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One could argue that this has extended to other domains, with exhibit 1 being Kamala Harris. Like she must be pretending to be dumb right? I need to find a video of her in court at some point, there is no way the California attorney general was this incompetent.
Kamala Harris is a skilled politician, which requires a decent amount of intelligence and willingness to deal with unpleasant drudgeries. She's good at politics not in a "how do I get people to like and vote for me" but in a "how can I exert maximal leverage with my current assets to achieve my ends." Public display of intellectual rigor is either not helpful or actively harmful in doing this (relative to her other strengths), so you don't see that kind of display from her.
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Yeah, without knowing these people personally it really is impossible for me to say with confidence. I've interacted with some pretty high profile people over the last few decades, and in my experience the "upper echelons" of American life include a surprising number of obviously-not-that-bright people, even though very-obviously-bright people are over-represented in their ranks. Really plainly stupid people are rare among millionaires and billionaires and successful politicans and lawyers and academics and so on... but listening to partners from multi-million dollar law firms fumble soft-ball questions from sympathetic appellate justices is always a sobering experience. To say nothing of reading arguments from SCOTUS justices who apparently can't even do high school math! It really goes to show that if you do something for long enough, and happen to be in the right place at the right time, eventually people will assume you must have some merit--and then they will give you more "merit."
Basically this SMBC comic but extended beyond graduation speakers, to all paid speakers, to all lawyers and politicians and academics and the whole damn PMC, I guess. It seems fruitless to complain about it because it appears to just be human nature, and so presumably adaptive in some way.
But there does seem to be a genuine asymmetry where right-wing jurists are still trying to, at minimum, pay some lip service to reason and principle and the actual empirical facts that underlie our successful intergenerational institutions... while left-wing jurists embrace "winning is the only thing that matters" via the postmodernist deconstruction of those institutions. Whether they're doing so deliberately, or inadvertently as a result of uncritically absorbing their political milieu, in the end scarcely matters. This has always been my objection to the political left, even though I am often more aligned with the vision of the left than the right. If I can only make sense of your jurisprudence by assuming that you are either stupid or dishonest, then it makes very little practical difference which of those things you are.
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