by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I try to be a reasonable, easy-to-get-along with person. And, yet, sometimes I talk to someone whose political hot takes are so confoundingly stupid that I grow exponentially exasperated. Let’s go through some recent dumb hot takes I’ve heard.
American Poor People Are Ungrateful
The premise of this dumb hot take is that the average poor person in the United States would “be in the in top 10% anywhere else in the world.” The purpose of this hot take is to suggest that American poor people are ungrateful mooches who want to drain hard working Americans of their tax dollars. If only they would realize how good they had it, the theory goes, American poor people would be seen and not heard. And they wouldn’t complain when the social safety net was cut, because, lulz, they already have it too good, anyway.
There are a lot of problems with this hot take. The most obvious of them is it’s just not very well thought out. Just because someone, in relative terms, is doing well if you directly compare them to someone in a 3rd world country, doesn’t mean that in practical terms their life is all that great. There is this thing called the cost of living. This hot take is sooo fucking dumb it enrages me just thinking about it.
Professional Politicians Should Be Eliminated
This dumb hot take posits that if only we stopped paying politicians and got a bunch of good old boys working in Washington part time, then “real America” would finally get the government it wanted. There is so much wrong with this hot take that, again, I grow enraged. The more glaring dumb aspect of this hot take is it has some sort of wistful longing for the good old days of early America when White People Were In Control. The fatal error of this hot take is it ignores the massive amount of corruption that would take place if you didn’t pay Congress anything. Even the most seasoned pol in Washington is often a pushover for lobbyist. If all you had were citizen pols who swung by the House floor on their way to see Lynyrd Skynyrd play, all you’re doing is handing the keys to government to the permanent lobbying class.
America Is A Constitutional Republic, Not A Democracy
This is dumb hot take pops up now and again in American history whenever people like me start to grow concerned about the fate of liberal democracy. It was harped on a lot right before World War 2 and it’s seen a lot now in a lot of MAGA and MAGA friendly circles. To me, this is just backdoor autocracy. It’s what people like MAGA say when they don’t like the fact that a lot of people don’t like their policies and, as such, vote against them. These “Constitutional Republic” people want to do everything in their power to delegitimize the importance of voting. This argument arises, in part, because people like me are now very alarmed about the fate of our democracy so these people just lulz and say, “What are you worried about, we’re not a democracy.” The end result is their autocracy-friendly and just want their unpopular conservative policies to be implemented, no matter what.
The general take away from these dumb hot takes is there are a lot — A LOT — of people who have recursive political political views. They’re generally uneasy with the talking points of the center-Left and, as such, they pull whatever necessary out of their puts to justify what they already believe.
