Ignorant and Free Doesn’t Work

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

– Thomas Jefferson, 1816

I think we can assume that unless the non-MAGA sector of American voters find some way to remove Donald J. Trump from office, or he vacates it the way Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy did, or the way Harrison, Taylor, Harding and FDR did, or the way Nixon did, you can settle down to four years of Trump presidency.

So far, after about two weeks, we can expect President Trump will push hard to replace all possible obstructions, Congressional, Constitutional, and Military, to his will to power. This is a power claim not directed at shaping a “higher humanity,” Nietzsche’s dream, but profiting on real estate, regal offerings, and merchandizing his presidency (Shop at Trumptstore.com). If you know U.S. presidential history, you’ll know this guy is a “never before.”

Actually, in Thomas Jefferson’s view, being ignorant of history and the workings of government and much more is a danger to any electoral Constitutional democracy hoping to hold on to freedoms won. Always, however, in danger of being lost. Like now.

Trump can be a one-off if we bring History, for one, back into public education, alongside Civics and its focus on how democratic governments work, the role of political parties, and Constitutional rights and the paths to their enactment. Here, we should teach historical struggles, highlighting strong positions at the time which collapsed into nonsense, and weak positions which over time found their way to acceptance. At a more primer level, we need to stand firm in regard to what a sentence is, in other words, how to read beyond messaging and emojis, how to build an argument grounded in supportable facts and evidence, and how to employ the methods of both dialectic and rhetoric to expose what is false, inconsistent and baseless.

You can discern at once that we are in desperate need of such skills.

Reading critically not confined to what STEM curricula require is essential if the scope of knowledge Jefferson found necessary to battle the forces of anti-liberal autocracy can be attained. There is much nonsense that has gained an equal footing with rational and empirically based discourse. Much has been turned upside down. For instance, the United States House Select Committee on the January 6^th insurrection presented clear evidence to make its case. Results: the insurrection was turned by Presidential order into a “day of love.” The members of the Select Committee should be indicted Trump declared. Trump demands an apology from a bishop who asked from the pulpit that mercy be shown to immigrants and LGBTQ+ people.

Examples of how the world of reliable reasoning is being turned on its head proliferate every day. What the response has been is expressed here in an 2023 Atlantic piece: “Trump Floats the Idea of Executing Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley: The former president is inciting violence against the nation’s top general. America’s response is distracted and numb.” Is not such distraction and numbness a clear indication that this is not a civilized state and that we are perversely believing we are free?

In the present, Trump’s own Heinrich Himmler, DOD secretary Hegseth, is doing what he can to execute President Trump’s orders but Biden’s preemptive pardon of Milley nixes execution. In our cockeyed world, it’s Biden’s preemptive pardons and not a President’s vindictiveness that are deplorable here.

We’re under a sort of Humpty Dumpty regime of authority. However, authorities do exist; what Fauci says about a virus is not equivalent to what Trump says; what the IPCC says about global warming is not equivalent to your experience of the weather; there are alternative theories, but no alternative facts; false equivalence is a rhetorical device, truth is not in repetition or volume; rhetoric is persuasive not crushing. There is much that has set critical thought back to troglodyte level.

This president is intent on making miserable the lives of those who oppose him. Some his fraudulent Justice Department may indict and imprison, others now without security detail may disappear. We won’t become less ignorant in time to save these or spin the world right side up but hopefully we can grow wiser before the 2026 Congressional elections. In a couple of generations of critical thinking education, the chances of both plutocracy and autocracy may diminish. But then AI may do the critical thinking for us, or the Owners of such will.

Long term goal: if we want to keep our republic, which Franklin obviously saw was not guaranteed (as if he foresaw Trump as did Tocqueville and Madison), we need to find a path to reaching common understanding. We need to ease up on our personal perspective and see beyond the illusions of our own likes and opinions, which are authorized only by the assertion that they are ours. A vicious circle. We cannot claim the deity of our own views, though Trump does, because in doing so we ignore the ruthless conditions of economic inequality that have led us to the antiliberal Trump. Likewise, the force of an increasing global warming does not dissolve because we choose to ignore its existence. Our ignorance on this matter is beyond tragic.

I am not advocating a path to Universal and Absolute Truth that is clearly marked and mysteriously devolved into a Trump politics of “alternate facts.” I am also not denying that methodologies to that path, rational since the Enlightenment and finely tuned empirically in the Scientific Method since Francis Bacon, have not saved us from degenerating into a Trump politics. The reasoning of reasonable people in government was stormed, like the Bastille, in the recent presidential election and that lot was vilified and scorned as The Elite. In accordance with our world upside down state, the Elite are no longer the wealthy and powerful but the journalists, the university faculty and those who write long form essays.

Education has gone down with reason itself, both at low ebb among Trump supporters. It is imagined that the bureaucratic dark web of the Deep State is woven in the web of reason itself.

I would, however, assert that there is nothing in our present level of discourse that can dislodge and replace either the Scientific Method or the Western Rationalist Tradition.

It is only because we are descending from a state of civilization to a world Hobbes feared (solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short), that we can presume to be both free and ignorant, ignorance here fully accepted as a “crushing” of the purveyors of “fake news” and all criticism of Trump. Interrogation and debate, a point-counterpoint, the formation of a dialectic and so on, requires a mutual respect for the process and an acceptance of the legitimacy of those engaged. Neither of those requirements now exist. They don’t because you can turn reasoning on its head and not be stopped, you will not concede any justness or fairness in opposing views, and you accept as a given that inquiry and investigation are weapons employed by Trump’s enemies, which are also yours. Faith in him has replaced a critical reasoning that would expose the uncivilized state of his own mind.

In point of fact, a U.S. state of civilization in which a substantial middle class and a reliable mobility ladder blocked a face-off between the poor and the wealthy vaporized. The reasons are many. Investment wealth crushed wage earner wealth; wealth invested in politics to preserve and protect its ownership; wealth invested against government obstructions to unbridled Market Rule; wealth is investing in a man who can win the popular vote even though the vast majority of that populace is best served by democratic and not oligarchic, autocratic rule.

The U.S. state of civilization has fallen into the hands not only of the will of the wealthy but also, as a double whammy, the hands of an autocrat wannabe who serves himself. Whether his transactional ways collide with the ways of global investment and finance is a speculation as to whether Trump can bend Market Rule to his own will as he has with 50% of those making under $50,000 total income.

In one telling, this demographic of voters were ignorant of who and what is endangering to them and their democracy, or, Trump has Rasputin/Svengali powers. In another telling, or recitation, this demographic had no political party representation, was thirsty for relief and saw that in Donald J. Trump, who gave them recognition.

Regardless of what explanation you choose, failures to push for working class and middle class representation in a party detoured from its New Deal roots, as well as failure of both parties to organize against the autocratic ambitions of Trump point to a collapse in our state of civilization.

We are not critically aware and accurately informed enough to keep ourselves free. What is a decline into a plutocracy or autocratic rule but a failure to keep ourselves free?

The whole tragic drama is different with Market Rule.

There’s some nervousness regarding what Trump may do but private gain and private property are not threatened either by Trump or were they over the 16 years of Democratic presidencies. Losers are part of the game and expected. There was no way that the party of Reaganomics was going to bring relief to those who became MAGAS. What the Losers in growing numbers would have done and how the Winners would have responded is academic at this point. Trump stepped in and buffered the conflict.

Conflict may arise, however, between the forces of market globalization and an autocrat’s need to bend such forces to his will. Or, more likely, Trump will withdraw within the domain he has won. He remains a Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues real estate guy from Queens. The fox doesn’t stray from home turf. What we do have more assuredly is a clear case of globalized capitalist strategic expertise in an unscheduled relationship with a clever fox who has gotten into the unprotected White House coop. Twice.

Perhaps Hobbes, who wrote that an authoritarian government would constrain the degeneracy of a state of Nature, would be MAGA today, looking upon Trump as an imposer of peace and a protector of the people from the responsibilities of keeping a republic. After this election, Trump tells us, we won’t need elections. We’ll have him. If we don’t acquiesce to his view of his own immortality, we face the possibility of a continuing regime of MAGA sponsored Trump clones.

In the collapsed and sorry state of civilization we are in, very little is grounded in thought but mostly passion as well as a cultish strain of allegiance to Trump. With him gone, passionate hatred wanders off, as it tends to do, and in the absence of a gospel left to us, there’s a good chance that Mother Nature will really go viral on alternative media sources and the fear of a planet heating up and destroying God, Country and Personal Freedom will be trendsetting. Passionate hatred that has no thought will react to the next Big Fear.

There’s a good chance Trump’s wild crew of miscreants will sink under the weight of their assignments by reason of ignorance and incompetence, or, as Big Plans crumble as poor execution becomes the norm, that chaos will lead to Congressional wins for Democrats in 2026. There’s also a good chance that the wizard’s curtain is thrown open and we proceed to see and think clearly. And fortify our defenses in the classrooms, in the eager minds of the young. . . if we can keep AI from replacing our own intelligence.

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