Welcome to Lord of the Flies
When Children are in charge ask any grade school teacher about that.
The Criminal acts of the Boys of the American Politics- Lord of the Flies
There’s a certain archetype every grade school teacher knows too well — the bad little boy. Not the violent bully or the tragic loner, but the other one — the loud, bright, disruptive one. The boy with a gift for breaking the rules just far enough to make the whole room laugh but not quite far enough to get sent home. He’s the boy who learns young that chaos can be a kind of power, especially if the adults can't figure out how to stop him without making themselves look ridiculous.
Lately, two of these boys — now full-grown and dangerously influential — have been holding the American experiment in their sticky little fingers. One is the former president, still pulling the fire alarm in the hallway every chance he gets. The other is the world's richest man, who seems determined to prove that even the smartest kid in the class can still turn out to be a menace.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk — our twin disruptors-in-chief — have spent the last decade testing the same unspoken question: What happens when the bad little boys grow up and never stop playing the game?
The Lord of the Flies Theory of Democracy
William Golding's Lord of the Flies has been assigned reading in American schools for decades, partly because it flatters the adult imagination. It suggests that civilization is something fragile, something the grown-ups hold together with rules and punishments. Take the adults away, the novel warns, and the children will inevitably turn savage.
But what Golding leaves out — and what anyone who's ever been in a classroom knows — is that the descent doesn't always happen by force. More often, it happens through mockery. The most dangerous child in the room is not the brute, but the boy who figures out that you can dismantle authority simply by making everyone laugh at it.
Musk and Trump — both billionaire disruptors, both perpetually online — rule in exactly this way. They wield the same crude, juvenile instinct: If you can't win the game, make the game itself look stupid.
Trump, of course, is the more obvious case. From the moment he rode down that gold escalator in 2015, he’s governed not like a politician, but like the loudest boy in the back of the bus. His entire persona is a living middle finger to the idea of adult behavior. His insults, his tantrums, even his legal defenses — everything about him says: You can’t stop me, because the whole thing is a joke anyway.
Musk works a subtler variation of the same trick. He'll spend an afternoon tweeting about Martian colonies or Neuralink brain implants — the bright shiny promises of the future — and by nightfall he's posting juvenile memes or giggling over his own half-baked conspiracy theories. He can pump up the stock price of his own trillion-dollar company one day and post cartoon fart jokes the next, all with the same Cheshire grin.
Where Trump attacks institutions head-on, Musk just undercuts them with a shrug — a kind of cosmic eye-roll. He’s not trying to burn down the classroom. He’s trying to convince everyone that the teacher is an idiot.
The Teacher's Dilemma
The genius of the bad little boy is that he forces authority into a trap.
Ignore him — he keeps acting out.
Punish him — he plays the victim.
Engage with him — he makes a fool out of you.
That's exactly the dynamic playing out across the American landscape right now.
Take Trump's endless stream of legal troubles. Every indictment, every lawsuit, every failed attempt to hold him accountable seems to inflate his power rather than contain it. He breaks the rules, gets caught, and then uses the whole spectacle as proof that the rules don't really matter.
Musk operates on the same frequency — daring regulators to rein him in, then crying censorship or bureaucratic meddling when they try. Whether he's breaking SEC rules or turning Twitter into his own personal ant farm, the whole performance is designed to make the grown-ups look fussy and small.
The Problem with Chaos
What Golding understood — and what we seem to be forgetting — is that chaos can be incredibly seductive.
A bad little boy might be a nightmare to the teacher, but to the other children, he's often a kind of hero. He’s the one who breaks the tension of the classroom. He makes rebellion feel fun.
That’s exactly the role Musk and Trump are playing in the larger democratic drama — the two most powerful men on the American stage acting out a shared fantasy of freedom without responsibility.
It's not hard to see why it works. Democracy, after all, is an exhausting business. It demands patience, compromise, delayed gratification — all the things children hate.
The bad little boys offer an escape hatch: What if none of it matters? What if you can just say whatever you want, do whatever you want, break whatever rules you want — and still end up at the top of the pile?
Can Democracy Survive Its Own Children?
Every democracy depends, at some level, on the idea that people will eventually grow up — that the little boys pulling pranks in the back row will one day take their place among the adults.
But what if they don't?
What if the bad little boys just keep getting richer and louder, while the rest of us slowly give in to the pleasure of watching the whole structure wobble?
There's a chilling moment at the end of Lord of the Flies — when the grown-ups finally arrive to rescue the boys from their self-made chaos. The naval officer looks around at the smoking wreckage of the island and asks, almost in disbelief:
"I should have thought that a pack of British boys... would have been able to put up a better show than that."
The boys — wild-eyed, half-naked, smeared with the ashes of their own small civilization — can’t quite explain what happened.
If democracy is that island, we haven't yet reached the rescue scene.
The bad little boys are still in charge — still throwing rocks at the rules, still making the whole game feel stupid.
But there's no grown-up ship on the horizon. Stop worshipping the Oligarchs
Carl Cimini writes about whisky, politics, and the American condition. He hosts the podcast Elegant AF.