Kristina Basham is a twenty-nine-year-old model with 4.5 million Instagram followers largely based on her bikini photos. That is an assumption on my part. It might be due to her posts of inspirational quotes such as “Stay close to people who feel like sunlight” and “I’m looking for a moisturizer that hides the fact that I’ve been tired since 2012.” But I’m guessing it’s the photos, since BroBible, which is the bible for bros, featured her in their “daily sexy Instagram roundup” several times, whereas the Paris Review hasn’t run her poetry even once. According to her Instagram bio, Kristina plays violin and piano, is a “skincare guru,” and wants people to know that “I like to smile, smiling’s my favorite ☺”.
Scott Adams lives down the street from Kristina. He needed a model for his book, and being a nice guy who didn’t want to ask someone to smile who wasn’t really into it, asked her to pose for him. Though the photos never made it into the book, they started dating. Not long after, Kristina moved into his house. Where, to Scott’s great fortune, she never opened his book to see if there were photos in it.
A bikini-model girlfriend isn’t the main data point that makes me want to ruin Scott’s meal and ask if he’s having a midlife crisis. Neither is the fact that he posted shirtless photos of his six-pack abs on Twitter. Or that he’s got a man cave. Or started playing drums. It’s that his embrace of populism seems like buying a sports car. It’s living in the moment, embracing risk, unshackling from polite society. Supporting Trump is a line of political cocaine.
It’s also a shot of testosterone. Populism is a primal scream for primordial masculinity. It’s a call for action over thought, individualism over cooperation. It’s uncontrolled emotion: fighting, insulting, bragging, sleeping around, and bragging about the attractiveness of your wife even though you’re also sleeping around. It’s everything the eggheads in salmon pants are not. Scott told me that the Democratic Party is symbolically female and committed to finding fairness. Republicans are metaphorically male and understand that fairness is both impossible and disincentivizing, so instead of justice they aim for power. On the last day of the 2016 Democratic National Convention, Scott tweeted: “Did the Democratic convention make you feel like a weak and useless white male? That’s why I didn’t watch.”
I lower my head both to avoid eye contact and reveal my thinning hair. “Is it possible you’re having a midlife crisis?” I ask.
Scott is not a man offended by questions. It’s a big part of his charm. He’s interested in difficult discussions. Scott says that he might be having a midlife crisis, but it’s not what brought him to his political convictions. It’s that his old movie wasn’t as good as his new one.
As he explains the plot of his movie about Trump, it starts to seem less foreign to me. In it, a scrappy trickster takes on the uptight powers that be. That’s a movie I love. I hate the uptight powers that be. The smug, mannered class and their tiny problems caused me to hate Pride and Prejudice in high school. I winced at a cappella groups in college even before I learned the incomprehensible fact that women find them attractive. Making fun of authority was my raison d’être, a phrase I loved making fun of. On a trip to DC in high school to a Junior State of America convention, I disrupted the mock election between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis with a third-party campaign for David Letterman. I arranged the letters on the sign in our high-school lobby to quote Paul Simon: “When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.” When I interviewed Scott for Time in 1999, one of my questions was “If you wanted, you could draw better than that, right?” I used to be a real dick.
At our Stanford orientation the entire incoming class listened to a speech from co–student president Ingrid Nava, who berated us for ignoring the plight of Latino gardeners working on campus. I was pretty sure I wasn’t responsible for these inequities because I had been a member of the elite for only three days. I later wrote an extremely offensive column for the Stanford Daily that, luckily, the editor yanked from the paper. I wrote it from Ingrid Nava’s perspective, donning a Carmen Miranda fruit hat in my photo and beginning with “Hate. Hate. Hate. Anger. Anger. Anger. Salsa. Salsa. Salsa.” I am glad I no longer insult ethnic groups in print and transgender people in photos, but I miss taking on whatever establishment is put in front of me.
“You and I have a similar brand. We mock the elite. That’s part of our job,” Scott said. “The amount of fun Trump supporters have is huge. You think you’re having one conversation but one side is laughing and one is crying. The memes are great. I have a meme guy. Some are too mean so I don’t put my name on the memes.” Mean memes do sound fun. When people point out typos in his blog posts, Scott leaves them in to troll the finger-waving grammar elitists. Trump’s staff members go one step farther and purposely insert grammatical errors when they tweet for him because it twists up the elite. Who doesn’t love making grammarians angry by breaking every prissy, can’t-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition rule you can think of? This is not how my stuffy elite friends think. My college friend Martha Brockenbrough, who wrote an anti-Trump children’s book called Unpresidented, founded the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar. Someone else I know has a T-shirt that says I’M SILENTLY CORRECTING YOUR GRAMMAR. Maybe I am watching the wrong movie merely because it’s the only one playing in my self-serious neighborhood.
“You would love this side,” Scott says to me.
He says this in a nice way, with no belabored breaths through a black mask, but it still makes me dislike his movie. It might be more exciting than mine, but it’s got a way bigger chance of ending with the destruction of a planet. I have become conservative in the truest sense, advocating for small incremental improvements and against attacking the system now that I’ve seen places that don’t have a system. I have lost my punk. I’d never ask Scott if he could draw better now. I’d never write that self-aggrieved, salsa-salsa-salsa column now because I’ve learned to control my MRI-diagnosed racism. I’ve tamped down the instinctual fear that people in Miami, Texas, expressed about another group gaining power.
As a tween I often giggled uncontrollably. So much was foreign and improbable: death, dismemberment, the word pussyfooting that I still believe the vice principal of my middle school baited me with when asking why I was late to the cafeteria. Those things now seem real. People I love have died. I’ve known people who got dismembered. And, thanks to the Internet, I’ve seen women pussyfooted. The world seems fragile and I want trustworthy, trained people running it. I want that more than I want it run by people who share my values or act like me. I want that more than I want to be funny. I want that more than I want great memes.
Walking down Main Street after lunch, Scott gets a call from a producer at Fox News. People from Fox call often, since he has a knack for delivering the most provocative take on that day’s news in his morning coffee lectures. A month after our lunch, he’ll buy a suit at Men’s Wearhouse for a meeting with President Trump in the Oval Office. “I’m the most successful political commentator in the last two years,” he says after finishing the Fox News call, “without any experience.” This was the third act in Scott’s elitist disillusionment. The pundits, pollsters, and politicians were wrong about the election and he was right. “From when I was young, I thought I would be an influential person in the world, simply by being a reasonable person. That would be rare and valued,” Scott says. It’s the populist version of a children’s fairy tale: He was chosen not because he had the DNA of wizards but because he was average. Innate reasonableness is his superpower. And superheroes don’t need training.
I wonder how much Scott believes in his own political skills. How much does he believe that expertise is unnecessary?
“Could you be secretary of state?” I ask.
Absolutely not, he tells me.
I am greatly relieved. We at least agree that someone who only recently ventured outside the country for the first time, is disinterested in foreign policy, and spent his career drawing funny pictures shouldn’t be the most powerful nation’s top emissary. Then Scott adds, “I lack the memory and stamina.”
On my list of why the Dilbert guy shouldn’t be secretary of state, “memory” and “stamina” would be 234th and 235th. But they’re number one and two for Scott. Number three is: “And I wouldn’t like it. If you could imagine me in some job where you don’t have to memorize a bunch of world leaders’ names and travel around the world? Yes.” I fear we are a few years away from the Senate confirmation hearing for secretary of state consisting solely of the question, “Dude, you afraid of flying?” I ask Scott if he could effectively serve as secretary of education or housing and urban development. “Yes,” he answers. “Probably yes.”
A 2010 study found that 30 percent of college students had narcissistic personality traits, which is 50 percent more than in the early 1980s. The most common dream job in my son’s first-grade class wasn’t doctor or firefighter, it was YouTuber, which is an especially lame dream since it’s something they could have done right then. It’s not because I live in LA, either; it was true for my nephew’s first-grade class in New Jersey. It’s not only young people: my mom’s email signature is “To thine own self be true,” which is Shakespearean for “Fuck everyone else.” Once you consider yourself a special person, it’s a small step to believe you’re special at everything. We confidently boast to our TV screens that we could have made a better decision than the coach of an NFL team or the president of the United States. This is not at all true. Since 2000, during each party’s first presidential debate, I try to calculate if I would do a better job than anyone onstage. Of the sixty-five candidates, I’ve guessed I could govern better than four of them, and only one of those four became president.
People’s overestimation of their abilities has been compounded by the fact that technology reduced barriers to entry. On a screen, a blogger’s thoughts on Middle East affairs look similar to a New York Times column written by a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. The punditry Scott broadcasts from his phone looks the same as analysis from a former White House employee on CNN. In an astonishing display of hubris, a lot of people post homemade pornography. I cannot imagine how confident you have to be to assume strangers want to see you have sex. I know that no one wants to see me having sex. Not even Cassandra, based on how quickly she turns out the lights.
Narcissism has been destroying truth. Liberals have been dangerously eroding the word truth when they use it instead of perspective or side of the story in the phrase “sharing your truth.” On college campuses, believing in science itself is questioned because it has been used by those in power to oppress others: phrenology to justify racism, nutrition to shame fat people, and psychology to institutionalize gays. In its place, professors teach truths based on personal narratives that can’t be questioned by people outside the author’s tribe because they cannot know the truth of that group’s experience. Scott’s two-movies theory is the reigning philosophic outlook. It was originally called perspectivism by Friedrich Nietzsche and it states that due to the limits of our dumb brains, we can only see from our point of view and not from an objective position, so truth is unknowable in a practical sense. Everything is equally true and false. Every fact is a cat in Schrödinger’s box. Or as Scott writes in his book, in an aphorism Nietzsche would admire: “Facts don’t matter. What matters is how you feel.”
That idea has smashed truth into enough snowflake-shaped shards for everyone to have their own. I know how easy it is to sledgehammer truth. Not because I’ve watched it nearly destroy journalism. Because I’ve met the people gleefully doing the demolition.