What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to
Ignorance?
June 28, 2021
By Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
As everyone knows, leftists hate
America’s military. Recently, a prominent left-wing media figure attacked Gen.
Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declaring, “He’s not
just a pig, he’s stupid.”
Oh, wait. That was no leftist, that was
Fox News’s Tucker Carlson. What
set Carlson off was testimony in which Milley told a congressional hearing that
he considered it important “for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and
widely read.”
The problem is obvious.
Closed-mindedness and ignorance have become core conservative values, and those
who reject these values are the enemy, no matter what they may have done to serve
the country.
The Milley hearing
was part of the orchestrated furor over “critical race theory,” which has
dominated right-wing media for the past few months, getting close to 2,000 mentions on
Fox so far this year. One often sees assertions that those attacking critical
race theory have no idea what it’s about, but I disagree; they understand that
it has something to do with assertions that America has a history of racism and
of policies that explicitly or implicitly widened racial disparities.
And such assertions are unmistakably
true. The Tulsa race massacre really happened, and it was
only one of many such incidents. The 1938 underwriting manual for
the Federal Housing Administration really did declare that
“incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same
communities.”
We can argue about the relevance of
this history to current policy, but who would argue against acknowledging
simple facts?
The modern right, that’s who. The
current obsession with critical race theory is a cynical attempt to change the
subject away from the Biden administration’s highly popular policy initiatives,
while pandering to the white rage that Republicans deny exists. But it’s only
one of multiple subjects on which willful ignorance has become a litmus test
for anyone hoping to succeed in Republican politics.
Thus, to be a Republican in good
standing one must deny the reality of man-made climate change, or at least oppose
any meaningful action to limit greenhouse gas emissions. One must reject or at
least express skepticism about the theory of evolution.
And don’t even get me started on things like the efficacy of tax cuts.
What underlies this
cross-disciplinary commitment to ignorance? On each subject, refusing to
acknowledge reality serves special interests. Climate denial caters to the
fossil fuel industry; evolution denial caters to religious fundamentalists;
tax-cut mysticism caters to billionaire donors.
But there’s also, I’d argue, a
spillover effect: Accepting evidence and logic is a sort of universal value,
and you can’t take it away in one area of inquiry without degrading it across
the board. That is, you can’t declare that honesty about America’s racial
history is unacceptable and expect to maintain intellectual standards
everywhere else. In the modern right-wing universe of ideas, everything is
political; there are no safe subjects.
This politicization of everything
inevitably creates huge tension between conservatives and institutions that try
to respect reality.
There have been many studies
documenting the strong Democratic lean of
college professors, which is often treated as prima facie evidence of political
bias in hiring. A new law in
Florida requires that each state university conduct an annual survey “which
considers the extent to which competing ideas and perspectives are presented,”
which doesn’t specifically mandate the hiring of more Republicans but clearly
gestures in that direction.
An obvious counterargument to claims of
biased hiring is self-selection: How many conservatives choose to pursue
careers in, say, sociology? Is hiring bias the reason police officers seem to
have disproportionately supported
Donald Trump in the 2016 election, or is this simply a
reflection of the kind of people who choose careers in law enforcement?
But beyond that, the modern G.O.P. is
no home for people who believe in objectivity. One striking feature of surveys
of academic partisanship is the overwhelming Democratic lean in hard sciences
like biology and chemistry; but is that really hard to understand when
Republicans reject science on so many fronts?
One recent study marvels that
even finance departments are mainly Democratic. Indeed, you might expect
finance professors, some of whom do lucrative consulting for Wall Street, to be
pretty conservative. But even they are repelled by a party committed to zombie
economics.
Which brings me back
to General Milley. The U.S. military has traditionally leaned Republican, but
the modern officer corps is highly educated, open-minded and, dare I say it,
even a bit intellectual — because those are attributes that help win wars.
Unfortunately, they are also attributes
the modern G.O.P. finds intolerable.
So something like the
attack on Milley was inevitable. Right-wingers have gone all in on ignorance,
so they were bound to come into conflict with every institution — including the
U.S. military — that is trying to cultivate knowledge.