Peter Greene asks how teachers can insist on honesty and evidence when the new president exemplifies the success of their opposites. Please open the link and read the article in full.
He writes:
We are already talking about the worst, ugliest, most misogynistic and racist impulses that will be boosted by Trump’s election. But for all of us in general and teachers in particular, I’m concerned about one other feature that will be super-charged by this administration.
We are now fully entered into a post-truth society. Folks voted for a Trump who doesn’t exist to solve problems that aren’t happening.
Yes, I’m solidly on record arguing that there is no such thing as One Truth, but there are truths that have a basis in reality and evidence, and there are views that are based on nothing but fabrication divorced from reality. There’s point of view, and there’s spin, and then there’s just utter reality-divorced bullshit.
Yes, Democrats made all sorts of mistakes; Bernie Sanders pointing out the failure to reach working class people may be on the mark. But to think Trump is the working man’s friend requires a head stuffed firmly in an alternate reality. Treasonous Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, and to believe otherwise is to accept a big lie. To think he’s some kind of genius requires a stretch of miles and miles and miles. Trump stole classified documents and tried to weasel out of giving them back. He’s a felon, a man found guilty of sexual assault, a serial grifter, a misogynist, a racist, a man whose character so lacking in character and honor that the notion of him as a Christian champion makes no more sense than the idea of a great dane teaching advanced calculus.
I get that some of his support is transactional, that he is such a weak man that he attracts people who figure he can be used by them for their own gains (e.g. I’d bet that much of his right-wingnut christianist support comes from people who see him as a brick that will open the door for True Believers). It’s a dangerous game, because Trump is in it for Trump, but at least these grifters have a reality-based picture of who Trump is.
But the vast majority of voters appear to have settled for the lies. Exit polls show they decided on issues like the economy, as if Trump’s universally-panned-by-experts plan will “rescue” a post-pandemic economy that is the envy of the rest of the world. They worried about trans athletes (because who wants to live in a country where you can’t harass young trans persons). And they believe in his victimhood, the idea that all these court cases and charges and all the rest are just Democrats “persecuting” the man who has “give up so much for this country.”
Trump voters could overlook his flaws because they were standing atop a mountain of lies.
And one lesson from the campaign is that disinformation works, that alternate facts work. And yes, I understand that this is not exactly news, but given our hyper-powered media and communications world, I think we’ve entered another level. This is a level where folks can decide that consensus reality, facts, standards, science–none of it– requires even lip service.
I worried about this in 2016. Never mind the public examples being set about propriety and basic kindness– how do you teach when the nation’s leaders demonstrate that facts are for suckers. Make up your own and just keep repeating them. And it was bad back then, but it feels so much worse this time. The first Trump administration felt like a trial balloon, a first shot at pushing the limits of anti-factualism. But now they can look back at some of the biggest lies ever pushed on the country and see that not only were there no negative consequences, they have been rewarded for it.
There is no need to even try to be tethered to reality. Just pick what you wish was true, and sell it. It’s an epistemological collapse, a suspension of any need to have a path to knowledge, because there is nothing to know except what you (or dear leader) wants to know.
Also, these are a lot of fancy ways to describe a simple thing– a lie.
In this context, teaching about things like finding text evidence to support an opinion seems quaint. Why discuss whether or not a body of Core Knowledge matters when knowledge itself has been cut loose? Why have reading wars about how to decode and define words when only suckers believe that words have meanings? Why worry about teaching scientific method and how to support an idea when it’s obviously simpler to just make up whatever you want to make up?
The answer of course is that all these things are doubly necessary in times like these, that society needs people raised and taught to function in reality based on real things. The Work of educators is now more important than ever.
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