The Historic Cult of Ignorance in America

If we are to understand why it is that demagogues like doughfacedonny have such an easy time manipulating the simple-minded authoritarian followers in this country and others, then we have to look backwards to the founding of the republic for some of the reasons. Inertia in history is an overlooked category in inquiry for many people looking for answers. Bad ideas can become entrenched as tradition and then mutate into inverted perversions of good intentions.

I do not intend to deconstruct Asimov's wisdom concerning the "cult of ignorance" in America. I merely wish to wield it as guidepost for this essay. I share many articles from Esquire's resident wise man Charles Pierce, but here we need to reference his excellent book called Idiot America. If you want to scratch the surface of this cult of ignorance, you have to look at empirical history and Pierce does a great job in his book (I recommend the audio version for the entertainment value, being narrated by Balki Bartokomous is also a plus) of examining that history. He peels back this disgusting crust of gleeful ignorance enveloping the founding fathers' enlightenment values. From the Amazon description:

The culture wars are over and the idiots have won. This is a veteran journalist's caustically funny, righteously angry lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States.

The three Great Premises of Idiot America: · Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units; anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough; "fact" is that which enough people believe. And "truth" is determined by how fervently they believe it.

Charles Pierce has led a career-long quest to separate the smart from the pap, and now it's time to try and salvage the Land of the Enlightened, buried somewhere in this new Home of the Uninformed. With his razor-sharp wit and erudite reasoning, Pierce delivers a gut-wrenching, side-splitting lament about the glorification of ignorance in the United States and how a country founded on intellectual curiosity has deteriorated into a nation of simpletons more apt to vote for an American Idol contestant than a presidential candidate.

With Idiot America, Pierce's thunderous denunciation is also a secret call to action, as he hopes that, somehow, being intelligent will stop being a stigma and that pinheads will once again be pitied, not celebrated.

I so wish he was right about the culture wars being over. Of course, you can lay a great deal of the responsibility and blame for why the moldy crust of idiots grew so exponentially over the great experiment in liberty and self-government in the lap of Thomas Jefferson. The American Sphinx, as biographer Joseph Ellis , was just as enigmatic in his own time as he is to Americans today. All things to all people, Jefferson is invoked by the Federalist Society (the irony of being idolized by the namesake of his enemies would not have been recognized by him) on the right all the way to Noam Chomsky on the left. They all take what they want from him, except the context of his times.

Jefferson's conception of the United States as a loose confederation of strong member states and populated by a disinterested yeomanry, self-sufficient and self-reliant, pursuing national concerns with enlightenment and wisdom, never really existed. Sure, yeoman farmers existed and we could think of them as part of the middle class. America did have a greater proportion of freeholding farmers than any European or offshoot county. But it also had subsistence farm families who had neither the time, resources, communications, or education to contemplatively ponder what it means to live in a republic. There were ambitious merchants on the coast who were full-blown capitalists and not interested in the high-minded pursuit of knowledge, rather they were interested in profit and bending the state to their will, such as the state was. Also, speculators and planters who were less interested in "all men are created equal" and "endowed with... rights" than in exploiting people. So a comparatively small portion of the American polity was in any position to really be Jefferson's virtuous yeomen, free from dependence or want, to execute his vision of selfless service to building democracy and the good society.

If you are interested in a glimpse of what politics was like in Jeffersonian America, I suggest Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and his Times. Marshall was a Federalist, and before becoming Chief Justice he served in many public offices and capacities that put him at the center of politics in the young republic. Although Jefferson's victory in 1800 was the first peaceful transfer of power in a modern republic, Without Precedent details all the ways that it was not frictionless, many of the facets of democratic governance that we took for granted before doughfacedonny came along and shit all over them very nearly failed to take hold in the first place because the Republicans (Jeffersonians, who evolved into today's Democratic Party but had many temperamental characteristics of today's Republicans) tried to take everything built by Washington and Adams apart, in many cases out of simple spite. American government would have evolved along much more demagogic lines, charisma and personal vendettas being the central tenet of statesmanship if Marshall had not insisted on rule of law in place of petty whims.

The point being that even at the beginning, there were politicians who acted like politicians. They were even petty, vindictive, corrupt, selfish, and uncompromising like today's republicans. And there is a hapless party of responsible adults who actually believe in governing on the other side that is forever hopelessly chasing a responsible, enlightened citizenry which doesn't exist. The first party system in America was a lot like the ridiculous system of today, the Federalists tried in vain to defend the values of a bygone age, and the Republicans (Jeffersonians) were committed to tearing it all down. Tomorrow perhaps we can explore why average American citizens failed to live up to Jefferson's idealistic naivete.