10 Traits of a Useful Idiot
How to spot the people destroying civilisation while feeling virtuous about it.
Lenin is usually credited with coining the term “useful idiot”. There’s no evidence he did, but it seems entirely plausible because the term became a popular way to describe Western intellectuals who cheered on communism from the safety of their Paris salons while actual communists were liquidating millions.
If we’re being charitable, we might say these intellectuals meant well, that they genuinely believed they were supporting progress towards a better society. Perhaps they were simply naive, seeing what they wanted to see and disregarding evidence of blatant tyranny, show trials, the mass murder of kulaks, and so on.
Or maybe they were just idiots.
The term has become popular again because the useful idiots of our day are similarly blinded by their own sense of moral superiority, too invested in groupthink to notice that they keep providing cover for modern-day evils. How else to explain their solidarity with fanatics who would eliminate them given the chance?
Every political tribe breeds its own useful idiots. The left has its campus activists and NGO lifers; the right has its conspiracy junkies and Putin groupies. This piece focuses mainly on the progressive variety because they currently have the deepest roots in our institutions – but the patterns are often the same.
It’s crucial to understand that not all useful idiots are stupid – not in the ordinary sense. Often they’re educated and articulate. The most committed useful idiots tend to have PhDs and introduce themselves as doctors. Yet all that education can obscure truths and blur moral clarity while making terrible ideas look attractive. As Orwell remarked, “Some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them”.
Nevertheless, some useful idiots really are just stupid, and we’ll cover those as well. What unites all of them is a lack of courage – the courage to trust their own eyes, ask uncomfortable questions, and pay social costs for being right rather than staying comfortable by being wrong.
As for what makes useful idiots useful and for whom, we’ll get to that. First, let’s identify some of the common traits.
1. They outsource thinking to slogans
Ideology is how useful idiots know what to think about things they don’t understand. Perhaps “From the river to the sea” sounds poetic to the “Free Palestine” activist, but ask them which river and which sea and you’ll likely get a blank stare or embarrassed laughter. It’s the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, of course, but the point is that chanting the slogan effectively calls for the elimination of Israel and its people. It’s a bit genocidal when you think about it, which they don’t.
“Trans women are women” works in the same way. It’s not a claim about biological reality but an unfalsifiable redefinition of the word woman. It also functions as a sort of loyalty oath. Ask for a definition of woman, and it quickly falls apart. That’s because slogans are engineered to short-circuit thought and leave reason at the door.
2. They mistake performance for principle
Pronouns in an email signature or LinkedIn bio are cringeworthy, of course, but also a handy marker of pre-packaged thinking. Cringe is not something that troubles useful idiots, though. It’s why they can unselfconsciously wear an Amazon-delivered keffiyeh to an anti-capitalist march. Pronouns and keffiyehs are tribal signifiers first and foremost: ideology as a fashion statement; borrowed convictions as accessories.
Hashtag activism is also comically easy, requiring no real sacrifice except the risk of faulty wifi at the local artisanal coffee bar. Actual principled activism is a very different thing. It’s Karoline Preisler standing alone at demonstrations in front of a baying mob. That’s what courage and moral clarity actually look like, not playing the bongos and screeching for intifada outside a Christmas market.
3. They champion causes that would destroy them
Queers for Palestine might be the purest distillation of useful idiocy ever achieved. Hamas would throw them off the nearest building. Many Gazans, if we’re being honest, would happily assist. They wave their flags anyway because the cause provides meaning and the consequences are someone else’s problem.
Then we have Western feminists defending the hijab as a symbol of “empowerment” while women in Iran are beaten to death for removing it. And let’s not forget the progressives who celebrate Islamist movements that would criminalise everything progressives claim to value.
The useful idiot never asks whether the people they champion would tolerate them. It’s a simple question with a simple answer, which is why they ignore it.
4. They attack the people trying to help
Ayaan Hirsi Ali knows better than any progressive in the land the true toll of Islamic extremism because she’s been at the sharp end of it. But never mind that; for many Western feminists, she’s still “Islamophobic”. It’s the same derangement that leads activists to call JK Rowling “genocidal” for defending women’s spaces.
Useful idiots reserve their greatest fury for people who threaten the narrative. Dissidents from within the “oppressed” group are deemed particularly dangerous because they can’t be dismissed as privileged outsiders. As such, they must be destroyed.
What matters for the useful idiot is the preservation of their moral framework. When people like Hirsi Ali and Rowling disrupt that carefully tended picture of reality, they shoot the messenger rather than grapple with the message.
5. They demand purity and deliver nothing
“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The words of Thomas Sowell are deeply wise, which is why they have no impact on the useful idiot, who rejects every imperfect solution. Ceasefires aren’t good enough, they say. Gradual reform is betrayal of the utopian vision. Pragmatic compromise is collaboration with evil. Only total transformation will do.
In any case, the useful idiot isn’t interested in solving problems – indeed, the problems are essential to their purpose. It would be like divorce lawyers campaigning for lifelong happy marriages. It would put them out of a job.
No, much better for the activist to keep the crisis alive and enjoy the moral superiority that comes with demanding the impossible. The people who actually need help remain stuck and serve primarily as vessels for activists looking to build careers and personal identities on their suffering.
6. They weaponise compassion
The useful idiot is inclined to a bit of melodrama – perhaps under the misapprehension that it strengthens their arguments rather than weakens them. And so we hear things like “If you don’t affirm trans kids, they’ll kill themselves”. Or, “If you question immigration, you’re condemning refugees to death”.
This is otherwise known as emotional terrorism, and it’s designed to shut down thought – often with great success among people who are perhaps genuinely kind and compassionate and don’t see the manipulation at work.
Real compassion, though, understands the need for trade-offs. Compassion is most effective when it acknowledges complexity and accepts that good intentions don’t guarantee good outcomes. The useful idiot skips all that and jumps straight to “you’re killing people”.
7. They invert victim and oppressor
Hamas are freedom fighters. Israelis are Nazis. Women protecting their changing rooms are bigots, and the men in dresses who invade them are the most oppressed people in history. The useful idiot has learned to reverse every obvious moral claim and treat any pushback as further evidence of fascism.
This requires remarkable cognitive flexibility. You must simultaneously believe that Palestinians are powerless victims and that Hamas’s sadistic campaign of rape and murder was legitimate resistance. You must hold that trans people face genocide while also insisting that questioning their every demand is literal violence.
None of it makes sense, but logical consistency isn’t the point. What matters is taking the position that awards maximum moral status for the least amount of courage.
8. They trust institutions that lie to them
Any fool knows that Western institutions have been chained to the radiator of progressive orthodoxy for years. It’s why universities enforce speech codes while calling it inclusion, why the medical establishment has fast-tracked confused children into transition.
Then there are the NGOs, the UN and the WHO – institutions that have revealed themselves as captured, cowardly or corrupt. The useful idiot still trusts them all the more because they lend legitimacy to their views. Indeed, it’s a mutually reinforcing relationship.
The institutions lie, the useful idiot believes and echoes them, and the institutions tighten their grip. It’s a perfect system for manufacturing compliance while calling it compassion.
9. They never pay the price for being wrong
Most celebrities are as wealthy and influential as they are catastrophically misguided. They can afford to be both because they pay no price for their ignorance – indeed, they profit from it in an industry otherwise baffled by reality.
The same is true for academics who championed puberty blockers. They still have tenure. The journalists who dismissed grooming gangs still have columns.
Meanwhile, detransitioners live with ruined bodies and girls in Rotherham live with trauma. The hostages died in tunnels. The women in Iran were beaten to death. The useful idiot faces no consequences for ignoring or sanitising any of these things. Someone else always foots the bill.
This is why they can afford to be so certain. When you risk nothing, you can champion anything and earn status points, which is really what most of this is about.
10. They do the work of the West’s enemies
Useful idiots aren’t confined to one side of the political spectrum. There’s a thriving ecosystem of “anti-woke” commentators whose loathing of Western elites is so total that it effectively works like an auto-lobotomy, turning even formerly sensible voices of conservatism into apologists for regimes and movements that mean the West nothing but ill.
This is how you get YouTubers with huge audiences repeating Kremlin narratives or antisemitic conspiracy theories. They are drawn to anyone who embarrasses the liberal establishment, typically the sort of “strong leader” who poisons opponents, defenestrates dissidents and treats the rule of law with contempt.
They imagine themselves as “based” realists who have seen through the propaganda. In reality, they are just another species of useful idiot manipulated by whichever enemy of the West rewards their egos and bank accounts most effectively.
The supply chain of delusion
Useful idiots don’t appear out of nowhere. They emerge from a complex system made up of specific types of people.
First, the ideologues, who need foot soldiers to spread their ideas – they’re not going to break a sweat themselves. Then there are the bureaucrats who need useful idiots as cover for their endless list of failures. The journalists need them as characters in the narrative. And ideologically captured NGOs need them to amplify their cause.
Useful idiots try to be all things to all of them, but most of all, they provide moral legitimacy and social pressure – the essential ingredients required to smuggle terrible ideas into polite society.
The mechanics are (albeit crudely) as follows:
Ideologue → Bureaucrat → Journalist → Useful Idiot → Victim
The ideologue creates the theory, say trans ideology. The bureaucrat implements the theory in institutions – now the civil service has unisex toilets. The journalist launders it into respectability, describing dissenters as “far right” and men in dresses as “oppressed”. The useful idiot turns all this into a performance on social media or in the streets: hashtag activism, #ProtectTransKids. At the end of this gruesome chain of events is the victim – the confused child, the raped woman, the cancelled author.
Each link in the chain needs the others. The ideologue needs institutional capture. The bureaucrat needs media cover. The journalist needs heroes and villains for the front page. And the useful idiot needs all of them to maintain the fiction that their performance matters.
Break any link, and the system collapses – which is why they defend each other so viciously.
Reality has other ideas
The good news is that communism eventually fell and the horrors were exposed, despite the best efforts of Western intellectuals in their Paris salons. We’re seeing the same thing with today’s fashionable ideologies. The Cass Review exposed the scandal of paediatric transition. The grooming gangs were finally acknowledged, if not properly dealt with. Iran’s theocracy revealed what “moderate Islam” actually means for women and girls.
Useful idiots will never go away or admit they were wrong. They’ll find new ways to feel superior while helping no one but the cleverer, more cynical people who pull their strings. Greta Thunberg, the patron saint of useful idiots, moved seamlessly from “climate catastrophe” to “Palestine genocide”. Her handlers will discover fresh opportunities when the Israel-Palestine conflict gets old, or she’s needed elsewhere.
Take consolation in the fact that none of this is new, and the world will grind on as before. True, a culture that punishes dissent and rewards conformity will always produce useful idiots in abundance. But the rest of us can stay alert, honour truth and trust that reality will have the final word.
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Very good. A phenomenon I have noticed on social media recently is the number of people - very long-term friends in my case - who never expressed an overtly political thought before, who've spent the last four decades building families and careers, who have, since lock-down, started to echo the worst of The Guardian in their comments, quite belligerently, and have taken to criticising myself for what they perceive as my right-ward drift- someone who has always been politically-minded and -active -, usually prior to unfriending and social ostracisation. Their newly-expressed political opinions sound pretty much like the ones I held 30-40 years ago when I was young and stupid. What can be behind this cohort of useful idiocy, I wonder? Perhaps, having paid off their mortgages, they consider that cheerleading for Corbyn/Polanski or fawning over illegal migrants is now a cost free luxury they can indulge. Except, it's certainly not cost-free for their children's and grandchildren's future, though. Covid was not the only air-born virus circulating, it seems.