Wednesday, September 6, 2023:  Republican Politics III: Killing Woke
We are in trouble in this country. Civic education is woefully inadequate to deal with the complexities of today's political cesspool. Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. Spend a few minutes researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government and you'll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. In 2011, only 38 percent of Americans could name the three branches of our government. A 2018 survey found that most Americans couldn't pass the U.S. Citizenship Test. Among other failings, most respondents couldn't identify which nations the United States fought in World War II and didn't know how many justices sat on the Supreme Court.

Civic ignorance is a serious but manageable problem as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, care about truth and knowledge — and as long as Americans care about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions. When a political class still broadly believes in policing dishonesty, the nation can manage the negative effects of widespread civic ignorance. When the political class corrects itself, the people will tend to follow. But when key members of the political class abandon any pretense of knowledge or truth, a poorly informed public is simply unequipped to hold them to account. Today's Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of honesty, integrity, ethics and morals. The have lovingly embraced a Fascist dogma building on civic ignorance to advance their agenda.

Republican Fascist politics is designed to disrupt public discourse by attacking and devaluing education, expertise, and language. When these key components of a society are undermined, the only thing remaining is power and tribal identity. That doesn't mean there isn't a role for education, but that role in their plan is solely to indoctrinate, not to educate. After all, an ignorant electorate is easily duped. As an added bonus, if you plant the seeds of hate, you have created a fertile ground for future manipulation.

At the university level, the fascists have weaponized free speech. Any protest against the fascist movements on campus has been used to paint them as victims. Yes, these fascists have the right to free speech, but those who protest against them have the same right. The fascist's objective in making themselves the victims, however, is to take the focus off their actions. While they beat their proverbial chests and scream unfair, they are slowly working to undermine our democracy. The current indictment of Trump outlines this in detail. As Jack Smith points out, Trump can say anything he likes. He can tell lie upon lie, but when he broke the law with his actions, he became indictable.