[P2P-F] the plague of anti-intellectualism

Thu Sep 22 18:49:33 CEST 2011

*Between Race and Reason: Anti-Intellectualism in American
Life*<http://www.truth-out.org/between-race-and-reason-anti-intellectualism-american-life/1314634662>
Susan Searls Giroux - Stanford University Press/truthout.org
*This is excerpt from Susan Searls Giroux's latest book, "Between Race and
Reason: Violence, Intellectual Responsibility, and the University to Come"
(Stanford UP), which won the prestigious Gary A. Olson Award for Best Book
Published in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies in 2010. In this excerpt she
gives an excellent analysis of the growing anti-intellectualism whic! h has
swept the far right, and correctly links it to racial issues which inform
it. Part of the great dilemma we face is that we cannot solve fact-based
problems with ideological fantasies. Sadly, when nearly half the population
takes pride in its willful ignorance, it is unlikely anything of substance
will be addressed meaningfully.

Professor Giroux is associate dean of humanities and an associate professor
of English and cultural studies at McMaster University in Canada. *
In late October 2008, just days before the U.S. presidential election,
George Monbiot of London’s The Guardian, caught perhaps in a mood of
deepening anxiety and dread over the impending outcome, leveled an
indictment against the American government and at least half of the
electorate in the form of a question: 'How did politics in the U.S. come to
be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance?” In a rather
unkind primatological allusion, he invoked as evidence the eight-year reign
of George W. Bush, the recent vogue of Sarah Palin-and before her, Dan
Quayle, apparently to round out the VP wing of 'gibbering numbskulls” past
and present-as well as the 'screaming ignoramuses” in attendance at
Republican rallies who insisted that Barack Obama was both a Muslim and a
terrorist. 'Like most people on my side of the Atlantic,” he ventured, 'I
have fo! r many years been mystified by American politics. The U.S. has the
world’s best universities and attracts the world’s finest minds. It
dominates in discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power
depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed
nations . . . learning is a grave political disadvantage.”[1] A troubling
observation to be sure. How exactly does one make sense of, let alone
respond to, such an astonishing contradiction, such an ungenerous play on
the concept of American exceptionalism? There are, of course, a number of
possibilities. (a) Denial: reduce the charge to a hiccup of European
arrogance tinged with a bit of resentment. (b) Dismissal: declaim as cynical
the blanket condemnation of ineptitude among government officials and the
fools who elected them. (c) Deflection: assert that the election results-and
the resounding defeat handed to the McCain-Palin campaign, which ran
primarily on emotional appeals! to fear and patriotic fervor-vindicate the
good sense of the ! voters and render Monbiot’s judgment too quick. It would
be tempting to answer '(d) all of the above” and continue to bask in the
warm afterglow of the Obama victory and the ensuing worldwide celebration
that marked the end of the Bush era. But, alas, we are not saved.

Indeed the pre-election antics appeared in hindsight little more than an
opening prelude to the 'delirium,” as The Economist termed it, of the summer
of 2009 debates on health care; the furor over the president’s
'indoctrination” of school children; the growing momentum of the
'birthers,” unchecked by repeated proof against their claims; and other
crazed conspiracy theorists who showed up at town hall meetings armed to
the teeth, leaving many to wonder why the nation surrendered public debate
over the most pressing political issues of our time (to say nothing of media
coverage) to the most extreme and unstable elements of the far right.[2]
Even the esteemed journalist Bill Moyers, deeply unsettled by current
events, couldn’t resist a bit of uncharacteristic sarcasm: 'So here we are,
wallowing in our dysfunction. Governed-if you listen to the rabble
rousers-by a black nationalist from Kenya smuggled into the United States to
kill Sarah Palinâ! �™s baby.”[3] The peculiar degradation of these three
fundaments of a substantive democracy-informed and judicious political
discourse, intelligence, and education-in contemporary American politics to
which Monbiot and others refer has had a long and storied career, extending
back to the early days of the republic. The subject was given unparalleled
examination in Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer-prize winning volume,
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963. It is important to
note, however, that for Hofstader anti-intellectuals are neither the
'gibbering numbskulls” nor the 'screaming ignoramuses” that Monbiot and a
growing chorus of journalists, scholars, and others criticize. Rather,
Hofstadter viewed them as a far more effective enemy to the educated mind
and to a vibrant, democratic political culture, which requires for its very
survival an abiding commitment on the part of its citizenry to critical
thought, moral judgment, the capac! ity for self-reflection, and an acute
awareness of self-limita! tion. Neither uneducated nor unintellectual,
anti-intellectuals constitute the ranks of the 'half-educated,” men and
women who are 'deeply engaged with ideas, often obsessively engaged with
this or that outworn or rejected idea.”[4]

Hofstadter describes them as hardly indifferent or hostile to the life of
the mind, but as 'marginal intellectuals, would-be intellectuals, unfrocked
or embittered intellectuals, the literate leaders of the semi-literate, full
of seriousness and high purpose about the causes that bring them to the
attention of the world.”[5] Indeed, he notes, even the most rigorous
thinkers are not immune to anti-intellectual moments. Writing in the
immediate aftermath of McCarthy era, he locates among the anti-intellectual
vanguard the following: highly intelligent and articulate evangelical
ministers; religious fundamentalists of various sorts; politicians who
inflamed populist and nationalist sentiment (including, he notes, some of
the shrewdest); businessmen and other self-appointed spokespersons for
practicality, utilitarianism, and free enterprise; right-wing editors with
strong intellectual pretensions; anti-Communist pundits; and for that
matter, Communist leaders, who he! ld intellectuals in high suspicion, if
not contempt. What such a disparate assemblage of characters share is a kind
of militancy fueled by a severe, fundamentalist morality; he calls them 'one
hundred percenters,” who brook no ambiguities, doubts, equivocations,
reservations, and certainly no criticism. Such rigidity they consider
evidence of their own toughness and strength-as well as, revealingly, a
testament to their masculinity.[6]

Following Hofstader’s logic into the present moment, we would add to these
ranks latter-day market fundamentalists, such as Jim Cramer and other
disciples of the brilliant and tragically myopic Milton Freedman, and their
powerful and embittered friends in the conservative movement, such as the
peerless Grover Norquist and Karl Rove, Bush’s reputed brain; the
intellectual denizens of highly partisan think tanks, from the American
Heritage Institute to the Heritage, Olin, Schaiffe, and Coors foundations,
like Charles Murray; as well as their learned counterparts in the academy,
like Lawrence Mead or Samuel Huntington; the various crusaders of the
Christian right, like Pat Robertson, who called for the assassination of a
world leader, and others who rail against science and the rights of women
and gays such as Bill McCartney, the founder of the Promise Keepers;
demagogic populists like Patrick Buchanan and Rush Limbaugh; jingoistic
patriots inspired by Newt Gingrich and! Tom DeLay; and the impassioned,
often inflammatory anti-immigration and anti-terrorist politicians and media
pundits, of whom there are far too many, such as Tom Tancredo, Thelma Drake,
Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck. And we would
acknowledge, as we do so, the continuing draw of masculinist posturing for
both men and women. For nearly four decades, these 'leaders of the
semi-literate” have assisted in the transformation not only of all three
branches of government but of the political culture of the nation as well,
swaying the voting public through base appeals to our deepest insecurities
and fears, most typically expressed and circulated through racially charged
representational codes. In apocalyptic tones, they warned that 'traditional
American values” and 'our American way of life” were on the brink of
collapse as a result of some marauding horde-thugged-out young black men,
welfare queens, overpopulating Latinos, illegal immigra! nts, radical
Jihadists, or 'gay married terrorists” (i! n economist Paul Krugman’s
satiric phrase). And most Americans went along for the ride. Even those who
didn’t buy the coded rhetoric (even as they enjoyed the privileges of a
still-uneven playing field) complacently went about their lives, feasting on
too-easy credit, flipping houses, or fixating on celebrity culture until all
the consumer bubbles finally broke. Though the candidate who stood for
change, for a restoration of democratic principle against a rising tide of
fundamentalisms-market, military, religious-won the 2008 election by a
respectable but not overwhelming margin, the legacy of the last forty years
of conservative counterrevolution did not magically disappear after
Inauguration Day.[7]

Nearly a half-century after it was written, Hofstadter’s erudite volume
remains essential reading for those troubled by the effects of
anti-intellectualism, and the various fundamentalisms that inspire and
inflame it, on democratic public life and political culture. In fact, his
uncompromising analysis of the political climate in which Thomas Jefferson
ran for president in the infamous 1800 election-an election that also
signaled a revolutionary shift in the political direction of the nation-is
particularly instructive in light of the 2008 campaign, which uncannily
recapitulated many of the same themes. Jefferson was the first distinguished
victim of a decisively anti-intellectual attack, and the assault on him
(leveled principally by Federalist leaders and members of the established
clergy) set a precedent for subsequent efforts to render an active, curious
mind either trivial and ridiculous or evil and dangerous. The echoes of such
efforts to sway the electorate on! principles that violate reason,
reflection, evidence, and judgment are heard to this day: intellect makes
'men” timid and ineffectual; they are likely to vacillate rather than to
act boldly in the face of crisis; their intellectual pursuits produce in
general a suspicion of, or a hostility to, Christianity; and they are
committed to abstract, radical, or even 'foreign” ideas over the
quintessential American values of God and country.

The capacity for reflective, creative, and critical thought, finely honed
argumentation, and public persuasion-talents one might otherwise assume
well recommend a candidate for the office of president-were transformed into
the gravest of liabilities. Jefferson’s critics assailed his philosophical
training and literary talents, which they insisted made him unfit for
practical tasks. Their eager acknowledgment of the elegance of his
rhetorical style provided only further proof of the man’s lack of political
substance. Said one South Carolina congressman, William Loughton Smith:

The characteristic traits of a philosopher, when he turns politician, are,
timidity, whimsicalness, and a disposition to reason from certain
principles, and not from the true nature of man; a proneness to predicate
all his measures on certain abstract theories, formed in the recess of his
cabinet, and not on the existing state of things and circumstances; an
inertness of mind, as applied to governmental policy, a wavering of
disposition when great and sudden emergencies demand promptness of decision
and energy of action.[8]

Thought, according to those suspicious of a critical and contemplative mind,
inevitably got in the way of action. In addition to these offenses,
Jefferson also stood accused of a lack of experience, particularly military
experience-the very ingredient which had made his esteemed predecessor,
George Washington, a patriot, a man of great character, and an effective,
no-nonsense leader. Smith, contriving to portray Jefferson’s astonishing
and wide-ranging intellectual abilities as trivial and ridiculous, mocked
his scientific interests and his inventiveness as 'impaling butterflies and
insects, and contriving turn-about chairs” adding that such merits 'might
entitle him to the Professorship of a college” but were utterly incompatible
with the duties of the presidency and the command of the Western Army.[9]

Such charges should sound strangely familiar. Barack Obama’s reflective
capacities and rhetorical strengths have been frequently acknowledged by
his opponents, who, interestingly enough, hailed from similar quarters: the
religious right and Republican descendants of Federalist persuasion. But the
praise, like that heaped on Jefferson, primarily served to underscore
allegations of inexperience and unbridled idealism. Like its distant
predecessor, the election of 2008 was framed as a choice between military
experience and character-the strength of which seemed to rest on an
ex-soldier’s patriotic zeal and plain speech, on the one hand, and change-in
the figure of a young cosmopolitan and former University of Chicago
professor of law who represented new ideas, gifted oratory, and hope-on the
other. Then, as now, when the bad news befalls the White House-whether by
messenger on horseback or emergency phone call-at three o’clock in the
morning, Americans are prompted to! vote for a man of action, not
intelligence, which is derided as inevitably naïve, 'timid,” 'abstract,” or
'wavering.” Whereas the former law professor was said to lack any military
experience and have negligible foreign policy credentials, McCain
emphasized his war record, his heroism, his endurance, as vouchsafed by his
five-year imprisonment in a Viet Cong POW camp, and above all his
patriotism.

Appeals to practicality and patriotism were not the only rhetorical weapons
in the arsenal of Jefferson’s opponents-or Obama’s. Hofstadter regales his
readers with various efforts to paint Jefferson as a dangerous scourge
without faith or morals. His learning and speculation, it was said, made an
atheist of Jefferson; he had not only challenged theologians about the age
of the earth but opposed having school children read the Bible-vagaries that
made him a threat to religion and society. Further proof of his alleged
immorality was offered in a litany of accusations: that he was a coward
during the Revolutionary War, that he started the French Revolution, that
he harbored a secret ambition to become a dictator, another Bonaparte. And
strikingly, though Hofstadter makes only a passing reference to the charge,
the integrity of this white, patrician male was tainted by an association
with race: it was asserted that he 'kept a slave wench and sired mulattoes,”
a dis! honor less to his wife than to his white blood-thus, according to the
racial reasoning of the time, proof of moral depravity.

Obama was subject to similar demagogic efforts throughout the seemingly
interminable two-year campaign cycle. While McCain played the role of the
valiant soldier and patriot, Obama stood accused of 'palling around with
terrorists” like University of Illinois at Chicago professor Bill Ayers and
other subversive intellectuals (a redundancy for conservatives). Moreover,
Obama’s Christianity was called into question repeatedly with insinuations
of his secret Muslim faith, as if the espousal of such doctrines were
adequate grounds to disqualify him immediately from political office.
Indeed, it was Sarah Palin’s very religiosity-in addition to other perceived
assets including her folksy demeanor, her status as mother of five, her
fascination with guns, and not so implicitly her whiteness as mirrored in
the clean, white snows of the Alaskan wilderness-that made this contemporary
Annie Oakley such an appealing vice presidential pick for the McCain team.
She embraced ! the very commitments and values of the Republicans’ most
stalwart constituency: the Christian right. In contrast, much was made of
Obama’s middle name, 'Hussein,” which was chanted over and over again at
Republican rallies, betraying similar efforts to associate him with the
dangerous Middle Eastern dictator, if not quite claiming, as in Jefferson’s
case, that he aspired to become a despot. (That accusation, of course, would
come within Obama’s first six months of office, when during the summer of
2009, angry constituents at town hall meetings would tout images of the
president with a Hitler moustache or feature him on placards with Stalin,
Mao, or Che Guevara.) Such charges performed a double duty for the Obama’s
critics, casting 'Barack Hussein Obama” as not only a threat to all
Christians, but beyond the pale of whiteness, both as a man of African
descent and as an alleged Muslim, a category that increasingly carries both
religious and ethno-racial ! 'civilizational” implication.

Just as Jefferson’s intellectual disposition, his sensibilities, his tastes
were pilloried as 'foreign,” a clear precursor to contemporary tactics
designed to generate fear toward those characterized as 'not American,”
Barack Obama was consistently characterized as alien. Of Jefferson, one
Federalist pamphleteer claimed: 'It was in France, where he resided nearly
seven years, and until the revolution had made some progress, that his
disposition to theory, and his skepticism in religion, morals, and
government, acquired full strength and vigor. . . . Mr. Jefferson is known
to be a theorist in politics, as well as in philosophy and morals. He is a
philosophe in the modern French sense of the word.”[10] The
anti-intellectual rejection of the candidate as a 'theorist” and a
'philosophe” anticipates accusations of anti-Americanism hurled at
contemporary intellectuals, particularly those critical of the Bush
administration, even as the charge ir! onically depicts thinking as a
foreign, even subversive activity. Obama was not only educated in various
regions of the world including Indonesia, Africa and the United States, but
he was also of mixed-race heritage. Most definitely, it was implied, where
not emphatically stated, he was 'not one of us.”[11] Of course, like
Jefferson, Barack Obama did win the presidential election; but the rather
shocking figure of the fifty-eight million (46 percent of the popular) votes
cast for the McCain-Palin ticket, despite its many allegiances to the
utterly corrupt and generally despised Bush administration, should give us
pause. This brief engagement with the Jeffersonian legacy is all the more
revealing for the decidedly ironic way in which Jefferson, and much of the
iconography of the American Revolution, has been appropriated by the far
right in post-election America-from 'tea parties,” to the incessant
appearance of the Gladstone flag and other militia flags fe! aturing
rattlesnakes and often accompanied by the slogan, &#39! ;Don’t Tread on Me,”
to the 'patriot movement” (and its various calls for revolution, succession,
and state sovereignty), which has made Jefferson’s quip that 'the tree of
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of tyrants and
patriots” its rallying cry.

Historically speaking, the suspicion of intellect has for centuries spawned
a variety of anti-intellectual commitments-the fetishization of folksiness,
the cult of efficiency and practicality, jingoistic patriotism, militarized
masculinity, and religious fervor. Whereas in the era in which Hofstadter
wrote it was still possible to equate mainstream intellectual culture with
the culture of liberalism, this is no longer the case. The below-the-radar
conservative counter-revolution begun in the late 1960s, coterminous with a
highly visible repressive law-and-order crackdown on various civil rights
and anti-war protesters, and eventually displaced the liberal hegemony of
mid-century America, as its advocates exploited and intensified the
anti-intellectualism of the culture. The consequence of this ascendancy has
been a crisis of liberal ideals and democratic values, of the very
possibility of politics, which has generated a cottage industry of similarly
themed tomes that commenc! e where Hofstadter’s probing analysis left off.

However, questions remain about whether the presumption that Obama’s
presidency commences an officially 'post-racial” and 'post-partisan” period
of American politics will continue to hold true, providing yet another kind
of dubious departure from reality and reason. To be sure the George W. Bush
administration, if unsurpassed in the degree of its commitment to
anti-intellectualism, was certainly not alone in its willingness to deceive
and manipulate everyday 'folks.” Over the past century, there have been
political leaders-Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton-who
successfully tempered their intelligence, invoked a colloquial idiom,
claimed an affinity for common values and tastes (Bill and his Big Mac
attacks) and survived. Others who were less adept-Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore,
John Kerry-simply perished, as their opponents effectively labeled them as
too cerebral, too elite, if not also effete, for effective leadership. While
it is true tha! t on the campaign trail, Obama exemplified thoughtfulness
and circumspection and spoke with eloquence and dignity, he also proved
adept at staying connected with the everyday, playing hoops with his mates
from high school the morning of the election, assuaging the fears of
children who faced a daunting move with the promise of a puppy.

In the service of heightening such 'exuberant identification” (as Judith
Butler describes it) with Obama’s leadership, a few items are missing from
the presidential agenda altogether, and their absence weighs heavily against
soaring hopes for genuine democratic renewal. Successive bailouts for
financials and other industries have proven unhelpful for everyday
citizens-and particularly citizens of color-facing alarming levels of
unemployment, impoverishment, and home foreclosure. Yet Obama has chosen to
abet the nation’s collective refusal to discuss race and, more
emphatically, racial injustice-his one speech on the subject
notwithstanding.

Yet at no other time have we been more in need of a critically engaged,
creative, and thoughtful citizenry who can face with courage and conviction
the challenges-political, economic, ecological, spiritual-that we face both
nationally and internationally. Obama is a product of this elite system and
will not push against its interests, unless compelled by an informed and
active citizenry. 'Obama used hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign
funds to appeal to and manipulate this illiteracy and irrationalism to his
advantage,” observes Hedges.[12] And indeed the electorate was invited to
focus increasingly on the person of this potential leader-his eloquence, his
gravity, his unfailing cool, even his jump shot-and a compelling personal
narrative that simultaneously invoked the triumphalism of America’s beloved
immigration mythology and offered a redemptive conclusion to its most
egregious racial sins. However, Hedges warns that 'these forces will prove!
to be his most deadly nemesis once they collide with the awful reality that
awaits us.”[13]

I suspect Hedges is largely correct in his assessment. Yet we can not accept
that our capacity to think, our educational system, and with it American
democracy itself, have reached a terminal stage. And it is because I reject
these premises that I argue strongly for academics, administrators,
teachers, intellectuals, and others to assume their responsibilities as
educators who play a vital role in molding citizens who can actively and
critically participate in democratic public life. Hedges is undoubtedly
right about one thing. The electorate is fast headed on that collision
course with the reality that the Bush administration sought and that it
apparently managed to repress for so long. As Obama himself acknowledged in
his Inauguration Day speech, few presidents have taken the oath of office
under conditions quite so devastating. Perhaps for this reason, ultimately,
he has been compared to former presidents Abraham Lincoln, also a one-term
senator from Illinois who ! confronted a nation ravaged by civil war;
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who led America through the Great Depression and
Second World War; and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the civil rights-era
commander in chief who inspired America with his youthful idealism and his
sense of hope. But it is also for this reason that I’ve gone even further
back in American history and invoked the legacy of Thomas Jefferson, who
also served in the county’s highest office in turbulent times, who like
Obama would lead the nation through the convulsions of revolutionary
change. Jefferson witnessed a political revolution in France and then in the
United States, and was able, as a result of those who fought and died for
their country, for its ideals of life, liberty, and equality, to ascend to
the position of president of a new nation divided in its search for the way
forward. Moreover, he was to serve while Western nations were experiencing
yet another, equally profound revolution in economic d! evelopment; he was a
plantation owner and adherent of an agrar! ian way of life that was about to
give way to new forces of industrialization, which would transform the
country in ways quite unknown and unimaginable. And there was the fact of
slavery, America’s original sin, about which he wrote most eloquently and
ambivalently.

In order to meet all of these political, economic, and spiritual
challenges, the nation’s third president understood all too well the
necessity of an educated citizenry. Having survived his own bitter and
contentious political campaign, Jefferson had witnessed first-hand the
nefarious and-as we have seen-cataclysmic danger that anti-intellectual,
populist demagoguery poses for a democratic nation. Surely it was this
complex set of conditions and experiences that inspired his radical
educational thought, for it was Jefferson who was one of the first to put
forth a multi-tiered plan for free and universal public education as the
primary means of safeguarding a young and fragile democratic nation. And it
is this legacy that seems to me to offer the most important lessons for the
Obama administration, and for those anxious to serve the country in its
current state of multiple crises. For Jefferson, education was the primary
means of producing the kind of critically inf! ormed and active citizenry
necessary to both nurture and sustain a vibrant public sphere; he believed
that democracy was the highest form of political organization for any nation
because it provided the conditions for its citizens to grow both
intellectually and morally through the exercise of these faculties. Consider
this passage from Jefferson’s moving preamble to the 1776 'Bill for the
More General Diffusion of Knowledge,” which bears the hallmark of his views
on the relationship between education and public life:

Whereas . . . certain forms of government are better calculated than others
to protect individuals in the free exercise of their natural rights . . .
experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with
power have . . . perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the
most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as
practicable, the minds of the people at large; And whereas it is generally
true that people will be happiest whose laws are best, and are best
administered, and that laws will be wisely formed, and honestly
administered, in proportion as those who form and administer them are wise
and honest.[14]

Jefferson made education central to his philosophical thought and political
commitments; it proved the best means for both preserving the natural
rights of citizens from all forms of tyranny and a means for enabling wise
and honest self-government. Jefferson conceived of education as a
preeminently political issue-and politics as a preeminently educational
concern.

As Obama confronts the challenges of the wars he has inherited, an economy
experiencing a shift as profound as the industrial revolution which
displaced agrarianism as a way of life, the moral stain of a vast carceral
empire both at home and abroad, as well as a citizenry riven by the divisive
and demagogic rhetoric of four decades of conservative counterrevolution,
the legacy of Jefferson, and his insistence on the preeminence of education,
may well provide the way forward-and, too, a warning. I have attempted to
argue that a (raceless) racist logic has shaped each element of these
knotted crises-the 'civilizational” war on terror as well as the nation’s
willingness to transform the welfare state into a neoliberal warfare
state-and the ease with which it criminalized the social ills that issued
from that pervasive and repressive shift. In fact, as early as 2001, ACLU
director Graham Boyd noted that the United States was

incarcerating African-American men at a rate approximately four times the
rate of incarceration of black men in South Africa under apartheid. Worse
still, we have managed to replicate-at least on a statistical level-the
shame of chattel slavery in this country: The number of black men in prison
. . . has already equaled the number of men enslaved in 1820. . . . [And] if
current trends continue, only 15 years remain before the United States
incarcerates as many African-American men as were forced into chattel
bondage at slavery’s peak, in 1860.[15]

Following Boyd’s prediction, the ranks of the incarcerated have swollen from
2 million to 2.3 million in the ensuing eight years. We have moved from a
time in which black Americans were legally defined as property, to one in
which they have been granted 3/5 humanity. From sub-humanity, they rose to
the ranks of second-class citizens, and once a full schedule of rights had
been achieved equally 'before the law,” those rights and entitlements were
dismantled along with the social state, which held the promise of their
provision. In the fantasy world where 'there is no such thing as society,”
there are now only dysfunctional men, women, and their families locked up or
locked out of the American Dream. Still marked by the original sin of
slavery, which we have not entirely repudiated, we now find ourselves in an
era ominously reminiscent of that biblical season of plague, only this time
it is not divine power striking down the first-born children of Pharaoh’s!
kingdom because he refused to grant full freedom to all people, but rather
the sovereign power of the state seizing every third son born black. Or
perhaps we should push even further back in locating an apt metaphor for
the present to ancient Babylon, to the building of that colossal tower of
Babel, which eventually wrought divine destruction, condemning humanity to
endless confused chatter and conflict. Whatever path of destruction
Jefferson envisioned for a nation that refused to take heed of its own moral
recklessness and injustice, we would do well to heed his warning. In his
Notes on the State of Virginia, he wrote: 'Indeed I tremble for my country
when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for
ever.”[16] Averting catastrophe-the organizing theme of the second half of
this book-will require a most arduous task for the nation’s citizenry: a
critical and consistent commitment to think and reflect, to act as citizens
who are worthy of a ! democracy.

1. Monbiot, George. 'How These Jibbering Numbskulls Came to Dominate
Washington.” Guardian, Oct. 28, 2008..

2. Editor. 'American Health Care: Keep It Honest.” Economist, Aug. 20, 2009.

3. Transcript. Bill Moyers Journal, Sept. 4, 2009.

4. Hofstadter, Richard. Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (p. 21.). New
York: Vintage, 1963.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid, 119.

7. For a comprehensive analysis of these various fundamentalisms, see Henry
A. Giroux’s Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of
Greed (2008).

8. Ibid., 147–48.

9. Ibid., 149.

10. On the blog accompanying the website accompanying his 2009 publication,
The Threat of Race, David Goldberg pointed out the racially driven
differences in the ways in which relative political newcomers Barack Obama
and Sarah Palin were embraced by the electorate. He notes: 'More than half
the whites polled registered harsher senses of blacks than they did of
whites. While 50 percent of white respondents at least sometimes have had
sympathy for blacks, nearly half had never or rarely. Similarly, more than
30 percent of white respondents have never or rarely admired blacks. Nearly
half the respondents characterized blacks as at least moderately violent,
and 38 percent as lazy. Lest one think that generally stated racial
prejudice does not necessarily translate into bias against a particular
person, the study also revealed that 47 percent characterized Obama as
‘inexperienced’ while just 4 percent did McCain, 17 percent as
‘un-American’ and just 2 perce! nt did McCain, and only 29 percent
‘patriotic’ while 61 percent did McCain. Just under 20 percent consider
Obama’s religion ‘a reason not to vote for him,’ perhaps a less surprising
fact considering that 14 percent still think he is a Muslim.”

11.Hedges, Chris. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of
the Spectacle (p. 111.). New York: Nation Books, 2009.

12. Ibid.

13. Peterson, Merrill D. The Portable Thomas Jefferson (p. 215.), New York:
Penguin, 1975.

14. Boyd, Julian P. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Volume 2: 1777 to 18
June 1779 (pp. 526–27). Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 1950.
Emphasis mine.

15. Boyd, Graham. 'The Drug War Is the New Jim Crow.” NACLA Report on the
Americas. July 31, 2001.

16. Peterson, Merrill D. The Portable Thomas Jefferson (p. 215.), New York:
Penguin, 1975.

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