Tag Archives: Adam Serwer

The War On Knowledge

When citizens are subjected to a “flooding of the zone”–daily assaults on a wide variety of systems, beliefs and values that have long been an accepted part of our governing environment–we can be forgiven for a lack of focus. It’s hard enough just to keep track of what is happening, let alone to decide which attacks are most worrisome. But Adam Serwer makes a good case for putting the war on knowledge at the top of the list.

In The New Dark Age, Serwer writes

The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.

Serwer enumerates the Trump assaults: threats to withhold funding from colleges and universities that don’t submit to MAGA demands. Sustained attacks on the engines of American scientific inquiry– the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health–and on repositories of America’s history, including the Smithsonian.  Arts organizations and libraries are losing funding. Large numbers of government scientists have lost  their jobs and remaining researchers prevented from broaching forbidden subjects. “Entire databases of public-health information collected over decades are at risk of vanishing. Any facts that contradict the gospel of Trumpism are treated as heretical.”

These various initiatives and policy changes are often regarded as discrete problems, but they comprise a unified assault. The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power.

Serwer describes the attacks on universities. He uses the example of West Point, and the administration’s purge of forbidden texts to reveal what MAGA’s “ideal university” might look like.

West Point initiated a schoolwide push to remove any readings that focused on race, gender or the darker moments of American history.” A professor who “leads a course on genocide was instructed not to mention atrocities committed against Native Americans, according to several academy officials. The English department purged works by well-known Black authors, such as Toni Morrison, James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is broad-based; it isn’t limited to academia. The administration has also singled out and fired government employees involved in research of multiple kinds.

These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to the Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts” to the Department of Education’s research division.

Serwer enumerates the nature of the cuts and their foreseeable consequences, especially for public health. As he notes, modern agriculture and medicine, and advances in information technology like the internet and GPS were built on the foundation of federally funded research.

For the past century, state-funded advances have been the rule rather than the exception. Private-sector innovation can take off after an invention becomes profitable, but the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble—for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot. Commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines—the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless.

MAGA’s racist fight against “wokeness” requires destroying huge swaths of scholarship and research, and distorting any American history that undercuts the administration’s goal: destroying the “ability to discover, accumulate, or present any knowledge that could be used to oppose Trumpism.”

You really need to click through and read the entire essay–and weep.

Welcome to a new Dark Ages.

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Who Is A Real American?

Adam Serwer is a staff writer for the Atlantic, and the author of a forthcoming book titled “The Cruelty is the Point: the Past, Present and Future of Trump’s America.” He recently contributed an op-ed to the New York Times, in which he undertook to defend the thesis of that book

Donald Trump has claimed credit for any number of things he benefited from but did not create, and the Republican Party’s reigning ideology is one of them: a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration. This approach has a long history in American politics. The most consistent threat to our democracy has always been the drive of some leaders to restrict its blessings to a select few.

This is why Joe Biden beat Mr. Trump but has not vanquished Trumpism. Mr. Trump’s main innovation was showing Republicans how much they could get away with, from shattering migrant families and banning Muslim travelers to valorizing war crimes and denigrating African, Latino and Caribbean immigrants as being from “shithole countries.” Republicans have responded with zeal, even in the aftermath of his loss, with Republican-controlled legislatures targeting constituencies they identify either with Democrats or with the rapid cultural change that conservatives hope to arrest. The most significant for democracy, however, are the election laws designed to insulate Republican power from a diverse American majority that Republicans fear no longer supports them. The focus on Mr. Trump’s — admittedly shocking — idiosyncrasies has obscured the broader logic of this strategy.

Serwer locates the origins of that cruelty in the Democratic Party of the post-civil war, post-Reconstruction eras, and he concedes that contemporary Republicans are somewhat less violent and racist than were the Democrats of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. But he points out that, as the parties exchanged positions, Republicans have adopted the Democrats’ prior political logic. They view victories of the rival party as illegitimate, the result of “fraud, coercion or the support of ignorant voters who are not truly American.”

That last belief–that people who vote for the “other party” (i.e. the Democratic Party) aren’t “real” Americans–shocked me, and I thought it must be an exaggerated claim. But Serwer documented it.

On Fox News, hosts warn that Democrats want to “replace the current electorate” with “more obedient voters from the third world.” In outlets like National Review, columnists justify disenfranchisement of liberal constituencies on the grounds that “it would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people.” Trumpist redoubts like the Claremont Institute publish hysterical jeremiads warning that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.”

There’s a great deal to provoke thought in the essay, and I encourage you to click through and read it in its entirety, but this accusation seems to me to sum up the crux of the argument Americans are having right now.

We are debating just who is entitled to be called a “real” American.

In a very important essay in the Atlantic, George Packer recently identified the Americans who consider themselves “real Americans.”The narrative of “real America,” Packard said, “is white Christian nationalism.”

Packard is correct. Survey research suggests that slightly over thirty percent of Americans believe that, in order to be a “real” American, one must be a White Christian. Those of us who reject that belief define a “real American” as someone who embraces what I call the American Idea: the philosophy that animated the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Unlike the European countries that awarded citizenship on the basis of identity–ethnic, religious, etc.–  the Founders established a country in which one becomes a citizen–an American– via acceptance of those foundational values.

American citizenship depends upon behavior, not identity.

The arguments we are having today in our dramatically-polarized country really boil down to a conflict between those who see “real Americans” as members of a tribe that one must be born into, and those of us who believe that being a “real American” requires that we understand, accept and uphold the principles and aspirations embodied in those constituent documents.

G.K. Chesterton once argued that the American experiment aspired to create “a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles” united by voluntary assent to commonly held political beliefs.

The real “Real Americans” agree with Chesterton.

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