Why Ridiculocracy?
If you’re reading this, you’re not crazy. Things are going off the rails. Pundits can debate whether this is America’s golden age, or if we’re slipping into autocracy, but one thing is clear: we live in a Ridiculocracy. Because, really, you can’t make this shit up. Except, we’re going to try.
Hi, I’m Aaron, a former State Department and Intelligence Community Middle East specialist, Ph.D. historian of Saddam Husayn and other autocratic regimes, and author of Ridiculocracy.
I’m also an innovation enthusiast who thinks government needs to work better — a lot better — for the people it’s meant to serve.
Broadly, these two desires — to 1) avoid autocracy and 2) improve government — are the driving forces behind my satire.
Theory of the Case
A “ridiculocracy,” as most political scientists define it, is “a polity that has slipped into the absurd, unmoored from its founding values and common sense.” Political factions care more about demonizing and “winning” against their rivals than besting foreign adversaries. They would rather cling to political power than transfer it peacefully. They are more loyal to their faction’s leader and ideology than to the country, rule of law, or welfare and wants of its people. In a ridiculocracy, truth is what the leader or party says it is, even against all evidence. It is a political system and class that lacks integrity and is often corrupt.
Ridiculocracy is a satirical newsletter that seeks to provide comic relief from the absurdity of American politics. It is founded on the premise that to avoid slipping into autocracy and restore faith in American democracy and government (the failures of which have facilitated our authoritarian moment), we need to lower the political temperature and laugh at the farcical depths we’ve fallen into. Then we can return to building the more perfect union that our Constitution envisions, together.
