Todd Gitlin

Opinion contributor

This is a tale of two cynics: Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. They’re equally volatile and dangerous, but they afflict their two nations differently.

Trump is a president who says a hurricane is threatening Alabama when, actually, it isn't; who believes wind turbines cause cancer; who purges references to climate change in government reports; and on, and on.

He doesn’t read, and he likes to be surrounded by ignoramuses. Few of his lieutenants are appointed for their expertise. Dr. Ben Carson, a former neurosurgeon, knows nothing about housing policy; Betsy DeVos is the Education secretary who visited the nation’s largest school district and didn't stop at a single public school.

And few of Trump’s notions are original: They are the fancies of his evangelical-oligarchic-Fox News alliance, who believe that climate change is either nonexistent or part of the cosmic order of things, that America is “infested” by nonwhites, that open-carry laws save lives, and so on.

Trump is a weirdo among his peers

But among eminences, Trump stands out as a weirdo. His contempt for knowledge would not fly at the top of a serious business. His economic advisers are outliers. And his reversals cause whiplash. When Trump named Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson as secretary of State, for instance, he commended him for his “tenacity, broad experience and deep understanding of geopolitics.” When he fired Tillerson after a year in office, he tweeted that Tillerson was “dumb as a rock” and “lazy as hell.”

By contrast, the wild spins of Britain’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, do not betray his class. They express its follies and foibles.

Johnson and most of his predecessors learned the arts of debate, slapdash generalization and high-level schmoozing at Oxford. They cultivated “debating skills and ambition without a cause,” in the words of the Financial Times’ Simon Kuper. Eventually, the future anti-Europe campaigners would forge what Kuper calls “a cross-class alliance with (Brexit Party leader) Nigel Farage and the tabloids.” Johnson even knows how to go lowbrow, having recently boasted: “The madder Hulk gets, the stronger Hulk gets.”

Bluffing it and winging it

Such cocky men (almost entirely men) stand for an entire class that journalists James Ball and Andrew Greenway write about in their book, "Bluffocracy." They run Britain’s politics, civil service and media — “people who are bluffing, winging it, obsessed with process over substance, and dominated by short-termism.”

Ball has referred to Johnson’s career as “the politician-as-nihilist: a genteel version of Donald Trump’s post-truth politics, reliant on charm to get away with an approach to the truth (that) could be set out as flexible.”

Trump was once charming, I’m told, but he must have lost the knack. Certainly he never had the knack of argument. One difference between the British and American versions of fakery is that the Brits practice argument as a game. They tend to talk well and write well. Most attended fancy private schools (which, perversely, the Brits call “public”), before going on to Oxford, which serves as “the bluffer’s finishing school.”

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(Thus, en route to Oxford, Johnson headed Eton’s debate team.) They learn how to defend any old proposition. (In 2016, Johnson, still a columnist, prepared two columns, one published and pro-Brexit, the other unpublished and anti-Brexit, to be ready for all contingencies.) At Oxford, they acquire a style of knowledge that, for them, is “another form of trickery — intellect being a quality that should run a mile wide, if only an inch deep.”

Trump may be gone before Johnson

Actual skill and expertise are, in the bluffocracy canon, disposable. As Michael Gove, Johnson’s fellow Oxford University graduate and Cabinet minister, put it, “People in this country have had enough of experts.” Never mind that a University of Sheffield survey — real data — refutes his claim.

In the long run, the UK's bluffocracy may prove even more toxic and deeply rooted than our own political afflictions.

Anthony Barnett, writing in openDemocracy, cautions that Johnson is not really an insouciant free spirit. However slapdash his maneuvers, such as comic photo opportunities with a bull and a kipper, there’s an underlying consistency: "Their aim (is) to encourage us to lower our guard and regard his government as irrational bluster and boosterism. Whereas he and his hedge-fund backers seek to turn us into the playthings of deregulated capitalism.”

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In this sense, America could get off relatively easy. Next year, Trump may be discarded as a whacked-out disturbance — if, once defeated, he agrees to go quietly. Donald Trump doesn’t speak for a whole class; he embarrasses them as he enriches them. We have a Constitution, centuries old, and flawed, as it is. In principle, violations are punishable by Congress.

Boris Johnson’s crowd will prove harder to dislodge.

Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology, is chair of the Ph.D. program in Communications at Columbia University. Follow him on Twitter: @toddgitlin