I know I have an Ivy League education which is now supposed to make me ashamed.
But I am really tired of trying to argue with ignoramuses who don’t know anything about anything on this hellsite.
It will be a miracle if America survives this ascent of the ignorant.
Jon "Bowzer" Bauman.
We need to stop trusting the experts... Trusting the experts is not a feature of science or democracy, it's a feature of religion and totalitarianism.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., ignoramus.
Bauman, famous for his portrayal as a deep voiced "greaser" in the band Sha Na Na, but in fact very well educated and now a Democratic political activist, has it right.
I've struggled to put together posts on this topic, unsuccessfully several times. Lots of people like me, Conservatives back in the day, and Social Conservatives still, keep wondering what happened, even while pretty much knowing what happened. We're horrified as the country rockets towards Petainism, or Francoism, or just outright stupidity, even while we wonder how on earth we went to a country in which homosexual propaganda is outright directed at the young.
Justice Kennedy. . . you are to blame for a lot of this.
Anyhow, one of the real stunning things of the Trump ascent has been the ascent of the ignorant.
And that's hard to take.
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Conservatism used to be fairly intellectual. . .well it was fairly intellectual after the McCarthy era. In truth, it's always cycled between intellectualism and wild conspiratorial phantasy, just as the left has cycled between intellectualism and wild eye flaming goofballedry . To some extent, the poor nation is getting both of these now at the same time, but it's most prominent on the right.
A big part of Trump's intellectual, if you will, drive now comes from Dominionist who claim to be carrying a sword for Christianity but who don't grasp the mains intellect of it. It was Cardinal Newman who noted that to know history was to make a person a Catholic, and the Dominionist neither know history nor, for that matter, Christianity very well. Outside of those carrying a Pine Tree flag are those who are in the Petainist/Francoist Christian Nationalist movement, who at least aren't anti intellectual and are relatively intellectual themselves, when their beliefs are drilled into.
But beyond that are a great mass of people, including people now in power, who reflect blistering ignorance.
Anti vaxxers, who took their initial inspiration from a Playboy model whose only claim to fame was her boobs, and then having had a child (out of wedlock, of course), went into full bore ignorance during COVID, showing how low education in the country generally sunk. A person can oppose vaccines for themselves on philosophical, or even theological, grounds, but you can't oppose them on scientific grounds. That's just ignorant. Nonetheless, Trump has elevated Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and "Dr. Oz" to positions of real power, when they ought to be in the waterfowl section of the local zoo. No serious nation would have either of these people in positions where they dealt with anything biological, even if that meant they were disqualified from being dog catchers.
Most of the cabinet officers we hear from on a frequent basis are total sycophants who sound like their on the losing end of a debate in a high school forensics team. Some sound like outright thugs. Our Ambassador to Israel is there as he wants to help bring about the Apocalypse.
Trump is outright weaponizing the Justice Department into the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and persecuting (not a typo) anyone who publicly opposed him. He's also sending the National Guard, converted into the Ersatzheer, into Republican cities illegally. While all this occurs a populace that would have previously flooded into the streets in protests sits on its hand believing that there must really Marxist, Communist, Fascists, Monarchist about to take over these cities and convert them into Communist Anarchist Monarchies.
It's really doubtful the nation can recover from this.
At a lower level, we're debating library books in the children's section which an adult nation ought to be able to sort out in about fifteen minutes. But perhaps a bigger example is the outright believe by people who believe that you ought to drink petroleum oil for breakfast that nuclear power is going to turn your housecat into the central character in 1950s Japanese horror film. In the meantime, a legitimate concern on the part of some, youth being exposed to pornography, has been captured by local members of the Freedom Caucus who are freely dumb in their local efforts to oppose it, going to public forums like school boards to act up.
The press rarely gets things 100% right, indeed a local big story that I know very well has recently amused me by how off the mark the reporting is, but the press has become a whipping boy for people with agendas on both sides. Chuck Gray, the Wyoming Secretary of State, is so enamoured of this that he can't pick up a lunch menu without claiming its the product of the "radical left wing media". The left accuses the press of ignoring Trump's mental decline, which is obvious to everyone, while the right basically seeks to totally shut down everything but the Völkischer Beobachter.
How we get out of this is really questionable, but education, and I mean public education, is going to have to be they key to a large extent. People need to learn science again.
I don't know how Americans became so uneducated.
I went through the local public school system which wasn't perfect, but frankly it was pretty good. My parents also took a real interest in how we were doing in school, and I think everyone's parents did. My own kids went through the same system after I had, and it had improved from good to really good.
Even then, there were some hints of things changing, mostly in the form of a handful of homeschooled showing up in sports and the rise of a series of private Christian schools and schools that were private Christian schools but which wouldn't admit that they were. Homeschooling was, and is, mostly marked here by what the parents don't want their children to learn. Some of those parents were really well educated themselves, but imports from elsewhere and often members of distinct minority religious communities. Outside of the Catholic school, and probably the Lutheran school, this was true of the Christian schools as well.
Following COVID, here locally, we got the influx of people from somewhere else who detested education even as they put their kids in schools One member of the legislature enrolled her two kids in the local high school noting how she was a "refugee" from Illinois, where she'd been on a school board. Now we have a Freedom Caucus legislator being such a problem at a school board meeting she had to be escorted away from the podium when you can bet that every member of the school board is, in fact, conservative.
What I think that tells me is that education elsewhere had declined, and we took in an influx of the uneducated, who in the sprit of the times, spread their views to elements ready to accept it locally.
Another thing is this.
Americans have always had a sort of populist anti intellectual streak, which is heavily ironic as the Founding Fathers of the nation were largely well to do elitists. Indeed, Jefferson figured the republic would not last, as ultimately it would yield from hard working yeoman farmers to a city living mob, dependent upon the government. He wasn't quite right, but he wasn't all that far off. We've had two prior New York born Presidents in the country, a highly educated but quite rural intellectual, a more urbane intellectual, and a real estate developing complete buffoon.
The essence of populism is that people have a native wisdom. The problem is, only an educated public does. Jefferson appreciated that, which is why he so heavily depended on the yeomanry to carry the republic. Family units, living independently, and frankly as somewhat genteel hardworking Christian farmers. He wasn't a yeoman himself. He did foresaw a day in which the republic would be much like it has become, a screaming mass of poorly educated people who were easily lead.
Populist movements have in fact always been easily lead. The Nazis were able to do it with the German populace. The Communist were able to do it with the Russian people. The Fascists were able to do it with the Italians.
For the Fascist, it was the Socialist, Communists and Slavs.
For the Communists, the population is the workers, whose enemy are capitalists, those who own their own businesses, and people who believe in any kind of religion.
For Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, which has been co opted by the National Conservatives, it's anyone who isn't a Christian conservative.
And so we have Trump and his followers. Trump probably has no real solid moral beliefs at all, and is a serial polygamist who was born obscenely wealthy and is getting richer in the office.
The problem with populism is that the bloom always comes off the rose. It turns out that native intelligence is often pretty ignorant. It always collapses in one way or another, often violently It's followers are left to pick up the pieces often having been exposed, by the end, as people who were enemies of the very movement they espoused.
It didn't have to be this way.
There were real reasons that the mass of people were discontent. Ignored on immigration and the erosion of an industrial base for decades, and watching the decay of moral values even as they joyously participated in that decay themselves, there was a real opportunity for a return to true conservatism. Even National Conservatives had the opportunity to participate in that, although they'd lost faith in democracy in general which caused them to choose not to.
When this flies apart, and it will, the reckoning is going to be huge. What will have been achieved is to anger those who became victims of it. The real number of populists in the country is fewer than supposed, and the true diehards fewer yet. Trump mostly won because Joe Biden chose to run in his dotage, which was obviously advanced, and which camouflaged Trump's mental decline. That can't be camouflaged any longer.
Nonetheless, like good fascists, the GOP is going to go down with Trump, even though it need not to. Mike Johnson is effectively releasing cheery news from the Führerbunker as the edifice of the Republic literally collapses around him. The Leader and his Favorite Architect plan a monumental building as an old one is destroyed. Miller and Bondi send their thugs out to hang supposed enemies from lamposts. Loyal reports from loyal lieutenants about not being able to hang on are ignored. Vance consults his Plans for the Fatherland book as if he has a political future.
It should be obvious where this is headed.
But it's easier just to blame it on Trump's style, or his amazing intelligence that we can't grasp, and just ignore it.
