Know-Nothings for the 21st Century

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Date: Wed, Jan 17, 2018 at 6:01 AM
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Know-Nothings for the 21st Century
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>


Know-Nothings for the 21st Century
By Paul Krugman
Jan 15 2018
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/opinion/trump-american-values.html>

These days calling someone a “know-nothing” could mean one of two things.

If you’re a student of history, you might be comparing that person to a
member of the Know Nothing party of the 1850s, a bigoted, xenophobic,
anti-immigrant group that at its peak included more than a hundred members
of Congress and eight governors. More likely, however, you’re suggesting
that said person is willfully ignorant, someone who rejects facts that
might conflict with his or her prejudices.

The sad thing is that America is currently ruled by people who fit both
definitions. And the know-nothings in power are doing all they can to
undermine the very foundations of American greatness.

The parallels between anti-immigrant agitation in the mid-19th century and
Trumpism are obvious. Only the identities of the maligned nationalities
have changed.

After all, Ireland and Germany, the main sources of that era’s immigration
wave, were the shithole countries of the day. Half of Ireland’s population
emigrated in the face of famine, while Germans were fleeing both economic
and political turmoil. Immigrants from both countries, but the Irish in
particular, were portrayed as drunken criminals if not subhuman. They were
also seen as subversives: Catholics whose first loyalty was to the pope. A
few decades later, the next great immigration wave — of Italians, Jews and
many other peoples — inspired similar prejudice.

And here we are again. Anti-Irish prejudice, anti-German prejudice,
anti-Italian prejudice are mostly things of the past (although
anti-Semitism springs eternal), but there are always new groups to hate.

But today’s Republicans — for this isn’t just about Donald Trump, it’s
about a whole party — aren’t just Know-Nothings, they’re also
know-nothings. The range of issues on which conservatives insist that the
facts have a well-known liberal bias just keeps widening.

One result of this embrace of ignorance is a remarkable estrangement
between modern conservatives and highly educated Americans, especially but
not only college faculty. The right insists that the scarcity of
self-identified conservatives in the academy is evidence of discrimination
against their views, of political correctness run wild.

Yet conservative professors are rare even in hard sciences like physics and
biology, and it’s not difficult to see why. When the more or less official
position of your party is that climate change is a hoax and evolution never
happened, you won’t get much support from people who take evidence
seriously.

But conservatives don’t see the rejection of their orthodoxies by people
who know what they’re talking about as a sign that they might need to
rethink. Instead, they’ve soured on scholarship and education in general.
Remarkably, a clear majority of Republicans now say that colleges and
universities have a negative effect on America.

So the party that currently controls all three branches of the federal
government is increasingly for bigotry and against education. That should
disturb you for multiple reasons, one of which is that the G.O.P. has
rejected the very values that made America great.

Think of where we’d be as a nation if we hadn’t experienced those great
waves of immigrants driven by the dream of a better life. Think of where
we’d be if we hadn’t led the world, first in universal basic education,
then in the creation of great institutions of higher education. Surely we’d
be a shrunken, stagnant, second-rate society.

[snip]

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