BREACHING THE CAPITOL ... A PRODUCT OF THE SHALLOW STATE

 My latest, "Breaching the Capitol, A Product of the Shallow State," published in the Bakersfield Californian this past Sunday ... 

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After watching the Trump-inspired spectacle of January 6^th one has to wonder, Where did this come from? To be sure, President Trump urged his supporters to go to the capitol. But this doesn’t explain how a group of overcharged cosplayers – let alone millions of Americans – could be convinced by one man to doubt an election that every institutional process in America validated.

To appreciate what happened on January 6^th one needs to understand the dynamics behind the gradual descent of millions of Americans into ill-informed voters who now embrace make-believe conspiracies.

As the Trump administration was settling into the White House in 2017, David Rothkopf wrote about "The Shallow State" in Foreign Policy.  The message was clear. We have to move past ignorance-filled and social media-fed Deep State conspiracy theories. To be sure, right-wing Twitter-bloggers and their followers are certain they've cracked some kind of mysterious Deep State conspiracy – which only they could have uncovered, of course – so their spooky Deep State monsters are very real.

But they’re also child-like and expose some seriously flawed and amateurish thinking about how government works.

Still, something far more alarming has happened in America.

Specifically, we need to worry about the growing presence of an arrogant but ignorant group of people who both disdain expertise they don't understand and walk away from evidence they don't want to see.

In this way the Shallow State is made up of people who reject experience, knowledge, insight, craft, and special skills and, instead, choose to celebrate their ignorance and disdain for those who possess these gifts. This is what Donald Trump stepped into. 

Worse, Trump became “the champion and avatar of the shallow state” and “won power because his supporters are threatened by what they don’t understand, and what they don’t understand is almost everything.”

Think about it. Whether it’s the economy, the very real threats we face around the world or the science behind diseases and vaccines – as we’re seeing in real time – they reject facts that don’t conform to their world views. There is no digging for the truth because skimming social media sites for conspiracy affirming news is more comforting. According to Rothkopf knowledge is not a useful tool but “a cunning barrier elites have created to keep power from the average man …”.

This is unfortunate because – whether Trump’s supporters acknowledge it or not – there are objective truths in our world. These truths, over time, have allowed us to move forward as a community, as a society and as a nation. Going to the moon and finding cures for polio and other once ordinary diseases are a product of building off of objective truths.

The process of building from objective truths is the muscle behind our system of education.

We know, for example, by the time a child enters Kindergarten they should be able to color between the lines. If a 2nd grader is asked to add 2 + 2 and comes up with "leventeen" there's a problem. By the time you leave middle school, you should understand that, no, the sun does not revolve around the earth.

If we understand these agreed upon, peer-reviewed truths we can appreciate that, yes, there are objective truths in our world. This means that, just as there are good sources and bad sources – and real universities and fake universities (think Trump University) – we also know there are reliable ways to distinguish between fact and fiction.

If we understand this we can begin to understand why arguments that begin with "Breitbart reported ..." are not acceptable answers. Simply put, the political equivalent of "leventeen" should not be an acceptable response, or the basis for a belief system, in any forum.

Yet, here we are, where a plethora of social media sites put out the political equivalent of "leventeen" every day. Worse, a large segment of America’s population eats it up.

Experience, skill, and know-how require time, work and study and will often challenge our belief systems. Truth is hard. Shallowness is easy.

Trump’s followers alone didn’t breach the capitol on January 6th. Leventeen was there too.

It’s the Shallow State that America needs to worry about. 

- Mark

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For previous readers, know that I have used the "leventeen" reference in previous posts, starting four years ago here.