself that his sexual organ was actually a state organ. No, Clinton started two monstrously stupid and harmful processes, which all these years shake and shape the geopolitical and economic situation of the planet and which caused the greatest damage to humanity after the Second World War: it is the aggressive expansion of NATO in the East, the new Drang nach Osten, which continued the criminal bombing and invasion of Yugoslavia (what was left of it); it also set a bad precedent with the occupation and secession of a part of a sovereign state, a precedent that these days turned into a NATO proxy war against Russia. The latter, on the other hand, foolishly escalated with American presidential decisions, so that today it represents the biggest security threat to the survival of human civilization. And the second nonsense of an unprecedented scale is the removal of regulations for the operation of banks, the famous Glass-Steige law, passed in 1933 after the collapse of Wall Street and the entire world economy. This second folly caused first the global financial crisis of 1998, and then brought the world to its knees in 2008 with the biggest financial stock market crash since 1929, a disaster from which the world has still not recovered.
About Bush Jr. I don't think I need to write at length, because it is already commonplace that he developed Clinton's interventionist policy to a paroxysm: he carried out a criminal invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, started wars that destroyed two countries and two societies, immediately killed approximately one million people, women and children, and set in motion the first million wave of refugees in the 21st century. If this is not monstrous nonsense of a cosmic scale, then it is a dark evil of cosmic machination. But I am inclined to respect Hanlon's maxim that never ascribe to evil that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
Barack Obama, who conquered the world with words and promises, and won the Nobel Peace Prize with his irresistible charm alone without lifting a finger for peace, ensured that no one was held accountable for the greatest fraud of the century, the banking financial crisis of 2008, in which introduced socialist solidarity for the fraudulent banks and gave them more than a trillion US public tax dollars to keep them from going bankrupt (and so they could split millions in bonuses) while millions of people stayed without their savings, homes and pensions. Folly or evil, you ask? He continued the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and during his tenure probably the most perfidious state-terrorist practice was perfected and expanded: the mass killing after weddings and funerals by drones, a practice that claimed tens of thousands of innocent civilian lives. Obama bombed and killed Gaddafi, starting the endless calvary in Libya that continues to this day, and he did the same with Syria, helping spark the civil war that is intensifying again these days. And yes, it was Obama who directed the 2014 coup d'état that overthrew the democratically elected president of Ukraine, Yanukovych, and it was his legacy that started the civil war in Ukraine, which, we all know, turned into a local war first - after the military invasion of Russia, to soon become a world war of NATO against Russia.
Trump has pulled off a champion streak of stupidity, starting with abandoning the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, then abandoning the United Nations Human Rights Council, then UNESCO, then the Paris Agreement to control carbon dioxide emissions and tackle climate change. , but also many others. Trump's streak of stupidity is enviable, but of a significantly smaller scale than his predecessors. Perhaps it can be said that he contributed significantly to the situation in Palestine turning into a war between Israel and the Palestinians in the occupied territories, but it is true that during his tenure he did not start a single war.
About Joe Biden, who is still the President of the United States, I can also be short and concise: with his ultra-stupid decisions and policies, he is responsible for causing and provoking, and endlessly escalating Russian aggression against Ukraine, just as he is responsible for enabling and directly participating in the genocide that the Israeli state is carrying out against the Palestinian population in Gaza. The dilemma of whether the reason for all this is stupidity or evil, I think is not relevant in this case.
In fact, for all these 35 years of stupidity, the world is ruled by an empire, by far the most powerful of all that has ever appeared on this beautiful but suffering planet, and according to Dieter Bonhoeffer's rule, whenever power reaches huge concentrations, stupidity strikes them cruelly and conquers with people.

(The author is an architect and university professor)