[American Thinker] You know the story: a man wakes up after a century-long bout of suspended animation to find... orbital colonies? Contact with aliens? Cheap universal fusion power? Nope — he finds a culture inhabited by ill-dressed goons speaking in monosyllables, with no understanding of history or the natural world or anything else, surrounded by shoddy, fake technology. The president is a dreadlocked idiot. The average IQ hovers around 65.Sure... you know that one. It’s Idiocracy, the comic film from 2006.
Except that it isn’t -- it’s "The Marching Morons," a 1951 short story by C.M. Kornbluth. That’s where the producers of Idiocracy got it, without acknowledgement, knowing that the current run of morons wouldn’t recognize it.
The theme and most of the details are identical: the intelligent and educated failed to reproduce, leaving the world to be populated by the subnormal. Except that while Idiocracy is slapstick comedy, "Morons" is high tragedy — in fact, tragedy of the highest sort, one that mourns the loss of an entire civilization.
The people running Kornbluth’s moron society behind the scenes are highly intelligent and preternaturally decent. But they’re at the end of their string. They know that their society is reaching a state of collapse, and they know what must be done. But they can’t force themselves to do it.
But then the hero awakens. He’s from the 20th century, one of the most brutal epochs on record. And he’s an experienced ad man, Don Draper in person, able to persuade anybody to do anything. In short order, a solution is in the works that will rid the world of the bulk of the morons... and it even pays for itself!
We’ve haven’t reached the state of Idiocracy or "Marching Morons" as of yet. But from the evidence of the midterms, we’re a good halfway there.
We now have two mentally damaged individuals in high office in this country, neither able to function as an independent adult. How did they get there? By being elected... with the addition of other means. But it was the votes that created a situation where those "other means" could work.
In other words, the moron vote played a large role. Tens of millions of voters who can’t recognize a mentally crippled individual when they see one. Who witness electoral cheating in front of their eyes as clearly as that of a three-card monte dealer but don’t see it for what it is. Who simply can’t make the connection between the close of critical pipelines and gas costing six bucks at the pump. Who could not define "inflation" at gunpoint, don’t understand that it’s always caused by government policy, and view it — if they view it at all — as something of an act of God. Who have utterly forgotten the peak state that this country enjoyed only two years ago. Who think "we’re going to make you eat bugs," is a joke. Who are easily persuaded, easily manipulated, easily confused, and easily run into the slaughterhouse.
How did it get this way? In truth, the term "morons" isn’t strictly accurate. Many — even most — of these people are of average intelligence, and should be able to figure their way out of a rat maze with little problem. The difficulty arises due to the fact that they have been relentlessly dumbed down for the better part of a century by an utterly corrupt educational system backed by bureaucrats and pols acting in full approval of the process.
This started with the progressive reformer John Dewey, probably the most influential educator on record. Starting at the turn of the 20th century, Dewey set about to remake the entire educational system, at that point largely consisting of small, decentralized schools staffed by graduates of normal colleges.
It’s possible to access the curricula for those 19th-century prairie schools. Younger children were introduced to Greek and Latin, in the later grades joined by a modern language, were introduced to geometry and algebra early, with calculus for the older children. Literature was taught by accessing the highest canonical works. In other words, grade-school children were easily mastering topics that most college postgraduate students today would find impossible.