21st-century know-nothings

The GOP is trying to kill off what made America great

These days calling someone a “know nothing” could mean one of two things. You might be comparing that person to a member of the bigoted, anti-immigrant Know Nothing political party of the 1850s. But you’re more likely suggesting the person is willfully ignorant and rejects facts that conflict with his or her prejudices.

Sadly, America now is ruled by people who fit both definitions — and who are undermining the foundations of American greatness.

In the 19th century, Ireland and Germany were the “s-hole” countries. Half of Ireland’s population emigrated in the face of famine, while Germans fled economic and political turmoil. Immigrants from both countries were portrayed as drunken criminals, if not subhuman. The next great immigration wave — of Italians, Jews and others — inspired similar prejudice.

And here we are again. There are always new groups to hate.

But today’s Republicans aren’t just Know-Nothings, they’re also know-nothings. The range of issues on which conservatives insist that the facts have a liberal bias just keeps growing.

One result is a remarkable estrangement between modern conservatives and highly educated Americans, especially those in academe. The right insists that the scarcity of self-identified conservatives in the academy is evidence of discrimination against their views. Yet conservative professors are rare even in hard sciences like physics and biology. Apparently, 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. Remarkably, a majority of Republicans now say colleges have a negative effect on America.

So the party that now controls all three branches of the federal government is increasingly for bigotry and against education — which means the GOP 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, secondrate society.

And that’s what we’ll become if modern know-nothingism prevails.

Enrico Moretti’s 2012 “The New Geography of Jobs” described the growing divergence of regional fortunes within the United States. Until around 1980, America seemed on the path toward broadly spread prosperity, with poor regions like the Deep South rapidly catching up. Since then, however, the gaps have widened again.

Mr. Moretti and other analysts believe this new divergence reflects the growing clusters of highly skilled workers — many of them immigrants connected to great universities — that create virtuous circles of growth and innovation. The 2016 election largely pitted these rising regions against those left behind, which is why counties carried by Hillary Clinton account for a remarkable 64 percent of U.S. GDP, almost twice as much as Trump counties.

One way to think of Trumpism is as an attempt to narrow regional disparities, not by bringing lagging regions up, but by cutting the growing regions down. For that’s what attacks on education and immigration would do.

If our modern know-nothings prevail, they won’t make America great again — they’ll kill the very things that made it great.