The King is Dead; Long Live the King!

I’ve never been a political animal, and never supported one party over another.  Two of my favorite modern Presidents are Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama.  While radically different in some ways, both Presidents were sincere patriots who offered what they felt the country needed at the time.  And big majorities of voters agreed.  Donald Trump is totally different, however, and presents a number of very serious threats to the US, its system of government, and our way of life.  This is one of many commentaries on him and the dire situation we find ourselves in under his administration.

One of the greatest results of The Crusades that started in 1096 was the opening of European eyes to the knowledge and advances made by Arabs in the fields of science, medicine, and mathematics.  While Europe was stuck in the Dark Ages with no progress in those fields and even a loss of knowledge attained by the previous Roman and Greek cultures, Arabs continued to build on those earlier wisdoms.  Few Europeans knew how to read or knew even the simplest basics of those academic fields, and relied instead on church and feudal leaders to tell them what was what.  Knowledge and study, which continued to advance in the Middle East, were replaced to a large degree by ignorance and superstition in Middle Ages Europe.

Returning Crusaders, however, brought back the marvels of the progressing Arab cultures upon their return to Europe.  Those, along with similar revelations that traders such as Marco Polo brought back from China – the world’s most highly advanced civilization at the time – eventually led to The Renaissance (or rebirth of learning and art) in 14^th century Europe.  That era, in turn, led to the Scientific Revolution in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  The basic building block of that Revolution was that there was order in the world, order that man could know things based on experiments that could, in turn, be verified by similar experiments done by others.  Science revealed the true nature of things, and no longer did people have to take their leader’s, or their local priest’s, word for the way things were.  Knowledge of the natural world progressed astronomically, while at the same time the stage was set for improved personal freedom, no longer constrained by leaders of the state and church. 

What followed was The Enlightenment of the 17^th and 18^th centuries.  If there was order in the natural world, knowable through science, then similarly order in the relationships among people could be guided by facts, reason, and compassion, rather than just doing things the way they had always been done.  Greek democracy and Rome’s laws and its form of representative government were rediscovered, updated, and implemented in places like – the United States of America.  The Constitution of the US resulted, creating a form of government that guided the growth and incredible prosperity of the country for over two centuries, a form of government subsequently envied and copied by virtually every democracy, real or supposed, in the world.   

That form of government, informed by facts and reason, where power is not held by just one person or small group of people, is now under serious attack.  Facts no longer seem to matter, as President Trump daily claims things that are demonstrably false, meaning: we can prove they are untrue with solid, verifiable evidence.  We are told by one of his surrogates that “facts are not facts,” and by another to believe in “alternative facts.”  The President himself has told us that “What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."  Only Trump, we are told, knows what it really going on, as he has “information that others don’t know.”   And so his Inauguration crowd was the biggest ever, Obama wire-tapped his offices, 3 million people voted illegally, he is the greatest protector of women in the history of the world while grabbing their pussies, and climate change is a Chinese hoax.

These and countless other preposterous and demonstrably false claims bombard the nation on a non-stop basis, with tens of millions of Americans nevertheless believing them, or apparently not caring that they are false and the guiding “truths” of our federal government.  The source of wisdom and power in the US today, at least on the federal level, is no longer facts and reason, but whatever Donald Trump says is true.  France’s King Louis XIV said it best: L'Etat, c'est moi – I am the state.

A big part of the problem, the reason why this is allowed to happen, is that Americans have increasingly become unable to tell the difference between fact and fiction, truth and lies.  Despite the readily available sources of generally reliable information, e.g. Google, Wikipedia, an astonishing number of people regularly simply accept statements that are thrown out there, instead of doing some simple fact-checking.  So Trump, and his sycophantic minions at Fox, say things that can easily be disproved, but are instead accepted by millions as truth. 

In a similar fashion, a great many Americans are apparently stymied by the difference between facts and opinions.  So when Trump says that person X is “the very worst ever,” often shortly after assuring us that same person was “the very best ever,” those are obviously highly exaggerated opinions.  It would seem that Trump’s followers aren’t concerned about the blatant 180 degree reversal of how person X is described.  But worse yet, those tens of millions of his supporters seem fully ready to accept his judgement as fact, just as they had with his earlier and opposite appraisal.  As a side-note, most Trump supporters would likely dismiss this entire commentary, claiming that it is just my ignorant opinion, when in reality almost everything presented here is a matter of verifiable facts.  I welcome any challenges to the contrary, if done in a reasoned, civil manner. 

Those who are highly educated, say with advanced degrees in the areas such as history and political science, are often scorned by Trump and his followers.  Formal education is generally seen as a negative, the educated person being a member of the “liberal elite.”  Knowing the facts is irrelevant, or at least less important than knowing the “truth,” which as we’ve seen comes only from the President, courtesy of his special insights.  Emotion and intuition, i.e. “my gut tells me,” trumps history, facts, verifiable evidence, and science.  That last one is truly stunning, as science - responsible for our current high standard of living - is itself now dismissed as a hoax, as is so notably true in the case of climate change.  In every other part of the world, save coal-rich Australia, climate change is an accepted scientific fact.  Only here, and somewhat in Australia, is it seen as a topic of political disagreement.  

The end result of all this is that too many Americans are ill-prepared to deal with a leader with authoritarian tendencies, who is guided by mythical “facts”, while ignoring legitimate, verifiable facts.  The danger of that situation reminds me of Thomas Jefferson’s famous observation:  If a nation expects to be ignorant and remain free it expects what never was and never will be.