Fwd: The Worst and the Dumbest
ltrucks
From: Paul Krugman from Paul Krugman <paulk...@substack.com>
Date: Mar 27, 2026 at 9:16 AM
To: ltrucks <ltr...@gmail.com>
Subject: The Worst and the Dumbest
Watch now
For more like this, check out my YouTube channel
Transcript
Has the US military already been Kudlowized? Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. I’ll explain what I meant by that in a couple of minutes.
It’s Friday morning. The war is continuing. A lot of what’s happened in the Iran war has sadly not come as a surprise. The fact that there was no planning, that there was no plan B in case a decapitation strike didn’t do the job, that Trump’s people didn’t seem to have gamed out at all what would happen if their fondest wishes did not come true — unfortunately, that’s par for the course.
There was a famous book in the Vietnam years about how all that went wrong, about how all of the sort of brains trust around LBJ led us into that disaster, and it was called “The Best and the Brightest.” In this case, it’s obvious: Everybody knows that we’ve got the worst and the dumbest. So we knew that the thinking about strategy was going to be nil, that it was going to be all very ill-conceived.
The surprise, and it’s an unfavorable surprise, is that the U.S. military has not been doing too well either. I mean, obviously, you know, they can blow up anything they want. There’s no question that the U.S. has unchallenged superiority in all of the conventional aspects of warfare. There’s no Iranian Air Force for, you know, there’s no Iranian Navy in any conventional sense. Unfortunately, it’s not that kind of war. The failure to have a prepared response to the modern world of drones and inferior powers which nonetheless have the ability to do a lot of damage, has been a bit of a shock.
Now, admittedly, that is something that I, like I think a lot of people who are amateur followers of military affairs, was worried about watching developments in Ukraine. You couldn’t help but wonder whether the U.S. military, with its emphasis on overwhelming force, with its historic superiority in technology, was actually ready for this new world of kind of democratized ability to inflict damage. And there were some straws in the wind suggesting that we were not, that maybe just the historical record of overwhelming dominance had made the US military complacent. But it still comes as a shock to find that U.S. bases in the region appear to be sort of completely unprotected, unhardened, that the U.S. went into this thing sending, you know, multimillion-dollar interceptors to shoot down multithousand-dollar drones.
It’s been really kind of shockingly overwhelmingly, I’m not sure incompetent, but unprepared. It’s just shocking how unready the world’s greatest military seems to have been for a war that was in many ways prefigured by what’s been happening in Ukraine for several years now. So how did that happen?
I was motivated to do this video by a report in The New York Times about what Pete Hegseth has been doing to the military, about the passing over of promotions for officers who happen to be black or female. It’s just been this shocking sort of anti, reverse DEI, otherwise known as racism and misogyny. But in general, I think it’s pretty clear, not just that Hegseth doesn’t like women, doesn’t like non-whites, but also he doesn’t like smart people. He doesn’t like people who are competent at their jobs. He wants people who are into lethality and dumb shows of force, which is not a good thing in a 21st century military. But I had thought that this would take longer.
And I’m wondering whether this is just Hegseth or whether this is a process that has been underway. And of course, it’s now accelerated drastically under current management.
And so let me explain about Kudlowization. In places where I do know something, do know what I’m talking about, which is economic policy making, economic discussion, there has been a long-standing dumbing down on the right wing, a dumbing down of economic thinking, dumbing down of economic discourse. Which is a little odd because for an academic field, economics has a lot of conservative people, not extreme right-wingers, but kind of small government, low tax, deregulation.
That kind of comes with the territory. It’s not that it’s necessarily right, but the simplified models that we use in economics do tend to point you that way. We like simplified models in which the market is always right, and in some ways the line of least resistance is to say that the models are right, the market is always right. So there are plenty of people who, at least by conventional, by historical standards, would be considered conservatives. And some of them have spent, over the course of my professional lifetime, have spent a lot of time trying to be part of the Republican policy apparatus, have sought appointments in Republican administrations. But more and more, and totally in recent decades, have been frozen out.
It turns out that the modern Republican Party doesn’t want, say, Greg Mankiw. They don’t want moderately conservative, technically competent economists. They want people who have no idea what they’re doing. They want ideologues, not even ideologues, but loyalists, people who will say whatever it is they want, the party wants them to say. They want Larry Kudlow, Stephen Moore. They want the often wildly incompetent but reliable people who are reliable in part because they’re incompetent. Somebody who has a professional reputation, a professional skill set might be tempted to actually someday take a stand on principle, and that’s unacceptable.
So we have this kind of real extreme, not just political extremism, but complete lack of ability to do the job, which is almost, in a sense, incompetence is a job requirement.
And I’m starting to wonder if that hasn’t started to infect the military as well. Certainly the people that someone like Hegseth wants are people who believe in warrior ethos, who believe in lethality, who believe in muscles in an age when war is largely waged by guys staring at video screens. And it’s a technological war in which all of those things matter not at all. But anybody who is likely to think that is not this regime’s, this movement’s kind of guy.
Now, what worries me, I mean, how much damage could they have done in just 14 months? Well, maybe quite a lot, but when I talked with Phillips O’Brien a while back, he said that this rot has been underway for a while, that there’s actually a kind of a MAGA-esque faction even within the professional officer corps.
And we certainly seem to be seeing that. So it looks as if the worst and the dumbest are not just at the top of the political leadership. They’re not just on the diplomacy and strategic policymaking end, but even in the cutting edge of the military. And it’s terrifying. America as we knew it may just not exist, even in our military forces.
On that happy thought, have a great day.
You’re currently a free subscriber to Paul Krugman. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
Like
Comment
Restack
© 2026 Paul Krugman
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
Unsubscribe
