In school, there are functionally two types of Cool Teacher. On the one hand, you have the Cool Good Teacher: someone who excels at their job and makes their subject interesting, who keeps order without being a hardass and is fair without being a pushover, and who is possibly funny or personable to boot. This is the kind of teacher you might only see once or twice throughout your whole education, and if you're lucky enough to get one teaching your best or favourite subject, it can be a legitimately transformative experience: the sort of thing that solidifies a future career choice or lets you understand who you want to be.
And then, on the other hand, you have the Cool Bad Teacher.
The Cool Bad Teacher is not particularly good at their job, but they're decently charismatic: enough to charm other adults into looking past their professional failings, or to captivate a class of kids or teens. That being said, if their classes are interesting, it's not because they care about the material, but because they're willing to make a joke of it, as though they, like their students, are only present in school against their will. They're neither fair nor a hardass, but they're often capricious, and they have - or appear to have - obvious favourites. Crucially, they want to be liked, and they want to have power, which largely explains their MO: after all, it's frequently easier to impress children than adults, and the simplest way to achieve this is to give them what they want - even if it's bad for them - and make it seem like a favour.
The Cool Bad Teacher doesn't care if the class does little or no work. They'll let bullying slide, or even actively encourage it, because it amuses them, and because allowing the worst students to do as they please grants them power over the entire class, because the bullies are so delighted to be given free rein that they'll work with the teacher rather than against them, enforcing "order" against anyone who questions the setup. A truly corrupt Cool Bad Teacher will take this relationship a step further, illicitly inflating the grades of the worst kids or acting as their character witnesses when they misbehave elsewhere, because they see them, not as students, but as their lackeys, and it pleases them to have that level of control.
If a conscientious student tries to report the Cool Bad Teacher to another adult, then they'll play it off as either a vendetta, a misunderstanding or a one-time lapse while enlisting their favourites as witnesses to whatever false version of events they construct to explain themselves, after which the reporting student will be retaliated against. Their coolness comes from branding themselves as Not Like Other Teachers: they know school sucks, they're only here for a paycheck, and they just want their class to have fun, where "fun" means the bullies getting kickbacks, anyone trying to do the actual work getting mocked, and this singular class being treated as though it doesn't relate to any other classes, or the school experience as a whole, or anyone's academic future, because it's billed as a respite from all that. Do the work or don't: the teacher doesn't care!
Confronted with a Cool Bad Teacher, most kids will go along with it, at least at first. There's an illicit thrill to being allowed to swear in class; to hearing the teacher roast the shy kid who dared to put their hand up; to an authority figure agreeing that the school experience sucks. But at a certain point, the work starts to get hard, because they're not actually learning anything, and it's impossible to get the teacher to teach, because nobody wants to be subject to the social mockery that accompanies trying to get the teacher back on topic, and if they ask for clarification, the teacher sneers at them for needing it.
They're an easy grader for the kids in the middle and their favourites at the bottom, but for anyone trying to take it seriously, they'll nitpick, taking marks off for petty, inconsistent reasons, because they don't like the idea of smart kids or hard workers, and they especially don't like kids who won't revere them. By rights, they shouldn't get away with it. But they're so personable to the right people (passing the kids with the rich donor parents, making sure the star athlete keeps their grade up), and they always have a handy excuse, and if you go against them in the staffroom, you'll find yourself branded as not a team player, hard to work with, because the Cool Bad Teacher is so easygoing, it must be your fault, and even though the list of problems tracking back to them keeps growing and growing, somehow, they don't face meaningful consequences.
Donald Trump is a Cool Bad Teacher.
His voters don't care if he's competent by any conventional standard, because his core appeal has consistently been that the entire political system is corrupt and bad, such that being "good" at the job by any traditional yardstick just means you're a shill for the Deep State. Similarly, they don't care that he doesn't act like other politicians, because they view politics the same way unmotivated teenagers view high school: as a pointless and oppressive system they're nonetheless forced to engage with, and which they fantasise about burning down, because none of them think they need it. In their view, all this stuff is irrelevant, and the idea that it matters is the root cause of every major problem in their lives.
They like that he eggs on bullying, because they don't like having to pretend to care about other people. There's no internal consistency to their ethics in this respect: only a kneejerk entitlement which says that, while they should be allowed to do and say whatever they want, nobody else should ever be allowed to make them feel bad. This isn't contradictory to them, because they don't care about or understand how anything works, let alone the reasons for the rules and laws and systems they disdain. When they struggle to understand something, they take this as a sign that the thing itself is the problem, because the alternative would mean admitting to a personal limitation or lack of knowledge, and because they've never learned how to self-reflect, anything that makes them feel bad lands as a personal attack.
But now, suddenly, they're starting to struggle. Their Cool Bad Teacher is acting just the same as he always has - perhaps even moreso - but this time, the metaphoric exams are being set by external third parties, and no matter how much the teacher yells and threatens and declares that only the grades he makes up should matter, it's getting harder to pretend that the class is going well.
Because this time, the Cool Bad Teacher has taken over the neighbouring classes, too, and all their grades have fallen off a cliff. Half the old teachers have been fired and replaced with his former class favourites, most of whom aren't even trained for the job, some of whom never even graduated at all, and that seemed like a massive fuck you to the system at first - a way of proving that they were right all along about not needing those stupid grades and rules and fancy qualifications, that the job was never really that hard, none of this difficult stuff was actually ever necessary - but there's fights every day now, and not enough food in the lunch room, and people from other schools won't talk to them, and all the while, their grades are plummeting.
A journalist recently posed the question: why, when MAGA are in charge of everything, are they still so angry - so dissatisfied with the status quo? The answer is simple: it's much easier to criticize than to do, in much the same way that it's easier to destroy than build, but none of them realized this. In their minds, there were no delicate, complex, deeply interconnected systems of trade, community and politics both domestic and international keeping their lives afloat. Instead, they saw themselves as being fenced in by the horrors of Woke: a nebulous yet omnipresent force that was limiting their ability to succeed. Dismantling this force - its agents, systems and outputs - would therefore be the political equivalent of unburdening the country, and thus their lives, of a massive dead weight, immediately making things run smoother, cheaper, faster.
But facts, as the right has so often ironically said, don't care about your feelings, and their perception of what America was and how it worked did not, in the end, match up to reality. As such, they've done the political equivalent of smashing their engine to pieces and then being shocked that the car won't start: all because they were convinced that the mechanic was lying about how it worked, and because they wanted to say slurs without repercussion.
