REVISED AND UPDATED: The decline of truth and respect for expertise: The foreign policy ignorance of the American electorate and its portents
Civil ignorance is not new, but the abandonment of truth by part of the political class may be.
Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) in International Law, Harvard University
REVISED AND UPDATED
August 31, 2023
The Republican debate on Wednesday night, August 23, 2023, brought home a few deeply-troubling realities.
Swarmy Vivek Ramaswamy, parroting Donald Trump, argued we should cut our aid to Ukraine, and devote our resources to defending our southern border from the "invasion" of aliens and asylum seekers who are entering the U.S.
Nikki Haley called him out for wanting to hand Ukraine to Vladimir Putin, and surrender Taiwan to China. "You have no foreign policy experience and it shows," she declared, as she took down Ramaswamy and showed the world there is no substance beneath the glib millionaire's patter. Ramaswamy has no government experience or any other qualifications to be president.
Why is he in the race? Could Trump donors be supporting other candidates just to divide the field and ensure support does not coalesce around a single challenger to Trump? Being rich is not a sufficient qualification to be president.
Thirty years ago a candidate like Ramaswamy would never have made it onto the debate stage.
Behind Haley's putdown lies another even more troubling truth.
The Republican Party and its Trump supporters have no memory of history, no understanding of government or international affairs, and are not shocked by what Ramaswamy said about supporting Ukraine,…OR… Or Trump supporters who, like many of those in leadership positions, have sacrificed honor and truth in the service of personal ambition.
As David French points out in an insightful Washington Post opinion column1 civic ignorance is not new. What is new is the attitude and actions of a large portion of the political class. This explains the current crisis America faces.
French writes about “the specific way in which poor leadership transforms civic ignorance from a problem into a crisis — a crisis that can have catastrophic effects on the nation and, ultimately, the world.” He continues,
Civic ignorance is a very old American problem. If you spend five seconds researching what Americans know about their own history and their own government, you’ll uncover an avalanche of troubling research, much of it dating back decades. As Samuel Goldman detailed two years ago, as far back as 1943, 77 percent of Americans knew essentially nothing about the Bill of Rights, and in
1952 only 19 percent could name the three branches of government.
Civic ignorance in general is not new, and foreign policy ignorance is even greater. What is different is that political elites used to compensate for this ignorance, but significant portions of them no longer do so. French explains,
Simply put, civic ignorance was a serious but manageable problem, as long as our leader class and key institutions still broadly, if imperfectly, cared about truth and knowledge — and as long as our citizens cared about the opinions of that leader class and those institutions.
French comments on Ramaswamy’s ignorant or cynical use of statements that have no basis in truth. Given his educational background (Harvard College and Yale Law School), the “ignorant” explanation is extremely unlikely. He is a smart, cynical politician who appears to deliberately and knowingly lie in the service of his own political ambition, He is emblematic of a whole class of politicians who have placed American democracy in peril.
French continues,
The bottom line is this: 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.
And when you combine ignorance with unrelenting partisan hostility, the challenge grows all the greater. After all, it’s not as though members of the political class didn’t try to challenge Trump. But since that challenge came mostly from people Trump supporters loathe, such as Democratic politicians, members of the media and a few Trump-skeptical or Never Trump writers and politicians, their minds were closed. Because of the enormous amount of public ignorance, voters often didn’t know that Trump was lying or making fantastically unrealistic promises, and they shut out every voice that could tell them the truth.
A democracy needs an informed public and a basically honest political class. It can muddle through without one or the other, but when it loses both, the democratic experiment is in peril. A public that knows little except that it despises its opponents will be vulnerable to even the most bizarre conspiracy theories, as we saw after the 2020 election. And when leaders ruthlessly exploit that ignorance and animosity, the Republic can fracture. How long can we endure the consequences of millions of Americans believing the most fantastical lies?
30-40% of the electorate, or more, are ignorant or cynical and support such irresponsible positions as those Ramaswamy and Trump have put forth regarding support for Ukraine.
Let us recall. Donald Trump has never criticized Vladimir Putin. Not once. He is, in fact, Putin's Trojan Horse, and Russia's best hope for an early victory in the Ukraine war.
The problem with an ignorant electorate is that political debates become circus shouting matches, where serious consideration of fateful issues yields to spectacle.
As Timothy Snyder pointed out in his classic primer, <em>On Tyranny (2017)</em>, once you have destroyed the concept of truth, as Trump has done with his cult followers, all that is left is spectacle, where "the biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights" (Chapter 10).
When truth has been vanquished, expertise is no longer valued.
What we are left with, as we were Wednesday night, is a lot of bickering and grandstanding at the third-grade level. Those few who made serious, rational arguments were immediately dismissed by journalists (viewing the candidates’ pre-debate poll numbers) as having little or no chance of winning the nomination.
It is incredibly hard to conduct a rational debate before a highly-agitated and ignorant crowd, even if that crowd is the entire Republican Party.
If only for the benefit of those whose minds are not hermetically closed, what is needed are little history and civic lessons accompanying every statement of a position. What is international law? What is the United Nations Charter? Why is its prohibition of the use of force across international frontiers so important? What were the lessons of World War II? Why are international human rights important? What did we learn from Hitler and the Nazis about human rights?
It is even possible that the accumulation pf such factual explanations could have an impact on Trump cult followers. Cult experts suggest this is s the path some cult members follow in gradually breaking free of the cult’s grip on their minds.2
The Democrats certainly have their work cut out for them in trying to explain history, World War II, and international relations to an ignorant electorate.
But they absolutely must try, every time they take a position.
In short, they have to lead.
I know that is asking a lot from the Democrats, or any politician, in 2023. But it is urgently required.
Haley might just as well have said, to the entire country, "You have no foreign policy knowledge or memory and it shows."
Unfortunately this foreign-policy ignorance could have disastrous consequences for the whole world.
Without foreign policy experts who are respected by political leaders and the population, without the concepts of honor and truth, anything can happen in the 2024 elections.
See also “Ukraine War, August 26, 2023: Republican unity and the fascist threat,” The Trenchant Observer, August 26, 2023.
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David French, “The Articulate Ignorance of Vivek Ramaswamy,” New York Times, August 31, 2023, (3:00 p.m. ET),
See, e.g., Peter Segal, “The end will come for the cukt of MAGA; The next generation isn’t buying it,” The Atlantic, August 30, 2023 (7:05 am ET).