James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

Donald Trump has moved at warp speed to nominate people to serve in his Cabinet and other important government posts who have chosen loyalty to him as their most important virtue, making a mockery of merit even as the nominees claim to uphold meritocracy.  

Moreover, like Trump himself, his nominees denigrate science and scientific expertise, subscribe to conspiracy theories, are eager to impose litmus tests in the arts and education, and seem hostile to the world beyond America’s borders.

Elections have consequences, so the saying goes.

And if that wasn’t enough to remind us that elections have consequences, the president-elect announced that on the first day of his administration, he will order a mass deportation of millions of immigrants and impose stiff tariffs on this nation’s most important trading partners.

While much of the post-election commentary has focused on its implications for American democracy,  there is another side to what will unfold starting on Jan. 20. When he takes office, Trump, who promised to Make America Great Again, seems determined to lead America into a period of scientific, cultural, educational, and global retrenchment, which collectively might be called the new “Dark Ages.”

Some see Trump as reviving the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era of great prosperity as well as technological and industrial growth. It was an era dominated by corrupt “captains of industry” or “robber barons” whose corrupting influence also extended to government and politics. 

However, leaders in the Gilded Age did not reject science and rationality. Quite the contrary, they embraced both because they saw them as essential to the growth of capitalism. And they invested in culture and the arts, rather than trying to make them hue to a particular orthodoxy.

Yes, Trump’s era may ultimately have some attributes of the Gilded Age, I think it will be much worse. 

Trump and his MAGA followers reject the cultural legacy of the people who founded this nation. The people who led the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution were, deeply impressed by “the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and its emphasis on empiricism, objective observation, and using rationality over faith or tradition as the foundations of truthful knowledge.”  

They founded “an Enlightenment country” and borrowed from the Enlightenment hostility toward the “hierarchically ordered societies of Europe.” 

The president-elect seems determined to end all that. 

In 2017, Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the writers group PEN America, warned of Trump’s “repudiation of the American ideals — grounded in the Enlightenment — of self-expression, knowledge, dissent, criticism, and truth.” What Nossel predicted then seems even more apt today. 

During the 2024 campaign and transition period, Trump and his cronies have broadcast their determination “to entrench within the machinery of the U.S. government… elemental disdain for intellectuals, analysts, and experts.” They regularly denigrate rationality and elevate superstition, tradition, and hierarchy. 

I call their program a recipe for the return of the “Dark Ages.”

Though the term is now much disputed, the phrase “Dark Ages” is used by some historians to describe a “’ period of intellectual depression in Europe from… the fifth century to the revival of learning about the beginning of the fifteenth….’” During that time, Europe experienced “a decline in culture (and) learning…. and a shift towards a feudal society with limited literacy and widespread superstition.”

.

Donald Trump and Jared Kushner (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)

.

.

Click the link below for the complete article:

.

__________________________________________