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 6th 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
6th 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.
