The poor have always been with us. So have the ignorant. Frequently a person will be a member of both demographics. But for the first time in history, a major political party actually seeks to cultivate the low information, no information people as a voting bloc. When the founders built the government under which we live, they, too, knew about the ignorance of a certain portion of the electorate. But ignorance in that day and age was not touted as a virtue or defended vociferously as a right. The right to spew untruths, idiocy, and disinformation was not seen as a worthy goal. Yet again, one political party makes it clear on a daily basis that it stands for this very thing and is willing to tie the First Amendment into a pretzel in order to secure the “right” of the citizenry to steep themselves in unreality and continue to inch into intellectual darkness.
You may recall the insurrectionist who claimed “Foxitus” made him go to the Capitol and riot? He felt programmed by Fox News and he believed that the game show host in the White House would bend or suspend all the laws of the land to pardon him. This was just a TV show, after all, directed by the showman in chief. He was far from being the only one to think that way. The name Ashli Babbitt is invoked as a martyr. She’s probably dead because she believed that as a television heroine it was impossible for her to get killed.
So who are these loons that think this way and why do they? In his column today Paul Krugman states the obvious that “closed-mindedness and ignorance have become core conservative values, and those who reject these values are the enemy.” This is what the founding fathers did not, could not, anticipate. And this is why we’re in the mess we’re in. New York Times:
Thus, to be a Republican in good standing one must deny the reality of man-made climate change, or at least oppose any meaningful action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. One must reject or at least express skepticism about the theory of evolution. And don’t even get me started on things like the efficacy of tax cuts.
What underlies this cross-disciplinary commitment to ignorance? On each subject, refusing to acknowledge reality serves special interests. Climate denial caters to the fossil fuel industry; evolution denial caters to religious fundamentalists; tax-cut mysticism caters to billionaire donors.
But there’s also, I’d argue, a spillover effect: Accepting evidence and logic is a sort of universal value, and you can’t take it away in one area of inquiry without degrading it across the board. That is, you can’t declare that honesty about America’s racial history is unacceptable and expect to maintain intellectual standards everywhere else. In the modern right-wing universe of ideas, everything is political; there are no safe subjects. […]
But beyond that, the modern G.O.P. is no home for people who believe in objectivity. One striking feature of surveys of academic partisanship is the overwhelming Democratic lean in hard sciences like biology and chemistry; but is that really hard to understand when Republicans reject science on so many fronts?
One recent study marvels that even finance departments are mainly Democratic. Indeed, you might expect finance professors, some of whom do lucrative consulting for Wall Street, to be pretty conservative. But even they are repelled by a party committed to zombie economics.
Which brings me back to General Milley. The U.S. military has traditionally leaned Republican, but the modern officer corps is highly educated, open-minded and, dare I say it, even a bit intellectual — because those are attributes that help win wars.
We live in a technological world, yet conspiracy theory is more pervasive now than at perhaps any time in history. Conspiracy theory is to our culture what witchcraft was to Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600’s. It was a fear-driven appeal to emotions, and against reason, which would allow someone to accuse a member of the community of being a child of Satan, one of The Other, and therefore worthy of being destroyed.
Conspiracy theory, which is where the intellectually lazy and incurious choose to roost, because it’s easier to listen to simplistic lies than to actually study and learn the truth about a topic, is as popular as it is because the GOP won’t shut it down. Au contraire, it is their greatest weapon. And it is weaponized much in the same fashion as the witchcraft hysteria of old was. It is a means of rulership by fear of The Other, nowadays The Other being defined as whatever their constituents worry about. Simply, the Republican party would rather tell the Trump base that what they fear is actually true and control them via fear, rather than to tell them the truth. They have too much contempt for their constituents to tell them the truth. And that is not democracy.
This is where we have fallen to in this country. The Big Lie could never have gotten off the ground but for Trump’s GOP enablers in Congress. And they know it’s a lie. They don’t care. Power is everything and if they need to sell out democracy to remain in power, so be it. They are happy to lie about everything from the election to global warning and hang the consequences.
The Republican party is falling apart. While the knee jerk reaction to this may be glee, bear in mind these words of David Frum: “Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Republican Party. You should. Conservatives will always be with us. If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy.”
The have rejected democracy. With the exception of a few notable holdouts in the old guard GOP, the Republicans only stand for one thing: power, the upraised fist.
We don’t have two major political parties in the country anymore. We have Americans and we have fascists. Survival is always the first order of business and the GOP has decided that the only way it can survive is by abandoning democratic values. It’s not the party of Eisenhower anymore. Nor the party of Reagan or even the Bushes. it’s not even the party of Cheney.
“It was a fear-driven appeal to emotions, and against reason, which would allow someone to accuse a member of the community of being a child of Satan, one of The Other, and therefore worthy of being destroyed.”
Should it really come as a shock that the first person directly accused of promoting witchcraft in Salem Village was a Black or Native American woman, named Tituba. The records aren’t clear about her origins. It’s known that she was brought to Salem from Barbados but she may have been born in Central or South America or in Africa and brought to Barbados. Even her slave status before the witch trials is questioned. She may have been indentured–a step above outright slavery–because she did seem to have more freedom than was typical of normal slaves but she is considered to have been a slave after the trial as her master (the term applied to a person who was either indentured or enslaved) refused to pay her jail fines and she was sold off to an unknown person for the price of those fees (since the person’s identity isn’t known, she may have been treated as an indentured servant rather than a slave).
Well there you have it. Witchcraft was weaponized as a means of subverting people who were The Other for different reasons. Can’t say I’m surprised.
I most assuredly am not surprised. But it none the less saddens me that this country has come to this point. I know that loads of folks out there don’t understand this, but I am not that very old 66, but I saw this coming a very long time ago. It amazes me and saddens me that there are so many who believe the BS that the Republicans and tRump spout.
David Frum is only saying what he is because the crazies he and so many others enabled before Trump will come for his kind first. Much as I’d like sane conservatives to deal with, I have never forgotten what Frum and Co have always stood for. By and large, no different than the Trump agenda, they just want the ugly parts shoved out of the spotlight. Plus, the only people who can fix this side of the spectrum is ultimately them. We took care of Trump. Now THEY gotta finish their own cleanup.
I don’t think they know how. I read a lot of the intelligent conservatives, Charlie Sykes, the Lincoln Project, all that. I don’t think they know what to do either.
That’s because they are intelligent rather than imaginative or adaptive. Take them out of the system they’ve known all their lives and they are lost. To hear them all but BEGGING the rest of us to figure it out for them is just insulting. No pity for them OR their plight.
The GOP is now a cult of ignorance.
The US has always had a streak of willing ignorance. Remember that one of the 19th-century parties was the Know-Nothings – not, in fact, because of ignorance, but because when asked, they’d say “I know nothing about it.” It’s why college-educated women are still considered uppity in some places.
Any people who believe they can be both ignorant & free, believe in what never was, & never will be. Thomas Jefferson
Wow. There’s a quote. Thank you.
[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.
(Robert Heinlein)
Ah, the quote of a man for whom America was good to up to the point where he could live comfortably with his blinders on. Hell with that…this sentiment by Andrew Vachss speaks more to the moment: “If you won’t see us, you won’t see us coming.” Way too many Americans let their ignorance show this last half of the 2010s.
“We don’t have two major political parties in the country anymore. We have Americans and we have fascists.”
And the right are sociopaths. Truly scary, nasty people who will not hesitate to use force. See Jan. 6th.
Thought provoking post and comments.