Tag Archives: ignorance

When People Have No Idea what They’re Doing

Simon Rosenberg recently explained what even minimally-informed people know: mass deportation–if it occurs– will raise prices for Americans, disrupt businesses and slow growth. (Of course, growth is already tanking as a result of Trump’s on-and-off tariffs. When even the Wall Street Journal calls a GOP economic policy “stupid,” you can pretty much assume widespread agreement among people who can spell “economics.”) Rosenberg noted that even the threat of deportations is having its effect; victims of crime and witnesses aren’t showing up for court dates because they are afraid ICE will seize them. “That means cases can’t be prosecuted and that means criminals stay free to commit more crimes. Party of law and order my sweet Aunt Annie.”

Speaking of “law and order,” there are reports that the administration is considering a pardon for Derek Chauvin, who killed George Floyd on camera. Such a pardon would be further evidence of the GOP effort to return the U.S. to the days of Jim Crow.

Let’s be candid. The daily havoc being applauded by Trump supporters demonstrates the profound ignorance of the MAGA cult–as does their rejection of expertise as “elitist,” and their inability to recognize the all-too-obvious effects of Trump/Musk actions.

Research confirms that the polarization that characterizes our politics is largely between the informed and uninformed. (For confirmation, you can review the occasional comment from trolls on this blog.) 

The monumental ignorance shown by those cheering Trump and Vance’s thuggish behavior toward Ukraine is a perfect example. In a recent post to The Bulwark, Jonathan Last wrote.

Donald Trump and Republicans explain their worldview by calling it “America First.” That’s a lie.

American foreign policy has always put America first. That’s what nations do. It’s axiomatic. Why did the United States do Lend-Lease with Britain before we entered World War II and bankroll the Marshall Plan afterwards? Why did we airlift supplies into West Berlin? Why did we spend trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons that have never been used? Why do we police the global shipping lanes and ensure stability in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East?

It’s not because we’re nice.

It’s because these actions further our interests. They make America safer and wealthier. They check the rise of rival powers. They put America first.

I urge you to read Last’s entire essay–especially his explanation of “Pax America.”  As he writes, for 75 years after the Second World War, the U.S. was the dominant global power. No country, anywhere on earth, could act without considering our interests.

The relationships in NATO, and among the Five Eyes, and with America’s other really close allies—Japan, South Korea—aren’t merely military agreements. They’re kinships. They transcend peace and war; they’re diplomatic, political, cultural, and economic.

Again: This is leverage. It means that when we go to war, we bring a huge crew with us. Other countries are willing to expend resources, and even shed blood, to stay aligned with us. Even for a contentious war like Iraq, we got nearly 40 countries to participate in some way or another.

This makes things cheaper for us. The Soviet Union and China and Iran have to spend money to dominate and subjugate their clients. Our allies spend money on our behalf, pursuing our interests, because we have shaped them in our image.

As Last writes, no country has ever been more globally dominant–and that dominance has largely been a function of our wealth–our ability to spend money.

Here is the thing you must understand: America will win any contest determined by the ability to spend money.

Rightly understood, this is just another example of how America created rules to benefit ourselves: Of course the richest country in history would build a system in which it could exert influence on the global order by spending money: Because the ability to spend money is one of our key advantages.

And yet today’s “America First” class thinks that spending money in order to shape the world is some kind of weakness…

Why do we spend $10 billion a year fighting HIV/AIDS in foreign countries? I have to keep saying this: It’s not because we’re nice.

We spend that money in order to stabilize the global order. If AIDS runs wild in one country, that creates ripple effects. It destabilizes the local economy, risking political instability, which in turn risks regional instability. All of which poses some small danger to the established order which—QED—benefits America.

We spend that $10 billion to preserve the system that benefits us.

That’s what soft power is.

When people in charge are clueless about how the world works, the world no longer works for us. Thanks, MAGA….

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When You’re Rich They Think You Really Know

I typically listen to music when I’m trudging on the treadmill, and my preference is for tuneful songs with lyrics I can understand. (I’m old!).

I’ve previously posted about the insights and real wisdom often conveyed by musical lyrics, especially a favorite line from Fiddler on the Roof’s “If I Were a Rich Man.” Tevya sings that, if he were rich, the men of the town would all call on him for advice; he then sings “And it wouldn’t matter if I answered right or wrong. When you’re rich, they think you really know.”

As Trump assembles an administration of very rich men, we are about to see the fallacy that Tevya identified play out in real time.

Americans have a long history of confusing celebrity with competence and wealth with intellect. Those with eyes to see have always recognized that Trump himself is a deranged ignoramus with a bloated ego. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into “X,” he’d been able to maintain a reputation as highly intelligent partly because few people knew that–like Trump–his fortune began with an inheritance, and that he’d purchased Tesla–not invented it.

The United States is about to be governed (or ruled) by a whole cohort of equally clueless rich White guys, and the most pertinent  question is how much damage will they do? These are, after all, the “captains of industry” who think they know more than they do, who don’t know what they don’t know, and who are unlikely to listen to people who have actual expertise in economics and/or a wide variety of public policies. (As Tevya would say, “they think they really know.”)

Paul Krugman recently considered that conundrum in a newsletter titled “Never Underestimate the Ignorance of the Powerful.” He began by reproducing one of Trump’s “Truth Social” posts, in which the incoming President proposed substituting tariffs for income taxes. “Tariffs” Trump posted, “Will pay off our debt and MAKE AMERICA WEALTHY AGAIN.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m still extremely unsure what the incoming president will actually do about trade. The Smoot-Hawley level tariffs he promised during the campaign would be disastrous, but sometimes I think he may have at least a vague sense of the damage those tariffs would do, so what he’s really aiming for is an extortion scheme — one in which most companies would secure exemptions via political contributions and/or de facto bribes (e.g. buying Trump crypto.)

But then he’ll come out with something like the Truth Social post above, and I’ll be reminded that wealthy and powerful people like Trump or Andreesen or, of course, Elon Musk are often far more ignorant than policy wonks can easily imagine.

As Krugman reminds us, Trump very publicly disdains expertise, and Musk “appears to get what he thinks is intelligence from random posts on X.”

Krugman attributes this intellectual defect to “the arrogance of success.”

In the academic world there’s a familiar phenomenon sometimes called “great man’s disease,” in which a successful researcher in one field assumes that he (it’s usually a “he”) is so much smarter than experts in other fields that he doesn’t need to pay attention to their research. Physicists make confident, deeply ignorant pronouncements about economics; economists make confident, deeply ignorant pronouncements about sociology…

This kind of arrogance presumably comes even more easily to men of great wealth. After all, if these so-called experts are so smart, why aren’t they rich like me?

As Krugman also notes, wealth and power attract hangers-on who will tell the great man what he wants to hear. “There are wealthy men with enough humility to accept constructive criticism — I’ve met some of them. But such men don’t seem likely to play a role in the incoming administration.”

When Trump or Andreesen ask why we can’t go back to the McKinley era, when the government subsisted on tariffs and didn’t need an income tax, their problem isn’t failure to understand the revenue function; it’s failure to appreciate the simple fact that in the 1890s America barely had a government by modern standards.

Sure, tariffs could pay for a government without Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, at a time when even the military was tiny. But the constituency for returning to that kind of small government consists, as far as I can tell, of a couple of dozen libertarians in bow ties. And the kind of government we have now needs a lot more than tariffs to pay its way.

Bottom line: we’re about to discover the real downsides of a kakistocracy…

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About Those “Outsiders”

In Indiana, Republican candidates for Governor and Congress are spending megabucks on increasingly horrifying political ads. (Forget “dog whistles”–the ads for Governor, especially, are blatantly racist). Although it’s difficult to choose the very worst, a candidate for Congress in Indiana’s Fifth District probably wins that close vote: he faults the incumbent for sending tax dollars to Ukraine when we have an enormous problem in the U.S.– trans women competing in women’s sports.

Glad he has a sense of proportion…

Interestingly, the gubernatorial candidates’ attacks on each other have been for taking the few positions with which I actually agree, a tactic that certainly shows what they believe their base Republican voters think. If they’re correct, those voters are “base” in both senses of the word.

If there is a “through line” in these awful ads, however, it is the repeated claims to be “outsiders” rather than “career politicians.” It’s a laughable label for most of them: Braun has been a Senator for six years (granted, an undistinguished one, but it’s been six years) and he was a state legislator before that; Crouch was a County Auditor, served nine years in Indiana’s legislature and is currently Lieutenant Governor; Brad Chambers–who has really leaned on his “outsider” status–was Indiana’s Secretary of Commerce. Etc.

Not only are these claims to outsider status bogus, they’re stupid. Would you hire a job applicant who proudly proclaimed  ignorance of your business and emphasized a prior lack of experience?

James Briggs recently addressed this issue, somewhat tangentially, in a column for the Indianapolis Star.  Briggs was talking about his opposition to term limits–an opposition I share–but his reasoning is pertinent to the posturing of these “outsider” candidates. As he wrote:

State Rep. Chuck Goodrich, a Republican running in Indiana’s 5th District primary against Rep. Victoria Spartz, recently bragged about signing a term limits pledge, adding, “It’s time to break the grip of career politicians & ensure elected officials serve the people, not their own interests!”

That’s completely wrong.

A 2006 National Conference of State Legislatures report looked at states with legislative term limits and concluded “high turnover and relative inexperience create a steep learning curve for committee chairs and members, who are often less knowledgeable than their predecessors,” which “can result in increased influence by staff, bureaucrats and lobbyists.”

Essentially, term limits take power from the career politicians and hand it over to people who are less accountable to the public.

In Congress, the “newbies” are inevitably dependent upon and influenced by Congressional staff, who are familiar with the arcane rules of that body– and unelected by and unknown to the voting public.

Much like term limits, it’s popular to say the government should run like a business. I can’t think of any other economic sector where you’d find strong agreement for the statement, “The more experience you have, the worse you must be at your job.” We have a lot of job openings at IndyStar and I can assure you no one is running around yelling, “Find me some journalism outsiders!”

Briggs points out what most of us know: a professional body is more effective when it’s run by people who know what they’re doing.

The longer lawmakers serve in those jobs, the more they can learn how to navigate complex webs of rules and systems. They can also gain policy expertise, which is helpful for creating laws affecting virtually every part of people’s lives. They can develop relationships to help advance their goals.

The problems we face with government, especially in Indiana, aren’t a result of legislative longevity: they are a result of gerrymandering and low voter turnout. Briggs is dead-on with this paragraph:

Obviously, some elected officials don’t deserve to stay in office forever. The ills attributed to unlimited elected terms can more appropriately be linked to partisan gerrymandering, which creates safe spaces for ineffective, lazy and corrupt officials to win election after election. Yes, term limits would eventually knock those people out. So would competitive elections.

Let me repeat that last sentence: So would competitive elections.

I miss “career politicians” like Dick Lugar and Lee Hamilton. Joe Biden has been able to pass transformative legislation because he is a “career politician” who understands how government works, and how to get things done. I don’t know which of Indiana’s “know-nothing” Republicans will wind up on the general election ballot, but this year, for once, the Democrats have an unusually strong state ticket featuring experienced public servants who actually know how government works and what the positions they’re running for entail. They are also right on the issues.

Vote Blue, and make the GOP candidates actual outsiders.

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Another Answer To “What’s WRONG With These People?”

A lot of them are ignorant.

At least, if a recent report from the (admittedly leftish) New Republic is at all accurate. That article looked at the GOP crazies’ enthusiasm for a government shutdown, and found that–in addition to their antipathy to government in general–several of them appear convinced that a government shutdown would prevent the prosecutions of Donald Trump from continuing.

If this is really one of the motives for our current dysfunction, it rests on a misconception.

A government shutdown would not end the four Trump prosecutions! Two of them, of course, are being undertaken at the state level, in New York and Georgia, so Congress has no power over those at all. And the two federal ones, both led by Jack Smith, one in Washington, D.C., and one in Florida, are protected from any shutdown. In the past, reports NBC News, federal criminal matters have been exempted from government shutdowns. A Justice Department memo from 2021—long before Trump was indicted anywhere, so presumably written not with him specifically in mind—states that in the event of a shutdown, “criminal litigation will continue without interruption as an activity essential to the safety of human life and the protection of property.”

It’s hard to believe that people elected to the Congress of the United States are so ignorant of the rules promulgated by that government, but there is massive evidence that several of them really are that clueless. Marjorie Taylor Green comes to mind…. and how many times have you watched a political advertisement in which a candidate promises to do something that is either patently illegal or–as a practical matter– impossible? I always wonder whether the candidate really believes s/he can accomplish whatever it is, or whether (more likely) s/he thinks voters are too ignorant to know better.

That said, according to the linked article, most elected officials do know better.

Very few of them believe this garbage. As Mitt Romney told McKay Coppins recently, GOP senators regularly criticized Trump behind his back and once “burst into laughter” after he left the room. The House is more extreme than the Senate, so maybe a dozen of them really believe Trump’s narrative. But most don’t. And yet they say it and say it and say it, with conviction.

The only thing that explains the culture warriors who aren’t acting out of ignorance or stupidity is venality. Only a dishonest calculus can account for their public pronouncements: If pandering to a crazed base–a cult–is what it will take to avoid a primary challenge from the even-loonier Right, then that pandering will take priority over both personal integrity and the clear interests of the American public. There’s no bottom to their cupidity and self-interest.

Representative Andy Clyde—the guy who called January 6 a “normal tourist visit”—is seeking to add amendments to the appropriations bill to remove all federal funding from all three prosecutors (Smith, Fani Willis, and Alvin Bragg). Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene want to defund Smith. And Jim Jordan (of course) wants legislation dictating that the department can’t spend money on “politically sensitive” investigations.

Can these people possibly get more corrupt? (Don’t answer that.) But this is what happens when reality is turned on its head. Trump has created a “reality” that is the direct opposite of real reality. In real reality, ample evidence exists to suggest that Trump committed serious crimes, and he tried, right in front of our eyes, to lead a violent coup against the United States. But in Trump reality, it’s all McCarthyism.

The past few weeks have demonstrated just how little today’s Republican Party cares about governance or the American people. The GOP House members have vacillated between paralysis in the face of events requiring crucial decision-making, and toyed with installing a legislative terrorist as Speaker.

The last paragraph summed up our situation:

And let’s remember the bigger picture with respect to democracy. When one of two political parties is led by people who either (a) genuinely believe a fascist interpretation of reality or (b) don’t, but pretend to out of fear of a strongman and his well-armed followers … well, if that party takes power, democracy is kaput. We’ll find out soon enough how much of the country cares.

We will indeed.

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Just WOW…

It appears that our fearless (okay, feckless) lawmakers have identified a dire threat to America and its children–librarians. The Washington Post recently reported on one of the current allegations–this one by Senator Mike Lee of Utah–

“The goal is to sexualize children — to provide minors with sexually explicit material … and then hide this content from the parents.”

The American Library Association is facing a partisan firefight unlike anything in its almost 150-year history. The once-uncontroversial organization, which says it is the world’s largest and oldest library association and which provides funding, training and tools to most of the country’s 123,000 libraries, has become entangled in the education culture wars — the raging debates over what and how to teach about race, sex and gender — culminating in Tuesday’s Senatorial name-check.

Lee isn’t alone. The increasingly insane Right is intent upon painting the ALA as a defender of pornographic literature for children. MAGA warriors insist that the nation’s libraries, including school libraries, are filled with sexually explicit, inappropriate texts.

Attacks on libraries are part and parcel of what Isaac Asimov called the “cult of ignorance,” a phenomenon that we see in contemporary dismissals of expertise as “elitism”and the cyclical eruptions of anti-intellectualism in the United States. Asimov’s famous quote probably says it best:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

America’s libraries are our intellectual gatekeepers, safeguarding our ability to access practical information as well as hard-won wisdom that has been built up over centuries. Attacking them is an attack on human intellectual progress–a declaration that, as Asimov aptly framed it, ignorance is just as good as knowledge.

We’ve been here before. In a speech in 2014, I argued that libraries as we know them are important protectors of what I call “the American Idea.” I spent six years as Executive Director of the Indiana Civil Liberties Union, and of all the lessons I learned during that time, the most profound was this: the future of western liberal democracy rests on the preservation of intellectual freedom.

That preservation, of course, is the library’s mission.

America’s Constitution is grounded in the Enlightenment concept of the individual as a rights-bearing, autonomous being. That concept is integral to our legal system; it is the foundation upon which our forbears erected the Bill of Rights. The Founders envisioned the good society as one composed of morally independent citizens whose rights in certain important circumstances “trumped” both the dictates of the state and the desires of the majority.….The First Amendment is really an integrated whole, protecting our individual right to receive and disseminate information and ideas, to consider arguments and theories, to form our own beliefs and craft our own consciences.  It answers the fundamental social question– who shall decide? — by vesting that authority in each individual, subject to and consistent with the equal rights of others.

Implicit in the First Amendment is the legal system’s concept of personal responsibility, the University’s commitment to academic freedom, the moral authority of the clergy, the independence of the media, and the legitimacy of the political process.

That exercise of personal responsibility requires untrammeled access to information. For that matter, protection of civil liberties of every kind depends upon  and requires intellectual freedom.

As I noted on this site back in April, the culture warriors out to terrorize Marian the Librarian are seeing considerable success. In an Urban Library Trauma study conducted in 2022, more than two-thirds of respondents reported encountering violent or aggressive behavior from patrons at their library.

Groups such as Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and Parents Defending Education aren’t the only ones fighting to remove books by Black and LGBTQ+ authors.  Proud Boys have taken to storming into Drag Queen Story Hour events, for instance, causing serious fear for patrons and librarians.

Lest we give these censors the benefit of the doubt, thinking they are identifying mostly trashy books, it’s instructive to consult the AIA’s annual list of the most frequently challenged books. They include Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.

Challenges are overwhelmingly aimed at books by or about LGBTQ+ people, and books critical of racism. (The most censored books of all times are 1984, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Color Purple, The Great Gatsby, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Lord of the Flies.)

The culture war isn’t “just” about democracy versus Christian Nationalism. It’s also about ignorance versus knowledge.

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