The Dangers of the Derp State
How we became a nation of so many dupes and fools is a matter at least as complicated as the causes of Donald Trump’s presidency.
One of the aphorisms of our populist era goes that Donald Trump is more of a symptom than a cause. Fair enough. I’ve certainly said it many times myself. But for it to be more than just a way to dodge nettlesome issues, we have to be clear about the diagnosis.
As Trump’s second impeachment trial gets underway, it’s crucial to know which causes and effects we mean. Since Trump re-emerged on the political scene a decade ago hawking Obama birtherism like a box of frozen steaks, he and his antic carnival of grift have been credited with and blamed for everything from “bringing peace and prosperity” to the world all the way down to dating woes.
I don’t pretend to know everything that caused the nation to be such ripe pickings for a hustler like Trump. We all know some of the causes: cultural starvation that created a yearning for rabid partisanship as a simulacrum, economic transformation, weak political parties, atomization of media, the ease of employing mob tactics in the digital age, and on and on. In fact, Trump has been a big and messy enough symptom that one can find his origins in almost any longstanding ill he or she wishes. Confirmation bias didn’t just help make Trump possible; it has confused the work of an honest, complete diagnosis.
This is the kind of algebraic thinking that makes it so hard to address serious problems in America. If one already knows the product of the equation is that their opponents are to blame, solving for X is just a matter of looking for a root cause that originates on the other side. Satisfied that it’s somebody else’s fault, the mind closes with a pleasing “snap.”
The truth about complicated matters such as these is seldom satisfying since no side or group can escape completely unscathed. Indeed, the prevalence of this motivated reasoning is in itself evidence of one of the leading causes of Trump’s acquisition of power and the enthusiastic support by millions for his abuses of it.
Exhibit A: Activists disrupt the administration of coronavirus vaccinations at Dodgers’ Stadium. One of the motivating factors cited by the so-called anti-vaxxers was the recent death of homerun king Hank Aaron at the age of 86—more than a decade beyond the life expectancy for an American male. Aaron died three weeks after he volunteered for a public inoculation to encourage other seniors to follow suit. Notorious crank Robert Kennedy Jr. said it was part of “a wave of suspicious deaths among [the] elderly.”
Exhibit B: The government of the District of Columbia, a perpetual motion machine for patronage, goes to court seeking an injunction against a union that represents Washington’s teachers. The aim was to prevent the American Federation of Teachers from striking to prevent schools from reopening for in-person learning. Government workers, especially teachers, are the political behemoth of local politics in our nation’s capital. For city leaders to bite the hand that feeds them means something is seriously out of phase. Here’s what: Despite all of the evidence presented by public health officials not only that schools can reopen safely but that opening them is essential, teachers’ unions are still opposed.
Exhibit C: Timothy Wilks, 20, is shot and killed outside of Nashville’s Urban Air Trampoline and Adventure Park. Police told reporters that Wilks was trying to create a viral video of himself staging a fake robbery prank for his YouTube channel. Apparently unaware of the hilarity of having a stranger run at you and your friends with butcher knives, one of Wilks’ intended foils drew a pistol and shot him dead.
The evidence comes from across the country. It transcends divisions of politics, economics, education, ethnicity and gender. You’ve got the nephew of a former president all the way down to a post-adolescent YouTube wannabe. What connects them—the same thing that threatens the health of the republic—is rank imbecility.
Foolishness is nothing new in America. This is the country of P.T. Barnum, medicine shows and pet rocks, after all. But our current concentration of imbeciles has surpassed any kind of safe level. How we became a nation of so many dupes and fools is a matter at least as complicated as the causes of Trump’s presidency. What stands out, and as the sad state of Washington’s schools suggests, is that we are suffering the consequences from generations of Americans who are both undereducated and miseducated. This many millions of nincompoops didn’t show up overnight. They have been stumbling out of our nation’s failing schools for decades.
If we are sincere about wanting to stop the next attack on the Capitol, then there could be no more urgent work than rescuing our students from the schools that fail them. It has not been so long since education was a top priority for both parties, but it can hardly compete with other issues that can more effectively be used as wedges and for which simplistic solutions can more easily be offered.
Humanitarian concern for students being dumped into and out of facilities that look like medium-security correctional institutions and act like daycares might not be enough to renew interest in the issue of education. But perhaps the consequences of plopping generations of wet clay into the hands of kooks, charlatans and demagogues will do the trick.
Chris Stirewalt is a contributing editor for The Dispatch.
I can't be happier that Chris Stirewalt is on board.
Now as to the article. I've long lamented ignorance and stupidity. It's a hobby horse of mine to be honest. But, I ask Chris to dive just a bit deeper than even he did this time around. It's not necessarily just how many facts you know. It's the ability to reason using logic and to evaluate "evidence".
I thank God that there were times and places where someone taught me those fundamentals.
Here are ideas I have had for schools.
1. Civics in school. Teach the constitution and some basics on the law. Teach people what rights are and are not.
2. Logic. Explain arguments and what makes a valid one.
3. Life Fundamentals. Bank loans, checkbooks, changing oil, driving a nail, basic plumbing, and so forth.
4. Relationship Fundamentals. Love, marriage, children, neighbors.
We are hurting in all those categories.
Glad to see you aboard, Mr. Stirewalt. Thank you for bringing your voice here.
Sorry if what follows sounds ranty at times...this is just one subject that I actually know something about.
A few things to consider in the education debate:
1) The basic structure of our education system is around 100 years old. When structures are maintained over time like that, it can be because they have enduring value, but that is not guaranteed. In the case of education, its history began as decentralized, where the main drivers were Protestant churches who wanted individuals to be able to read the Bible and be good people. Economically, most people (men) earned a living from agriculture or manufacturing or some other trade-based employment, and most women became homemakers. In 1917 the Smith-Hughes Act went so far as to provide federal funding for agriculture, home ec, and industrial trades as compulsory schooling became the norm. That's where those courses that used to be pretty standard in HS came from, for better and for worse. Better, since they sometimes gave people useful skills, worse, because they becamea dumping ground, especially for black and brown kids. At that time, the idea was that we use our education system to bring the general population to a minimal level of literacy and numeracy, and skim the more talented group (mainly men, mainly white or assimilated immigrants) to attend more school and operate in highly educated occupations. Even when our economy began to change dramatically 50 years later, the model remained largely the same, and mostly continues today. The purpose of schooling was to select talent as opposed to developing it, but that made sense at the time. This is especially true when we consider the evolution of grading practices.
2) Two things changed. First, it became clear that the system as constructed was ignoring talented individuals in underserved groups, thereby continuing cycles of poverty. Second, the economy itself began to change to service-based and information-based industry, where the basic numeracy and literacy targets of the past no longer fit. In came the standards movement (the beginning of my teaching career, in 1992) which was largely the work of educators at first. I remember hearing and seeing those standards being debated. But the processes of learning that I practiced were largely just what I experienced myself. I was lucky since I was a person who got "skimmed off the top" even though my parents didn't go to college and were immigrants. As a teacher, I dove deeply into my state accountability structures and served on the state assessment committee during the GW Bush era, where we became obsessed with data as the great equalizer. It was apparent that some of the standards were poorly written and unmeasurable, but they were tied to high-stakes testing and so they could not be easily changed. In our state (CO) and others, educators began to ask why we were all writing our own standards and spending tax dollars redundantly to create state-level assessments. When you do that stuff right, it is expensive and difficult to do well. So, we saw (in education - it wasn't evident outside that world, and why would it have been?) the rise of the Common Core movement. That movement began at the grassroots, despite how it was portrayed later. I know because I was in it.
3) Enter the Obama admin. Common Core was at the end of its first real draft, but it was still being discussed. The error made at that time, in my opinion, was to kick off Race to the Top before CC was fully cooked. It was (and is) singularly focused on the idea that everyone can and should aspire to college/university work (at least in mathematics). Some of the math topics in it - and I don't mean the much maligned number sense standards for young children, but the abstract algebra topics supposedly meant for all kids, are nuts. Almost no one in the world needs to know how to complete the square. Yet it is in there. But no discrete math, graph theory, chaotic systems, algorithmic thinking. Race to the Top was well intentioned but a hot mess. States like mine enshrined practices in law such as taking 50% of teacher evals from student assessment data in the hopes of securing a honey hole of funding for training and such. Well, no states west of the Mississippi got any funding, but we sure got the mandates!
4) So here we are. We STILL have a system that does not reflect the economic or personal needs of the students it is trying to serve. Solutions that are posed tend to fall short, usually because they are unable to scale up to meet the need (school choice) or because they have no feasibility (keep system mostly the same, pay teachers a lot more to do more or less the same thing). At the same time, the 100 year old system is chugging along, more or less the same. It gets harder and harder to recruit and keep high quality teachers, and COVID will definitely thin the ranks further.
I SO WANT TO LEAVE MY PROFESSION BETTER THAN I FOUND IT. It is difficult to avoid discouragement. In my little world, I am fighting to NOT return to "normal" exactly but to stop and think about what parts of "normal" are actually worth keeping. That is NOT a discussion that weary people want to have.