Geoffrey Pullum and I have not always agreed on everything. I like to comment, and he hates comments. But in a recent language log post, Mr. Pullum mentioned talking to his son about “the ghastly crew of obnoxious multi-millionaires who dominate the newspapers, and how they keep threatening to achieve success even in the political arena.” And that’s when his son turned him on to the fact that we are living in “the age of the assholocracy.”
At first, I thought I agreed with Pullum. It really does seem like there are a ton of assholes in power these days. And it seems there are even more assholes vying to get into power. It’s easy to believe that the age of the assholocracy is upon us.
But then I realized that we’ve always been living in an assholocracy. Assholes in power has long been the rule, not the exception. Just open a history book. Those things are chock full of assholes. It’s a wonder there’s room for anyone else. Or, even better, go ask someone who’s not a white middle-class male. They’ll tell you all about the assholes in power.
Mr. Pullum uses Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi, and Vladimir Putin as examples of the assholocracy we’re living in. But these people are downright pussies (to continue the anatomical analogies) compared to previous media moguls and Italian or Russian leaders. Is it possible we’re at the end of the assholocracy and the start of the pussypublic? You wish. (Again, just following the anatomy metaphor.)
Instead, I think these assholes are starting to be assholes to their own kind – the other white middle-class males – at an equal rate that they historically were assholes to other kinds of people. The assholocracy has gone into self-destruct mode, or what political scholars refer to as a dicktatorship.
