Ismail Djalilov
is an American journalist originally from Azerbaijan.
He is the host of “Straight Talk” channel on YouTube,
where he interviews politicians, diplomats,
and other newsmakers on developments in Azerbaijan
and wider Eurasia in Azerbaijani, Russian, and English.
Note: The original version of this article is written in English.
The Drunk Flight Crew
It is easy to blame the internet for mobilizing the Aggressive Amateurs and normalizing anti-intellectualism. But let’s be honest: The electorate is not entirely crazy to be angry. As an even-handed witness, one must look past the vitriol to understand the wound. For decades, the Western public has watched a professional class of technocrats—the "Insiders"—not only preside over a slow-motion decline, but justify the economic policies that underpin it. They saw a financial system that privatized gains and socialized losses, and a foreign policy establishment that spent trillions on quagmires while the domestic infrastructure frayed at the seams.
In Europe, this betrayal was written in the suffocating language of David Marquand’s "Democratic Deficit" (from his book Parliament for Europe).
Citizens watched for decades as power migrated from their national parliaments to opaque commission meeting rooms, creating a system of "governance by procedure, without accountability." The Brussels consensus treated national identity as an administrative inconvenience and economic anxiety as a lack of education.
The ultimate fracture, however, was distinct and visceral. The appointed "Insiders" in the meeting rooms threw the doors wide open to uncontrolled migration without a coherent strategy for integration, effectively gambling with the social cohesion of their own nations. When citizens expressed anxiety about the formation of parallel societies or the strain on public services, the technocratic elite did not offer solutions; they offered judgment, dismissing legitimate concerns as bigotry.
We are now paying the price for that deception. To the average voter, the pilots and the cabin crew were not just detached; they were drunk and partying in the cockpit, tossing the contents of the duty-free cart to the eager and joyous business class in an eerie silence of the engines.
The tragedy, however, is not the diagnosis; it is the prescription. In a spasm of electoral rage and overtaken by the self-preservation instinct, the coach class passengers committed a fatal category error: they decided to elect new pilots, convinced that their lack of flight hours was not a liability, but a blessing. We have confused being anti-establishment with being anti-competence.
We must be hyper-clear on this distinction. A corrupt technocracy is a problem to be solved; a "gut-based" kakistocracy is a suicide pact. However flawed, erroneous, or self-serving the pilot may be, he is statistically safer than a well-intentioned passenger with no training, no understanding of the aircraft's complexity, but a "fresh angle" and a lot of confidence. The pilot might steal the duty-free liquor, but the amateur will miss the runway.
The Outsider Fallacy
The logic driving this shift is seductive but suicidal. It rests on the "Outsider Fallacy"—the belief that ignorance is a form of purity. But this "purity" is often just a mask for profound civic illiteracy. We are handing the controls of the state to a movement defined by what it proudly refuses to understand. We see this in the American voter who cannot name the three branches of government, let alone define the "isolationism" they now demand—viewing it not as a doctrine, but as a refusal to send their children, once again, to die in places they cannot find on a map. We see it in the Brexiteer who voted to dismantle a trade relationship they did not understand, only to frantically Google "What is the EU?" the morning after. And we see it in the AfD supporter who demands a "sovereignty" that physically cannot exist in a globalized economy.
This ignorance makes the electorate easy prey. As voters recoil from real and perceived deceptions, a large portion of them across the Western world assumes that anyone untainted by the stain of prior governance must be the answer.
In reality, the opposite is true. Modern governance is not a test of intuition; it is a discipline of technical mastery. When an amateur enters this arena, they do not "smash" the machine; they are either eaten by it, or they cause catastrophic, cascading failure.
The irony of history repeating is not lost on the "lucky" who remember the Soviet dogma. It was Lenin who famously addressed the idea of the kukharka—the cook—governing the state. Yet even the Bolsheviks, in their utopian fervor, conceded that a cook could not run the government without extensive training. In a strange historical twist, the current populist movement ignores a constraint that even the Soviets accepted. They believe the cook—or the real estate developer, or the cable news host—is qualified to dismantle the complex administrative machinery not despite their lack of knowledge, but because of it.
We are witnessing a dangerous transition in our institutional philosophy. As economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson outlined in Why Nations Fail, successful societies are built on "Inclusive Institutions"—systems that extract talent from the entire population based on merit. The West’s historic advantage—a cognitive architecture that allowed the best ideas and the most competent people to rise, regardless of their background—now seems not only questioned from within, but assaulted and marked for demolition.
But the rise of the populist "Kakistocracy"—rule by the least competent—marks a voluntary slide toward "Extractive Institutions." We are purging the technocrats, dismissing them as "elitist," and replacing them with loyalists whose primary qualification is their fealty to the tribe or its leader. This is not a victory for democracy; it is the "Third-Worldification" of the Western power structure. For those who fled the East, this is not a theoretical slide; it is a recurring nightmare.
The Asymmetry of Competence
This internal decay carries a catastrophic geopolitical price. In a global landscape defined by ruthless competition, we are unilaterally disarming our intellectual state machinery in favor of placating the electorate's anger du jour and aligning with its "gut instinct." We are betting not only the hegemony, but the survival of the West on a strategy that creates a terrifying asymmetry of competence, while our adversaries operate with cold, professional precision.
This is the political weaponization of the Sovereignist Illusion. We are elevating leaders who possess the terrifying confidence of the Geopolitical Amateur—figures who promise that the solution to complex, continental problems is a retreat into a 19th-century fantasy of the nation-state. They look at a world dominated by civilizational superpowers and believe that a mid-sized European country can compete alone, simply because they lack the depth of historical knowledge to understand the scale of the game.
Imagine a possible scenario: On one side of the negotiating table sits the European "Anti-System" leader—elected on slogans of national greatness, armed with grievance and a disdain for the "Brussels machinery." On the other sits the career intelligence officer, a man whose entire professional life has been dedicated to the recruitment of assets and the manipulation of psychological vulnerabilities.
This scenario, at this stage, might feel more visceral in some parts of the West than in others. However, the electoral winds propelling it are blowing in the same direction, differing only in speed and intensity. The danger is not merely that the amateur will fail to make a deal; it is that he does not understand the game he is playing. His counterpart sees a target profile to be managed, a volatility to be exploited. We are sending a player who bluffs on instinct to a match where the opponent has already memorized the board.
The Roulette Wheel of History
Prioritizing "gut feeling" over expertise transforms the democratic process from a system of governance into a game of Russian Roulette. For a time, a nation may survive on momentum. Every election cycle, we might spin the cylinder and get lucky; we might elect a leader who, despite a lack of experience, possesses the humility to learn. But a system that relies on luck is not a strategy; it is a gambling addiction. And eventually, the house always wins.
The terrifying reality of our current moment is that we are no longer spinning for a Lincoln. The mechanism of our politics, stripped of the guardrails of merit and fueled by the dopamine loops of social media, is now calibrated to select for the loudest, most destructive voice in the room. We are drifting toward a scenario where the electorate—morphing into a modern-day Roman mob—cheers not for the statesman who secures the grain supply, but for the gladiator who burns down the arena.
This delusion is so potent that it blinds the mob to reality. They cheer for "Outsiders" who are often the ultimate beneficiaries of the very system they claim to despise—billionaires, aristocrats, and career grifters masquerading as men of the people. The electorate is so desperate to send a wrecking ball to the "Insiders" that they don't notice the wrecking ball is aimed at their own house.
The bread-and-circuses addicted crowd demands a show, and the system obliges by elevating a modern-day Caligula—a figure of pure, unchecked impulse who views institutions not as pillars of stability, but as obstacles to his whim. The danger is not just that such a figure is incompetent; it is that his incompetence is shielded by the mob’s adoration. To them, his erraticism is proof of his "authenticity," and his destruction of the state machinery is seen as a victory against the "elites." They do not realize that when Caligula threatened the Senate that he would make his horse a consul, the joke is not on the Senate; it is on the Empire.
