What polarizes core America? Which knowledge matters: measurable, testable, expert scientific proof vs. faith-based, post-factual, anti-reality gut instinct
Compared to other populous countries, we have more than a decent life-style, at least for the upper third. Tens of affluent millions live longer (college degree = seven years more), securing better health care and freedom from toxins, enjoy comfortable, single-family homes, and boast far more disposable income for vacations, new cars, eating out, tech gadgets, games and clothes. The bottom half (or more) of any advanced country still endures rough survival levels, but have up to now benefited from innovations in affordable technology (TVs, mobile phones, vaccines, drugs, imported goods). Trickle-down payoffs do happen.
Big picture: let’s assume some governmental services, funding and regulations are bloated. Yet the vast magnitude (wild guess? 80+%) are absolutely critical to crime prevention, tax collection, food, health, education and travel safety, essential, national emergency preparedness, and funding the science, resource management, and core research across every major field and industry, without which basic stability and security for all are jeopardized.
Good government matters
Imagine how compromised, even unhealthy we’d be without decades of beneficial federal grants and research support: medical breakthroughs (vaccines, drugs, surgery, blood tests, improved therapies, health monitoring and scanning tools); technology (the internet, wireless phones, communications, computer chips, batteries, optics, energy efficiencies and so much more); improved air quality, forest, water, river, land and soil management); plus, a vast (excessive) surfeit of high-tech, military security machinery and defense oversight. Despite crystal clear downsides, government serves public welfare and the public good. You don’t get to be the world’s top life-style nation by random chance but with considerable focus (beyond imperialism), wherein tax money channeled to agencies well repays the expense. Knowledge is thus linked not only to power but whatever prosperity citizens enjoy.
That makes the most heinous MAGA crimes against the American people not transient tariffs (changeable) or tax giveaways to the rich (also changeable) — on par with attacks on elections and the media. The worst, stupidest mistakes are the DOGE obliteration of federal research funding across every field, thus driving out hard-to-replace top government talent. Plus “exporting” critical investigators, an inevitable brain drain caused by slashed university contracts. If American life-styles depend on public and private research — think decades here, the know-nothing MAGA assaults on knowledge, technology, and expertise invite immensely costly disasters, even tragedies. Here truly is the second great Trump bunker-buster on truth, justice, and the American way (recalling Superman comics motto).
I leave the appalling, equally mindless attacks on the US judicial integrity to another day, though they do impact where and when both domestic and foreign investment capital goes. Legal stability matters. What company takes outsized risks (new factories and services) only to be blasted by an impetuous, infantile, buffoon’s moronic tweet because a CEO hasn’t bent the knee or paid the right bribes?
It’s the knowledge economy, stupid!
Thus, while left vs. right and conservative vs. liberal serve useful functions, so does MAGA vs. the Constitution, or globally-minded Democrats vs. small-minded, partisan rightwingers. The world is littered with convenient dichotomies, but nothing more clearly separates polarized America than voters convinced by evidence-based, method-tested judgments and conclusions vs. yahoos who’ve not only given up on the idea, indeed necessity of truth, but the means and methods by which top expertise creates, then refines workable planning and execution models based on reality. Fantasy magic thinking is a very expensive folly when human lives are at stake. The displacement of intellectual rigor as if nice-to-haves for modern global competition with ignorant, less educated, know-it-all certainties is what dooms America, unless reversed. The core, reality-driven must-have is constantly refined and upgraded knowledge in sync with technological potential and advances.
Maybe when cannons and single-shot rifles ruled the day, not-knowing universal truths, nor what may loom ahead was less important. But today, not knowing tomorrow (resource shortages, climate change, mass die-offs) is a moral crime. If we simply refuse to change how we grow and harvest food (too much meat, subsidies for non nutritious carbohydrates), how we use and nurture (or waste) drinking water, the deflection of alternative energy sources to reckless “drill-baby, drill” opportunism, millions will suffer badly. Too much MAGA ignorance is suicidal – driving a collective death trip that leaves no earthling untouched.
The banishment of critical research and scientific advances undermines the entire American experiment, certainly democratic institutions, making us vulnerable to plague, famine, pandemics and social disruption, like Jan. 6 and 9/11. Much of modernity, even the New Deal, are still intact, despite 90 years of strident rightwing hostility, though what happens when high courts are ignored? I expect the illegal, punitive, ideological damage to major universities will be reversed, though with awful, unintended consequences. Resurrecting Medicaid cuts in four years is very different — and far more daunting — than rebuilding the most power-house research teams, agencies and thinkers the world has ever known, signified of late by two brilliant Yale professors already moving to Canada.
Significantly, these doom and gloom projections come from a persistent optimist who underestimated the enormous leverage of billionaire dollars and know-nothing propaganda to elect so many backward, regressive, cowardly rightwingers. Very bad timing, just when a forceful opposition in charge of one branch of government is paramount. Whether talking life-saving climate checks or life-saving medical advances, or life-saving health care, the U.S. has either reached a hard, tragic bottom, against which reason and enlightenment will rebel, or things will get much less fixable and scars more permanent.
RIP American innovation?
Here’s a powerful shot across the bow from the insightful Bina Venkataraman in the Washington Post:
No leader slashing the government’s science budgets has proposed a replacement model for the engine that has powered U.S. economic growth and earned the admiration of the world. No democratic country has been more inventive than the United States. Rather, in the late 20th century, as the United States invested in knowledge, countries from Brazil to the former Soviet Union invested in roads and buildings — in infrastructure people could see right before their eyes. Those countries’ growth stagnated while America’s thrived, as U.S. investment built great universities and colleges that became magnets for the world’s brightest minds to build their lives, make their discoveries and start companies in the United States.
There is no plainer betrayal of the MAGA promise to restore the nation’s storied past than to destroy this legacy of invention. What we’re losing is far more important, however, than the pride one felt being part of that America. We’re losing the country’s future.
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