The Republicans' Ideology of Ignorance

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The Earth is on fire. And Republicans, led by Donald Trump, are poised to dismantle all the funding and regulations to combat global warming.

Racial bigotry runs rampant in plain view. And Republicans bar the topic from classrooms, emasculate the Voting Rights Act, and move to ban the military’s anti-discrimination programs.

The COVID pandemic triggers rapid, ground-breaking vaccine development. And Republican officials demonize scientists, fight protective measures, and hound numerous public health specialists out of their jobs.

And so on. The Republican Party has led the United States into a peculiar era of contempt for knowledge, disdain for the experts who have acquired it, and suspicion of fellow Americans who revere learning. “Expert” has become a dirty word.

From Republican-controlled state houses to public universities, secondary schools, so-called “news” organizations, and libraries, a concerted campaign is on to create deserts of ignorance where no fruits of accumulated understanding can grow. These blank landscapes are devoid of the conscientious research and reasoning gathered over decades. In the empty patches, weeds grow—the weeds of fabricated conspiracies and dogmatic thinking. They are producing a harvest of contempt for any truth that violates a predilection.

There is a class element to this, a bottom-up sense that the elites with all their schooling really know nothing about the real world and care nothing for those whose names are not followed by letters signifying advanced degrees. This phenomenon of disparagement is a symptom of powerlessness, marginalization, and alienation. It was accelerated by the Great Recession of 2007-08—triggered by elite wheeler-dealers in finance. Lower middle-class families lost equity in their homes, jobs that had seemed secure, and confidence in their futures—a logical sequel to the decline of manufacturing and the stability it had provided. People’s foundations were shaken.

One outcome has been fear, particularly among whites without a college education. Not just fear of personal economic vulnerability, but also anxiety about change in demography and society: rising  numbers of non-whites, shifting social attitudes on sexual orientation and other issues, declining trust in such big institutions as government. That perspective sees an America drifting from some idyllic essence. Make America Great Again—Again.

That idyl is a myth, of course, picturing a supposedly homogeneous United States—white, Christian, socially traditional, heterosexual, family-based—a comforting Norman-Rockwell culture with non-accented English and red-blooded “American” names. It’s no surprise that it is nurtured mostly in rural areas where the myth is closer to reality, and where the new Republican Party finds ready voters.

Fear is convenient to certain brands of politicians, especially those aspiring to autocracy. As we have seen, fear has been cynically stoked by Trump and his fellow co-conspirators in the great takeover of a once-responsible political party. Where Republicans once garnered more electoral support than Democrats from voters with college degrees, it’s now the opposite. Democrats have largely lost their appeal among the white working class, where Republican fear mongering has gained ground.

That is not to say that a thirst for knowledge—and its delightful ambiguities and contradictions—is monopolized by the college-educated. Smarts and curiosity are widely distributed up and down the socio-economic scale, blessing those without university diplomas and also skipping many of those who have them. But informing yourself these days takes more time and skill than long working hours and defective schooling usually allow, a handicap for those who lack leisure and luxury.

Republicans have profited from the deep inadequacies of the country’s education systems, which mostly neglect to teach students how to check facts, discern truth from propaganda, and filter through the internet maze of reports and claims. (The News Literacy Project has developed curricula and online tools to help teachers do just that.) Under the guise of awarding parents control over their kids’ schooling, Republican lawmakers in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere are moving aggressively to erase honest history and relevant contemporary discussion from classrooms, and to remove books on race and sexual orientation from courses and libraries. The objective, it seems, is to create pockets of abject ignorance in the rising generations.  

That will work to the advantage of a party that wants to manipulate instead of educate. Even more troubling than the Republican schemes to fool the public is the capacity of large parts of the public to be fooled.

The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of the “willing suspension of disbelief” as an aesthetic component of readers’ acceptance of literature’s plausibility. But he meant it as a conscious, creative process. In American politics, the willing suspension of disbelief allows mendacious actors room for mischief.

Hence, the Republicans’ ideology of ignorance. It is easier to convince citizens to ignore racial bias if you obliterate its history from classrooms. It is easier to foster contempt for your political opponents if you impugn their support for transgender people as morally harmful to children. It is easier to frighten people that they are losing parental authority if you brand relevant books and classroom discussion on race and gender as self-blaming, pornographic, or perverted.

It is a cleverly constructed strategy at the heart of Trump’s spellbinding appeal and his intellectual corruption of the Republican Party, once a responsible bastion of tempered governance. Trump and his copycats create areas of ignorance with their perpetual tempests of lies. They conjure up a mirage of candor but obliterate knowledge.

I am reminded of a day off the coast of Maine, sailing through a heavy rainstorm. The radar, unable to penetrate the downpour, displayed a screen entirely lit up in vivid orange, blotting out all traces of nearby boats, buoys, and treacherous land—the reality that I needed to see. Thankfully, the storm soon passed.