Tues­day, Alamo Draft­house Cin­e­ma and Art House Con­ver­gence — a the­ater chain and net­work of inde­pen­dent movie hous­es, respec­tive­ly — will team up with League of Women Vot­ers chap­ters around the coun­try to offer screen­ings of Idioc­ra­cy, Mike Judge’s 2006 com­e­dy in which Amer­i­ca kills itself with its own stu­pid­i­ty. Pro­mot­ing the screen­ings, the the­ater chain’s web­site announces that, ​“We are approach­ing the end of the most bizarre, absur­dist pres­i­den­tial race in U.S. his­to­ry. Over the past months, thou­sands have ques­tioned in social media whether Idioc­ra­cy was actu­al­ly a documentary.”

'We are approaching the end of the most bizarre, absurdist presidential race in U.S. history. Over the past months, thousands have questioned in social media whether Idiocracy was actually a documentary.'

The sub­text isn’t hard to make out: Amer­i­ca might just be dumb enough to elect Don­ald Trump, and Idioc­ra­cy shows that fate car­ried to extremes.

The film’s dystopia rests on a kind of anthro­pocene the­o­ry of democ­ra­cy, where­by people’s igno­rance is to blame for the down­fall of soci­ety and polit­i­cal insti­tu­tions. The sto­ry begins with an extend­ed pitch for eugen­ics, chid­ing the rich for not pro­cre­at­ing more and the poor for doing it (lit­er­al­ly) too much. Evo­lu­tion ​“began to sim­ply reward those who repro­duced the most,” the film’s pro­logue states, ​“and left the intel­li­gent to become an endan­gered species.”

From there, the plot is most­ly an acces­so­ry to its set­ting. The U.S. gov­ern­ment finds a sta­tis­ti­cal­ly aver­age Joe (Luke Wil­son) to test a tech­nol­o­gy that could hiber­nate the best and bright­est the armed forces have to offer, indef­i­nite­ly. When the project gets dis­band­ed, Wil­son and his coun­ter­part in the exper­i­ment, a sex work­er (played by a crim­i­nal­ly under­uti­lized Maya Rudolph), are left sleep­ing for 500 years. Acci­den­tal­ly res­ur­rect­ed by an avalanche of trash in 2505, they awake to find them­selves the smartest peo­ple on earth.

Basic gov­ern­men­tal func­tions have devolved into dingy pri­vate-pub­lic part­ner­ships, and the Amer­i­can flag has mor­phed into a Carl’s Jr. logo. Fields are fed with a Gatorade-like sports drink whose own­ers bought both the Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion and the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion dur­ing a bud­get cri­sis, ​“enabling them to say, do and sell any­thing they want.” The crops, con­se­quent­ly, are dying, and the econ­o­my is in sham­bles. The pres­i­dent is a pro­fes­sion­al wrestler and cab­i­net posi­tions are hand­ed out to con­test win­ners. The prob­lem isn’t the state or cor­po­ra­tions, per say, but that human­i­ty is col­lec­tive­ly too dumb to function.

Con­text here is key. Idioc­ra­cy emerged at the tail end of the George W. Bush years, when the leader of the free world dared to ask, ​“is our chil­dren learn­ing?” But while Bush’s gaffes have lived on past his tenure in the Oval Office, it’s eas­i­er to for­get that W’s home­spun appeal was part of what land­ed him there. The Con­necti­cut-born, Ivy League-edu­cat­ed son of a for­mer pres­i­dent, the younger Bush found a way to speak to an Evan­gel­i­cal base that was eager to see a politi­cian rep­re­sent con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues on a nation­al stage. Whether Bush had a claim to those val­ues or not is up for debate. Regard­less, he helped solid­i­fy the reli­gious right’s pow­er in the nation’s high­est office, and made it easy for coastal lib­er­als to blame two dis­as­trous terms on Bush’s idio­cy and a class of rur­al Repub­li­cans who might as well have been from a dif­fer­ent planet.

In his own way — with his own base — Trump may be play­ing a sim­i­lar role for the ​“alt-right,” the band of Inter­net trolls that skirts a thin line between neo-fas­cism and the Pro­to­cols of the Elders of Zion. That said, while alt-right mem­bers might be the most deplorable seg­ment of Trump’s base, they aren’t exact­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tive. At least for now, their num­bers are rel­a­tive­ly small. Like any good pop­ulist, Trump is a voice for the voice­less — in this case, large­ly mid­dle-class white men who’ve seen their for­tunes decline after NAF­TA and the Great Reces­sion. Build­ing on the foun­da­tions of both the reli­gious right and the Tea Party’s rev­o­lu­tion, Trump offers easy scape­goats, on the one hand, in immi­grants and the polit­i­cal class — and, on the oth­er, a mod­el of doing pol­i­tics that seems to run against every con­ven­tion in the book.

As his rise has shown, Trump is imper­vi­ous to gaffes. His per­sona is about dis­man­tling the idea that gaffes should exist. Win­ners in Trump’s mold speak loud­ly, often and off the cuff, a counter to Belt­way insid­ers’ cal­cu­lat­ed talk­ing points. It’s why Trump is also immune to pun­dits’ digs that cen­ter around fact-check­ing and appeals to rea­son. Trump knows that pol­i­tics has nev­er been about telling the truth. And his poli­cies — ground­ed only loose­ly in real­i­ty — may be the last thing that attract vot­ers toward him.

“Trump is sound and fury and gar­ble,” crit­i­cal the­o­rist Lau­ren Berlant wrote recent­ly. ​“The Trump Emo­tion Machine is deliv­er­ing feel­ing ok, act­ing free. Being ok with one’s inter­nal noise, and say­ing it, and demand­ing that it matter.”

The log­ic of Idioc­ra­cy is that Amer­i­ca has trans­formed into some­thing grotesque and for­eign, over­run by those oth­er Amer­i­cans, who are all feel­ing and no rea­son. It’s okay to laugh because they’re poor and wrong and most­ly white — and they prob­a­bly don’t go to upscale the­aters like the Alamo Draft­house Cinema.

But the right’s ascen­dance — in Bush and in Trump — is a project hatched by the one per­cent, intend­ed to pit ​“real Amer­i­ca” (in Sarah Palin’s words) against lim­ou­sine lib­er­als. Divi­sion among the 99 per­cent makes it eas­i­er for the 1 per­cent to get things done, like dis­man­tling unions and wel­fare and start­ing wars.

With Trump polling almost neck and neck with Clin­ton in near­ly every swing state, there’s nev­er been a greater need for uni­ty. The prob­lem with Idioc­ra­cy screen­ings 10 years on isn’t that lib­er­als will pack into fan­cy the­aters to blow off some cathar­tic steam. It’s that it’s the wrong dystopia for under­stand­ing where we are in 2016. Life under Trump will look more like Mad Max than Idioc­ra­cy, and the only way to stop him might be to grow some empa­thy for the so-called idiots across the aisle and, togeth­er, punch up — not down.