Idiocracy Predicted Our World, But Not in the Way You Think
Mike Judge's cult classic turns 20 and remains prescient about how we live today, especially outside of politics.
September 1 marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Mike Judge's cult classic Idiocracy, a time-travel comedy in which a dimwitted and lazy Army librarian named Joe Bauers wakes up 500 years in the future to find himself the smartest man alive in a world gone horribly wrong. As a voiceover intones at the start of the movie, smart people increasingly put off having kids, resulting in a precipitous, uninterrupted, and compounded "dumbing down" of the population. Combined with an emphasis on physical comfort—everyone wears some version of athleisure and then-unknown Crocs for footwear—"the intelligent" became "an endangered species." But Joe eventually saves America by replacing the ubiquitous use of a salty sports drink called Brawndo ("the thirst mutilator!") with water in industrial agriculture.
Despite a tiny budget of around $2.4 million, a rushed production schedule and mixed reviews, the movie, cowritten by Judge and frequent collaborator Etan Cohen, quickly became a shorthand for an America that seemed to be getting dumber and dumber at an accelerating rate, especially in the political arena. By as early as 2008, people on message boards were asking, "Who here thinks we're well on our way to Idiocracy becoming reality?" The November 2008 issue of Reason features a review of the utterly forgotten film Swing Vote titled "Idiocracy Now!", and in 2015 Matt Welch dubbed Donald Trump "the Idiocracy candidate." No explanation in either case was offered, or necessary, a sign of the film's cultural relevance.
Idiocracy is an explicitly political movie, with Joe (played by Luke Wilson) quickly coming to the attention of the former professional wrestler who resides in White House, President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews, clad like a combination of Afroman and the late Hulk Hogan), known to punctuate his press conferences with bursts of machine-gun fire. Despite being released by 20th Century Fox, a running gag is that Fox News is anchored by a buxom babe and topless male bodybuilder who flexes his pecs while reading headlines (shades of Naked News, which went live in 1999, just a few years prior). By the end of the movie, Joe has succeeded President Camacho in the White House. Any sentient being watching the 2024 Republican National Convention—especially the moment in which Hulk Hogan tore off his own shirt and declared "Let Trumpamania run wild, brother!"—would have to compare that spectacle to Idiocracy. The same goes for this summer's UFC Freedom 250 mixed-martial arts event at the White House. And, in all honesty, former President Joe Biden's dementia, former Vice President Kamala Harris' endless word salads, and headlines like this one about former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner.
Yet for all that, the deeper reasons that Idiocracy still resonates go beyond politics and into our contemporary culture of fetishizing fertility rates (up or down), branded content, lazy thinking, and general social disinhibition. Not all of these things are always bad, but we live in a world of social mores few would have imagined even two decades ago. In 2022, science vlogger Hank Green, wrote that given the film's opening sequence discussing general intelligence, "Idiocracy is, at minimum, implicitly pro-eugenics." Eh, probably not, especially given how terrible the high-IQ couple who bicker onscreen at the start of the movie come across; Trevor (138 I.Q.) and Carol (141) are as plainly risible as the lower-scoring people with lots of kids. If these are the smart people, we are probably better off with fewer of them, especially compared to midwits like Joe, who is at least a decent human being.
Which isn't to say that the future in which Joe awakens isn't a hellscape of overwhelming corporate sponsorships and blandly repeated slogans that are invoked like religious cliches or cult affirmations. "Welcome to Costco. I love you," say greeters at the warehouse store which has metastasized to infinite proportions. Whenever the sports drink Brawndo, which fully owns the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission, is invoked, someone inevitably follows up with some variation of "it's got electrolytes, what plants crave." Starbucks serves up sexual favors (e.g. Gentlemen's Lattes) alongside coffee drinks, as does H&R Block (which offers "tax returns and relief"). Texas-based Fuddruckers has become Buttfuckers, and the West Coast burger chain Carl's Jr., known for its founder's conservative politics and hyper-sexualized commercials, has changed its tag line from "Don't bother me, I'm eating" to "Fuck you, I'm eating." After being appointed secretary of the interior by President Camacho, Joe earns the devotion of his idiotic fellow cabinet members by invoking the hackneyed catchphrase of Lee Iacocca, who was credited with saving Chrysler from bankruptcy in the late 1970s: "You lead, follow, or get out of the way." And by asserting that he can talk to plants.
The most popular show on TV is Ow! My Balls! (think Jackass or Judge's own Beavis and Butt-Head, but with less subtlety or insight into the human condition), starring Hormel Chavez, who is hardly alone in being named after some kind of brand or product. Beyond President "Mountain Dew" Camacho, there are characters such as Tylenol Jones, Frito Pendejo, Dr. Lexus, and Beef Supreme. Which seems increasingly on the nose in an America in which parents are, according to the Social Security Administration, naming their kids after gun makers such as Wesson, Remington, Colt, Ruger, and Winchester.
Most distressing is not simply the mental dullness of Idiocracy's future, but the open hostility toward any sort of intellectual pretense or even basic literacy. Joel Miller has rightly questioned apocalyptic warnings that we are officially done with reading as a society, but there's no doubt that reading and writing have been downgraded by the culture at large for decades now. When the conservative Wall Street Journal opinion page is defending AI-generated slop on the one hand and progressive academics are defining plagiarism downward because it suits their immediate needs in a given culture-war battle on the other, we're enacting our version of Idiocracy.
Joe's first speech as president hits home in 2026 more than it did in 2006, if only because we're 20 years older and almost certainly dumber as a society. Throughout Idiocracy, the easiest putdown any character can make is to call someone gay—a lazy epithet that has all but vanished from popular discourse except in the far reaches of the manosphere.
"There was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!"
All crudeness aside, Joe's call for renewal would be welcome from elected officials and culture figures today. Idiocracy explains too much of our world not to take it seriously.
