AS WE BECOME DUMB
Kevin Williamson’s new book, “The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics,” argues that our political discourse has become so degraded as to threaten the survival of the republic.
For Williamson, this is the central political problem of our time because “Discourse — the health and character of that discourse — is a force that exists above and outside the specific policy questions of the day; it is the master issue that will determine how every other issue is talked about and thought about — and whether those issues are thought about at all.”
This is another way of saying that how we talk about issues is more important than the particular issues we talk about. And if we can’t talk about issues intelligently as part of an overarching culture of reasoned discourse, politics itself becomes irrelevant and self-government impossible.
Few can dispute at this point that our political controversies invariably involve things no one with a real life should care about and that our political disputes seem to increasingly resemble fights between second-graders on a playground.
“Have we gone insane?” is a question I frequently get asked within the first 30 seconds or so of any casual conversation about our politics.
Williamson discusses this debasement in much more extensive detail in his book, but a number of overlapping causes spring to mind.
Extreme polarization is part of it, in the sense that it encourages warfare between tribes less interested in seeking truth than defeating the other side in skirmishes where truth is irrelevant.
Social media comes into play as well, with Twitter especially to blame for elevating fake outrage and hysteria over knowledge and reflection. As Williamson notes, a herd has no mind.
Still, while excessive partisanship has provided the temptation to lie and vilify, and technology new means of disseminating that, political tribalism and appalling social media content are likely more a consequence of political decay than actual causes; after all, nothing forces anyone to get on Twitter and spew vitriol at strangers.
No, an almost certainly more parsimonious explanation is that we have a dumber politics because we’ve become a dumber people (and have a reality-TV star as president because our politics has become reality TV).
The operation of self-government doesn’t require that all voters possess political science degrees, but the founders’ conception of “virtue” suggested that they must at least be able to grasp basic political principles, especially those underlying their own Constitution and political order.
The often-noted failures of our public education system in this regard have likely been magnified in recent years by failure at the next level, in our once respected institutions of higher education which increasingly substitute indoctrination for genuine education.
The graduates of our finest universities, their heads filled with little more than mush, then go on to populate the elite chattering-class institutions, mass media, publishing, philanthropic foundations, and of course government and academe (thereby creating a self-perpetuating ignorance).
The failures of institutions of higher learning to teach critical reasoning is further compounded by their export of political correctness. What began as a somewhat admirable form of political etiquette has now become a stultifying, constantly twisting equivalent of the party line.
We have political candidates who now promise all kinds of ridiculous free stuff as if our national debt doesn’t exist, including benefits that citizens don’t receive for people in the country illegally, pundits who argue that gender is a consequence of identity rather than biology, and professors who think teaching students about Western civilization is equivalent to promoting “white supremacy.”
Welcome to dummy land.
Bradley R. Gitz lives and teaches in Batesville, Ark.