The following article, How the Left Perfected the Art of Lowering the Bar and Then Tripping Over It, was first published on The Black Sphere.
We were all initiated into the same childhood cults of make-believe.
We fervently believed in a jolly, fat man who breached international airspace annually to deliver toys though the chimney. Next, we bought the story of a winged, mammalian fairy who paid cold, hard cash for discarded biological waste products. These were our first lessons in suspension of disbelief, a necessary magic trick of youth where the payoff. Presents under the tree, a dollar under the pillow; worth the willing ignorance. The true mark of maturity was when the scales fell from our eyes, the ruse was revealed, and we joined the ranks of those in the know. We put away childish things.
But what happens when the government, the most powerful force in our lives, refuses to grow up? When it not only perpetuates the magic act but actively lowers the standard for what constitutes a convincing trick, betting that you’ll be too distracted, too demoralized, or too dumbed-down to notice the man behind the curtain isn’t a wizard at all, but a bumbling bureaucrat with a god complex?
This is the grand, tragicomic arc of the modern Left: a political movement that prides itself on lofty, utopian ideals of excellence and equity while simultaneously engineering a society where the only thing that’s truly excellent is their ability to lower every standard to the point of meaninglessness. They haven’t just moved the goalposts; they’ve paved over the entire field, sold the stadium for scrap, and are now insisting that watching a game of checkers on a broken phone screen is the same thrilling experience. It’s a breathtaking act of prestidigitation, a sleight of hand that swaps competence for credentialism, merit for mediocrity, and national dignity for a participation trophy handed to a nation that didn’t even know it was in a race to the bottom.
From Santa Claus to the State: The Magic Trick That Never Ends
The childhood parallels are almost too perfect. The government-as-Santa-Claus model is a classic. It promises gifts (entitlements, stimulus checks, student loan forgiveness) funded by an infinite, mystical workshop (the taxpayer) run by elves who never sleep (the IRS). The Tooth Fairy government swaps your hard-earned tooth (paycheck) for a shiny coin (a tax return or a social program), performing a magical transaction that obscures the sheer volume of teeth it’s collecting to fund the operation.
A mature populace, one that learned the truth about St. Nick, would see this ruse for what it is. They’d demand transparency, sustainability, and actual results instead of fairy tales. But the Left changed the rules of the game. The magic show must continue, even if the magician performs like third-grader who just go his mail-order magic kit. Questioning the magician remains a greater sin than the magician’s obvious, fumbling incompetence. The state, in their view, must be seen as a benevolent, all-knowing entity, even when it’s clearly being run by the Keystone Cops.
To maintain this illusion, you can’t have a populace sharp enough to spot the rabbit move in the hidden area in the hat. You need a citizenry trained to applaud the act, no matter what.
This requires a deliberate, multi-generational project of degradation. It’s not enough to occasionally elect a fool; you must build a system that cultivates fools, celebrates them, and protects them from the consequences of their own folly. You must, in essence, become a connoisseur of the lowest common denominator.
A Case Study in Calculated Incompetence: The Biden Benchmark
No administration in American history has so perfectly embodied this crusade against excellence than the previous president. To call the Biden White House a “low bar” is an insult to bars everywhere; it’s less a bar and more a tripwire in a darkened hallway, set up specifically to watch the entire country faceplant.
Democrats didn’t just elect a man with a four-decade-long resume of being consistently wrong on every major foreign and domestic policy issue; they cheated to install a pathological liar whose falsehoods are so frequent and so bizarre they transcend politics and veer into clinical study. This is a man whose greatest talent is making gaffes sound like gospel to a media willing to play along. The media itself has occasionally been forced to admit the emperor has no clothes—like when CNN finally fact-checked his endless stream of fibs. However, these moments are treated as unfortunate slip-ups, not the defining characteristics of his presidency.
They sold Biden as a return to “civility and normalcy,” a soothing balm for the national psyche. The irony is so thick you could use it to patch potholes on I-95. This is the same man who openly threatened a sitting president with a physical altercation, called black voters who questioned him “not really black,” and whose family has operated a multi-million dollar influence-peddling scheme with terrifyingly hostile nations. If his name were Trump, the media would have spontaneously combusted from a decade of non-stop, apoplectic outrage. Instead, we get somber tones about his “empathy” as the country burned, the border vanished, and our global standing plummeted.
The Biden administration represented the ultimate expression of lowered standards. It’s not just that he may be the least intellectually curious and most cognitively compromised president in modern memory—a man for whom a coherent sentence is a high-stakes game of linguistic Russian roulette. It’s that the entire apparatus around him was a monument to nepotism, credentialism, and naked ambition disguised as compassion.
We have a First Lady who, in a stunning display of insecurity, clings to a “Dr.” title based on a dissertation that appears to have been ghostwritten by a fifth-grader who plagiarized it from a third-grader.
Then there’s the son, Hunter Biden, a walking, talking, crack-smoking testament to the perks of political privilege. His laptop wasn’t a October surprise; it was a whole season of a depressing reality show, revealing a man with more skeletons than a medical school anatomy lab. The Biden clan is the poster family for the Left’s ethos: rules for thee, but not for me. And they made it clear that standards are for losers who don’t have a last name that serves as a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The Pantheon of the Mediocre: A Historical View of Lowered Expectations
But let’s be fair. Low expectations by Leftists didn’t start with Biden. He is merely the apotheosis of a long-brewing philosophy. The Left has a rich history of elevating the aesthetically pleasing over the substantively sound, the politically correct over the actually correct.
They anointed Barack and Michelle Obama as “Black Camelot,” a regal duo whose style often overshadowed a substance that was, at best, contentious and, at worst, deeply damaging to the nation’s social fabric and foreign policy. His presidency was a masterclass in style over substance, a phenomenon I dissected almost daily during his tenure, and subsequently.
Where is that legacy now? What enduring policy, beyond gargantuan debt and a more divided populace, remains? He’s a footnote who is somehow still trying to write his own chapter.
And then there is the Daenerys Targaryen of the Bronx, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. AOC is perhaps the purest distillation of the modern Progressive: long on performative outrage and Instagram-friendly soundbites, catastrophically short on basic knowledge, historical context, or legislative competence. She is the political equivalent of a participation trophy: she shows up, says the lines she’s been fed, and is celebrated for her “authenticity” while being utterly out of her depth. She’s not a lawmaker; she’s a social media influencer who accidentally won a lottery seat in Congress and has been pretending to know what she’s doing ever since.
This is the pattern. From the failed presidential bids of hysterical figures like Hillary Clinton to the anointing of an empty vessel like Kamala Harris—a woman whose political career is a testament to sleeping her way to the top and whose competence is so lacking her own staffers reportedly shielded her from basic duties—the Left is drawn to the weak. It’s an anthropological marvel. As I’ve noted, “Leftists are the only animals who allow the weakest to lead.” It’s a political version of reverse Darwinism, ensuring the least capable survive and thrive at the top of the food chain.
How They Do It: The Playbook for Dumbing Down a Superpower
This isn’t an accident; it’s a strategy. The lowering of standards is a multi-front war:
The Education Front: They’ve traded the teaching of critical thinking for critical race theory. They’ve swapped phonics for “whole language” and rigor for “self-esteem.” The goal is not to create educated, skeptical citizens but to produce compliant, emotionally managed activists who trust “lived experience” over empirical evidence. The dumbing-down of curricula creates a perfect, pliable electorate, a topic I’ve tackled before in Common Core: The Government’s Plan to Stifle Genius.
The Cultural Front: Excellence is now “problematic.” Merit is “racist.” Hard work and success are signs of “privilege” to be taxed and shamed, not admired and emulated. The message is clear: striving to be exceptional is an act of aggression against those who choose, or are encouraged, to be mediocre.
The Linguistic Front: They corrupt language itself. “Equity” replaces “equality,” meaning equal outcomes must be engineered, regardless of unequal effort or ability. “Justice” no longer means a blind legal system but a racially weaponized one. Words are stripped of their meaning and repurposed as political cudgels, making honest debate impossible.
The hypocrisy is the point. They preen about “following the science” unless the science contradicts their narrative on gender. They demand “decency” while launching the most vile, personal attacks on their opponents. They claim to be for the “little guy” while jet-setting to conferences where they lecture you on your carbon footprint.
The arc of the Left is a tragicomedy of errors, a self-perpetuating cycle of failure where the only consistent success is their ability to convince enough people that failure is success. They’ve taken the magic trick of government—which an adult populace should see through—and convinced the audience that applauding the clumsiest magician is a moral virtue. They’ve sold us a tooth fairy that keeps the tooth, a Santa Claus that steals presents from kids, and a government that is “by the bureaucrat, for the bureaucrat,” all while insisting that anyone who points this out is a cruel, heartless Scrooge. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. The greatest trick the Left ever pulled was convincing the world that competence, excellence, and merit are social constructs designed by the patriarchy. They haven’t just lowered the bar; they’ve convinced a frighteningly large part of the country that there never was a bar to begin with.
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