- Anne Applebaum on why dictatorships fail;
- David Brooks on how Americans can’t think anymore;
- Amanda Marcotte on Elon Musk’s and MAGA’s misogyny, via their war on empathy;
- Morons: A GOP Rep about how climate change is a sham because God controls the sun; and the current U.S. Secretary of Education who thinks AI is pronounced “A-one”.
- And how the State Department is now monitoring employees for “anti-Christian bias”.
The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum, 10 Apr 2025: This Is Why Dictatorships Fail, subtitled “The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason.”
He blinked. But we don’t really know why.
Whether it was the stock market cascading downward, investors fleeing from U.S. Treasury bonds, Republican donors jamming the White House phones, or even fears for his own portfolio, President Donald Trump decided yesterday afternoon to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs. This was his personal decision. His “instinct,” as he put it. His whim. And his decision, instinct, or whim could bring the tariffs back again.
The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. The Cabinet is composed of sycophants and loyalists who are willing to defend contradictory policies, even if doing so makes them look like fools. The courts haven’t decisively intervened yet either. No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning.
This is what arbitrary, absolute power looks like. And this is why the men who wrote the Constitution never wanted anyone to have it.
…
More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will without taking any facts or any evidence into consideration, and without listening to any contrary views. And although the economic damage he has caused is easier to measure, he has inflicted the same level of harm to scientific research, to civil liberties, to health care, and to the civil service.
So, what’s the lesson here?
From this wasteful and destructive incident, one useful lesson can be drawn. In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions.
The subject of a couple books recently covered here. She concludes:
But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.
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Again, thinking about the Nichols book: society actually takes care of people pretty well — the average person is *much* better off than the average person of a century ago, let alone a millennium ago — to the extent they don’t have to *think* much about anything.
NY Times, David Brooks, 10 Apr 2025: Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime [gift link] (title in today’s print paper: “We’re Just Not as Good at Thinking Anymore”)
You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.
The trend starts with the young. The percentage of fourth graders who score below basic in reading skills on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests is the highest it has been in 20 years. The percentage of eighth graders below basic was the highest in the exam’s three-decade history. A fourth grader who is below basic cannot grasp the sequence of events in a story. An eighth grader can’t grasp the main idea of an essay or identify the different sides of a debate.
More statistics.
This kind of literacy is the backbone of reasoning ability, the source of the background knowledge you need to make good decisions in a complicated world. As the retired general Jim Mattis and [his coauthor] Bing West once wrote, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Why? Are we back to Jonathan Haidt’s theme?
…these declines started earlier, around 2012, so the main cause is probably screen time. And not just any screen time. Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills. But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.
With more statistics from studies.
Older people have always complained about “kids these days,” but this time we have empirical data to show that the observations are true.
Bottom line, and concluding:
What happens when people lose the ability to reason or render good judgments? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Donald Trump’s tariff policy. I’ve covered a lot of policies over the decades, some of which I supported and some of which I opposed. But I have never seen a policy as stupid as this one. It is based on false assumptions. It rests on no coherent argument in its favor. It relies on no empirical evidence. It has almost no experts on its side — from left, right or center. It is jumble-headedness exemplified. Trump himself personifies stupidity’s essential feature — self-satisfaction, an inability to recognize the flaws in your thinking. And of course when the approach led to absolutely predictable mayhem, Trump, lacking any coherent plan, backtracked, flip-flopped, responding impulsively to the pressures of the moment as his team struggled to keep up.
Producing something this stupid is not the work of a day; it is the achievement of a lifetime — relying on decades of incuriosity, decades of not cracking a book, decades of being impervious to evidence.
Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.
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One more think piece.
Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 11 Apr 2025: MAGA’s war on empathy exposes misogynist fears, subtitled “Elon Musk and the Christian right call empathy ‘toxic’ and ‘suicidal’ — blame their shared misogyny”
The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner is famous in people-who-read circles for his ability to get maloevent and/or stupid people in leadership to humiliate themselves in his interviews. Lucky for him, the right provides an endless supply of people who are egotistic as they are ignorant, meaning he will never go without subjects who don’t bother to learn this history before agreeing to go on the record with him. The latest deserving victim is Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, who went from denouncing Donald Trump as a “predator” in 2016 to being one of Trump’s loudest Christian right defenders. Chotiner drew Mohler, a supposed follower of Jesus Christ, to admit he now condemns empathy. Mohler sneered that empathy is “an artificial virtue,” calling empathy “destructive and manipulative.”
“Empathy means never having to say no,” Mohler insisted, attacking the straw-iest of strawmen.
(Misogyny being an essential tribal value. Empathy an essential progressive, cosmopolitan value. Again, Lakoff, Greene, and all the others.)
Much was made in the media, for good reason, of billionaire Elon Musk’s crusade against empathy, an emotion he describes as “suicidal” and the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Musk is an atheist, but in this attitude, he is increasingly joined by the Christian right, as Julia Carrie Wong documented at the Guardian this week. A growing chorus of evangelical leaders has taken to calling empathy “sinful,” “toxic,” and “satanic.” Right-wing Catholics are going there, too, with Vice President JD Vance rejecting Jesus’s exhortations to love your neighbor and welcome the stranger, drawing a rebuke from the Pope.
It goes on.
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A couple examples of morons today. They seem uneducated; I’m guessing they have not read books, maybe not even the Bible.
JMG, 11 Apr 2025: GOP Rep: “Climate Change Is A Sham Because God Controls The Climate Because He Controls The Sun”
Is religion a mental illness? At least a disability; it interferes with the ability to think and understand the real world.
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JMG, 11 Apr 2025: A1 Steak Sauce Seizes Opportunity After Education Secretary Repeatedly Calls Artificial Intelligence “A1”
She thinks AI, for Artificial Intelligence, is pronounced “A-one”, like the steak sauce. And this is U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon, once the CEO of WWE, World Wrestling Entertainment. Because Trump always hires the best people.
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If I disappear, this might be why. We’re turning into an authoritarian, theocratic, police state.
JMG, 11 Apr 2025: State Dept Launches “Anti-Christian Bias” Snitch Line
We’ve already seen examples of this. Those who do not think correctly will be deported to banana republic nations, or simply “disappeared.” This used to happen only in other, we thought less-enlightened, nations. Now it’s us. (It’s the re-emergence of base human nature, which will never go away.)
