At one point, Woodward mentioned to Trump an observation made by Barbara Tuchman about the dying of an earlier old order. Woodward suggested that, with the election of Trump in 2016, a similar dying of an old order had occurred. Trump heartily agreed. Woodward, however, didn't consider the dying of the old order in 2016 a positive event. But it required a pointed observation by Secretary of Defense Mattis to identify why. (Note: I was reminded of Mattis's crucial observation by Lawrence O'Donnell during an episode of "The Last Word.")
Mattis believed that "Trump's impact on the country would be lasting. 'This degradation of the American experiment is real. This is tangible. Truth is no longer governing the White House statements. Nobody believes - even the people who believe in him somehow believe in him without believing in what he says.'"
What an amazing observation! Beyond explaining why Trump's more than 20,000 lies as president fail to outrage his supporters, it immediately brought to mind similar observations about America's degradation made by Henry David Thoreau and Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset. It also raised the question of whether America has reached a new low in its degradation.
Thoreau famously observed that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." Although that observation appears to remain generally valid today, it appears to be especially applicable to the majority of Trump supporters - and even more so to the group's large subset of white Americans lacking a college education. Most of them appear to nurture some grievance or other, whether it is economic, racial, nativist, religious, or anti-elitist - or some combination. Pitifully, these aggrieved seem to find Trump's pandering to their grievances at his rallies to be quite entertaining, great sport, and an escape from their quiet desperation.
Thoreau also wrote scathingly about the failure of Americans, who were far too consumed by mastering their labors and the vicissitudes of everyday life, to remember well their ignorance, which their growth required. But, today, his admonition begs the question of how members of the Trump cult can well remember their ignorance when, as Mattis asserts, those "who believe in him somehow believe in him without believing in what he says." Such stunning behavior appears to rest on a resolute unwillingness to attempt to establish the true and the false - the very bedrock for holding leaders responsible in any genuine democracy.
Walter Lippmann would have viewed such behavior as an assault on "effective virtue." "Effective virtue, as Socrates pointed out long ago, is knowledge; and a code of right and wrong must await upon a perception of the true and the false." (Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public, p. 20). Caring little about independently establishing the true and the false, the Trump cult simply submits, as if in worship, to the words spouted by America's Orwellian "Big Brother," regardless of right or wrong.
Even putting aside the large number of whites lacking a college education, simply consider how many Americans do not read serious books, magazines, or newspapers, let alone scholarly journals. When you do, you get a vague notion of what noted conservative historian, Jacques Barzun, called "the menace of the untaught" (to themselves and everyone else). But Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset identified a particular menace, one posed by the "learned ignoramus."
In 1930, Jose Ortega y Gasset published his classic work, The Revolt of the Masses. Chapter 12 of that book is titled "The Barbarism of "Specialisation," and wickedly describes the "learned ignoramus."
According to Ortega, "Previously, men could be divided into the learned and the ignorant, those more or less the one, and those more or less the other. But your specialist cannot be brought in under either of these two categories. He is not learned, for he is ignorant of all that does not enter into his specialty; but neither is he ignorant, because he is "a scientist,' and "knows" very well his own tiny portion of the universe. We shall have to say that he is a learned ignoramus, which is a very serious matter, as it implies that he is a person who is ignorant, not in the fashion of the ignorant man, but with all the petulance of one who is learned in his own special line."
Consequently, "In politics, in art, in social usages, in other sciences, he will adopt the attitude of primitive, ignorant man; but he will adopt them forcefully and with self-sufficiency, and will not admit of -- this is the paradox -- specialists in those matters." Can you think of a more appropriate description of Trump, Fox News, and their cult?
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
