Liner Note 5: Bonfire of the Knowledges (Part 1)

St. Petersburg, Fla.,November 18, 2018

The post-mortem tsunami will never drown the fact that the Democrats ran a textbook centrist campaign and lost nonetheless. 

I'd have liked a left-wing campaign attacking corporate price-gouging and militarism and Big Egg and Big Finance--the kind of campaign Democrats have refused to run since McGovern lost to Nixon in 1972. 

But when I ask myself, did you really think most Americans would vote for a woman--a Black woman--for president, I have to say well no I didn't really. My prize for one-sentence explanations goes to Keith Boykin.  (And don't settle for my screenshots.)

Yes, for sure, Trump surfed the waves of cultural resentment, to put it politely. But I'd like to add a second sentence.  

This sentence is prompted by the fact that we still have to explain why a factor like mass comfort with white patriarchy can override policy.  This idea that feelings now rule reason in public life has become an orthodoxy of our time (e.g., William Davies' Nervous States).  It fits with the sense that everyone's brain has become one with the slop of social media.  By why does it rule, or seem to?

What we're seeing isn't actually a generic shift from thought to feeling. So my second sentence is that factors like racism and misogyny are strengthened by a systematic war on knowledge. It's one that Trump inherits from Republicans going back to McCarthyism 75 years ago, but had taken to a new level.

Democracy was on the ballot in 2024 .Relatedly, thinking was also on the ballot.  With Trump nominating the co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment as Secretary of Education and a vaccine-denier to the top of Health and Human Services, knowledge workers in universities, design studios, farming communities, wherever, will need to fight this knowledge war and not the last ones.

Here’s Trump-stage strategy in action. In the week before the election, the Guardian reporter Michael Safi went to Lancaster Pennsylvania to see how politically divided communities were doing, and he wound up in an art gallery. He met the owner, whom he calls Alice.

 

“She wore this bold floral blazer and had wild grey curly hair. She called everyone babe.”

“’Alright, babe.’”

“The art that she was exhibiting was modern and alternative. I thought I had a pretty good sense of her politics. And I was wrong.

“’Can I ask you a question? Who will you be voting for?’

“’Oh, Trump. Absolutely. Because he's a businessman and our country needs an astute brain that he has.

“’He did a great job when he was with us for four years. He got us out of a lot of agreements that were old. They were sapping us as taxpayers and they were not in our best interest anymore.’”

Safi wants to keep the conversation going.  Under Trump Rules for knowledge, that means you accept without question what the Trump voter says.

“’You run an art space and a dance studio. And do you find that you're surrounded by people who believe the things you believe? Or is that kind of in contrast to what others believe?’”

‘”So funny. Yeah, I think they're really shocked when they find out that I'm a Republican.’”

“’I'm a bit shocked to be honest.’”

“’Because a lot of them were Democrats’ [Alice replies] and very liberal and very open-minded. Kamala's really never been voted in. She was sort of whisked in with no votes. No one was really in her favor. Nobody really could make sense of what she was saying.’”

‘”Do you find it easy to talk about politics these days, like with people around you, neighbors, friends?”

“’So I was raised never to talk about religion and never to talk about politics because you won't make everyone happy. But this election is so important, I cannot shut up. I talk to the cash register people at the store.’”

Fine, but why does Alice like Trump? Safi doesn't ask.  He might tried to get into the head of an art-loving Trump voter with,  “what agreements were old and not in our best interest? The nuclear treaty with Iran? The Paris climate accords?  A trade agreement? What was wrong with them?”

Or, “when you say money, what money did they cost us?”

Or on the great job he did: “did his tax cuts help your gallery?” "Did you like his COVID-19 response?" “Was there something else you liked?” 

 Any of these questions go unasked. So Alice doesn't have to explain herself--or hear herself explaining any of this. We don't gain any knowledge about her thinking.  We don't get to see her think.

I've heard countless hours of Safi on Guardian podcasts and he's very good at getting into people's motives and ideas. He seems to sense that quizzing even this very friendly Trump voter will sour or end the conversation.  

He's probably right. In Trumpian knowledge culture, the act of asking for information identifies the asker as educated or pro-education or pro the kinds of evidence and argument that education inclines people to expect. And that defaults to elitist and insulting.  

To ask, “what agreements” is you implying the Trump voter might wrong. In Trump’s culture, this sounds like a request for expertise that is a put-down of regular people. 

As a result, even the nicest Trump voters have a kind of standing impunity from criticism. 

I've had a similar experience many times. I'm surprised by my own inhibition. 

How does this happen? My sense of the source is that it's not only the degradation of public education over the last two generations, but also Trump's national bullying of all questioners as elitists.  

This is a new stage of what we used to call "anti-intellectualism in American life." Trump has intensified the work Ronald Reagan began sixty years ago to convince voters that if an informed person asks you to explain, it suggests that you might be wrong, which in turn implies you might be stupid, but it fact they're stupid. They’re the one who’s wrong.  And you are right.

This is the psychological trap-door through which anti-authoritarian forces have fallen.  In Part 2 I'll discuss the Democratic contribution.  Then it's on to discussing how knowledge affected voting in the 2024 election.  Finally, I'll outline Trump's four innovation in knowledge destruction and  offer ideas for defeating Trumpism.