Did Steve Sailer know it all the time?

A long list of prominent conservatives have referred to leftists and Democrats as dumb, stupid, incompetent, crazy, and insane. In 2007, Ann Coulter wrote the book “If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d Be Republicans.” Both Rush Limbaugh and President Trump regularly referred to Democrats as “Dumbocrats.” More recently, the leader of the House Freedom Caucus called Democrats “the crazy party,” and JD Vance framed the contrast between the parties as “common sense vs. crazy.” Matt Margolis titled a piece in PJ Media this year “Democrats Are Too Stupid to Heed This Warning,” and posited that somewhere between the 1990s and today, the Democratic Party lost its mind.

Consider a recent interview in which Representative Jim Jordan explained that the left’s open-border policy was part of a shrewd, long-term plan to bring in new Democrat constituents, with sanctuary-city policies as another step in that plan. Yet in the same interview, he called the policy “Just stupid” and “one of the dumbest policies I’ve ever heard of,” and in a later interview, adding, “just about every single position today’s left adopts is crazy.”

To be clear, there are certainly some dim bulbs among the left – both in leadership and rank and file. Showcase examples include Vice President Kamala Harris, who frequently struggles to articulate coherent sentences; Rep. Hank Johnson, who worried during a congressional hearing that Guam might “tip over and capsize” if it became too populated; Rep. Shelia Jackson, who once referred to herself as a “freed slave” and spoke of “two Vietnams side by side, North and South”; and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told us that America with defunded police would look just like the wealthy white suburbs. On a broader scale, consider millions of California voters who knowingly continue to vote for politicians whose policies have devastated the Golden State.

In this light, things like defunding the police, draconian regulations and carbon taxes, mothballing coal and nuclear plants, wide-open borders, turning a blind eye to Medicaid and NGO fraud, supporting genital mutilation of minors, opposing voter ID, massive expansion of entitlement spending, lowering combat readiness standards in the military in the name of gender equality, and support for adversaries like Hamas can be understood not as disconnected examples of incompetence, but as elements of a broader ideological program. If it does damage to America and hastens the great realignment, they support it.

We don’t tend to think of stupid people as evil. Perceived stupidity neutralizes perceived intent and, to some degree, perceived blame. “Stupid” is not the word that comes to mind for figures like Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot, and it would have done us no favors to describe the Axis powers in World War II as merely stupid or crazy.

Calling an adversary’s actions crazy or stupid implies those actions produce an outcome fundamentally different from what their architects intended. But what if the opposite is true? What if the policies are producing precisely the disruption their architects sought?

If conservatives want to understand and effectively challenge the modern left, they should focus less on calling its leaders stupid and more on understanding what they’re trying to accomplish. That leadership may be insidious, duplicitous, destructive, morally wrong, and in some cases evil.