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.
