Henry Giroux's "Manufactured illiteracy and miseducation: A long process of decline led to President Donald Trump" in Salon is timely and accurate within itself. But there are boundaries, and perhaps the facts on the ground are better than he and the political observers see.
It is true that "illiteracy is also about refusing to act from a position of thoughtfulness, informed judgment, and critical agency." It’s also true that thoughtfulness, informed judgment and critical agency have been refused by Gingrich/Trumpist Conservatism for decades, they have been attacked; and indeed, that the Republicans haven’t just eschewed thoughtfulness and informed judgment, they have explicitly rejected them from their political DNA. Thoughtfulness and informed judgment kill political careers on the Right. Trump destroyed their whole slate of candidates in 2016 by denigrating the bedrock traits of statesmanship.
However, one thing keeps escaping the prognosticators: outside just two realms, politics and faith, thoughtfulness and informed judgment aren’t liabilities. They’re indispensable assets and in many cases they’re even legal requirements for people in positions of responsibility. That’s always been the case, but now more than ever, accountability for thoughtfulness and informed judgment is essential because the capacity for scrutiny is higher than it’s ever been. We live on the cusp of an age of measurement whose challenges and rewards are already evident. Thoughtfulness and informed judgment are fundamental to success in every sector of business, science, law, medicine; indeed the whole economy from one-man shops to entire industries is compelled to think and act on the bases of thoughtfulness and informed judgment if they want to survive. Thinking with the blood might be malevolent fun for the mobs at Trump rallies, but if those same people worked for companies that employed Donald Trump’s rabbit-hole fabulism, or if they ran their own companies that way, if they drove a car, took a prescription drug, bought a stock, used a physician, or did their household finances based on this bizarre subjectivity, bad consequences would result.
This kind of thinking is pathogenic in the real world. Its success in politics comes from political leaders disconnecting politics from real life and reducing it to crude vaudeville at the direct expense of their own supporters. This kind of arrogance is the stuff of Aesop and Ovid. Human folly, cynicism, and nihilism as old as Greek myths haunt us again when the likes of Gingrich, Frank Luntz, and Karl Rove bring the fever back and declare that “We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” The only reality they create is damage to the one they live in. They don’t create new ones. Like serial arsonists they burn and escape, burn and escape; but they never leave reality-based community because there isn’t anything else.
Reality is reality-based. That is why Trumpist Conservatism is doomed.
A business executive who insists that he’s accountable to his own reality is a Bernie Madoff--and he goes to prison. A jury that creates its own reality nullifies evidence and with prejudice exonerates the Emmett Till killers and O.J. Simpson. A company that creates its own reality is the dot-com that makes fatal mistakes and destroys a billion dollars in capital. Doctors who create their own reality join the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and embrace false theories that can’t survive responsible peer-review. They can all try to escape the reality that declines them their fabulism, but they remain part of the real world they deny. They're making high speed in an iceberg zone. Fabulism sinks even the unsinkable ship. If Trumpists actually lived in a comprehensive system of food, law, energy, money, etc., based on their thinking--in other words, if everybody else was as crazy as Trumpists want to be--then they’d be dead in a month.
Our political crisis is dangerous but not existential. The fever can’t spread far, and if it does, the first and worst damage that this willful stupidity does is to the interest that tries to use it. Don't believe the noise--Trump and the GOP aren’t on the offensive here. They’re taking their own voters down a rabbit hole where as states and individuals they will be poorer, sicker, and shunned in instance after instance by the economy where their thinking is like Confederate currency in 2017. They might get away for a while with taking each other’s bad money but sooner or later they have to face it: thoughtfulness, informed judgment, and critical agency aren’t just political stances. They’re competitive requirements in real life, and they’re how capitalism works. That's why the GOP has made a suicidal political mistake here, and why its decline is inevitable and must be managed carefully as a pillar of American statecraft falls down.