Clever stupidity generally takes this form:

Clever stupidity, then, when it's plainly visible, offers unmasking moments for its viewers. Clever stupidity puts in plain sight what would otherwise appear merely clever. We avoided the above cartoon scenario earlier in world history when the elites believed, in the era of JFK, that a rising tide lifts all boats. But in the Seventies, with neoliberalism, they gave up on that notion in favor of markets where we could buy stuff we didn't need or something else advertised in Thomas Friedman's books. Our elites are now working to create a future like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and so no wonder it made billionaire Oprah's reading list.

Richard Wolff finds it in Europe:

And then we have Emmanuel Macron, who says he will consider protecting allies with France's nuclear arsenal, in which case we ought to ask: what physical acts will be necessary to "protect" anyone by using a nuclear arsenal? If the bombs are set off, the Coriolis effect sends the radiation around the world until it shortens everyone's lifespans.

Of course, in the US you have Elon Musk's attempt to privatize the Federal government into his own hands. What masks the stupidity of Musk's approach, however, is the Democrats' cleverly stupid response. Omigod Ukraine! They blather with one voice. As if Ukraine were not already lost, and as if they hadn't created the billionaires which made the Musk attempt possible. Other people's megalomania is awesome, you see, and you can later pat yourself on the back for not having been its direct victim, or for having destroyed your own reputation in the history books as a result of being complicit (see e.g., Iraq, Gaza).

When it comes to reflecting upon what clever stupidity is, I keep thinking of those early James Bond movies, especially "You Only Live Twice," screenplay by Roald Dahl. The scene toward the end is where there's this great battle between the forces of Tanaka, a Japanese secret agent of some sort, and the obedient flunkies of the megalomaniac Ernst Stavro Blofeld. I have to imagine, fifty-seven years hence, that watching this movie was a formative moment for me. I was five.

Watching it makes you wonder: why would anyone work for Blofeld or for that matter any Bond supervillain? It seemed cleverly stupid when the movie came out in 1967. Sure! Supervillains can get anyone to fight for any idiot cause. Of course, it's Roald Dahl authoring the screenplay, and so it's going to be full of clever idiots like the stupid kids in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." They had such clever names: Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregarde, Mike Teavee. Reading the book you had to wonder what act of malice brought them and their parents into being -- well, besides the fact that they were products of Dahl's twisted mind.

Donald Trump and Joe Biden seemed like Roald Dahl creations. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, appeared merely as a student who couldn't pass a public speaking class but who was running for President anyway.

Here's a quote attributed to Jay Gould, the robber baron, in 1891: "I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half." That sort of cleverly stupid statement, it would seem, is what inspires class solidarity today.

In a magazine called Woman's Own, former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once famously said, "who is society? There is no such thing." This was back in 1987, at about the time when the present day Democratic Party was forming its neoliberal core. It would seem that Western society's obedient response was to abolish itself, and so, later, you had books such as Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, which detailed the vast expansion of loneliness in life in the West. Our saving grace as a society is that the task will never be finished.

I have to think that all of this clever stupidity is really just a fascination with mechanics, and so you have films like "Jackass." I find all of this stuff of no interest except insofar as it might be interesting to inquire as to why such movies were made in the first instance. My high school physics teacher was uninspiring -- but at least I learned about levers and such. Actually I learned that stuff in middle school.