http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/02/22/the-shallow-state-trump/
[links in on-line article]
The Shallow State
Forget the conspiracy theories. Something much more dangerous is seeking
to gut our government and change the character of our society.
By David Rothkopf
February 22, 2017
The “deep state” is the flavor of the month for conspiracy theorists,
the “black helicopters” of 2017. The idea of career intelligence and
military officers and bureaucrats marshaling the institutional power
they have spent decades mastering to advance their goals regardless of
the whims or wants of elected public officials or the people at large is
irresistible, Tom Clancy stuff.
But I’ve seen what there is of a deep state, and let me tell you, based
on very nearly 25 years living and working in Washington, it is not the
dark fantasy of highly competent government workers that worries me.
No, what worries me is something new, more real, and much more
dangerous: the shallow state.
The shallow state is in many respects the antithesis of the deep state.
The power of the deep state comes from experience, knowledge,
relationships, insight, craft, special skills, traditions, and shared
values. Together, these purported attributes make nameless bureaucrats
into a supergovernment that is accountable to no one. That is a scary
prospect. But the nature of bureaucracies, human nature, inertia, checks
and balances, and respect for the chain of command makes it seem a bit
far-fetched to me. (The bureaucracy will drive Trump, like many
presidents, mad, and some within it will challenge him, but that’s not
the same thing.)
The shallow state, on the other hand, is unsettling because not only are
the signs of it ever more visible but because its influence is clearly
growing. It is made scarier still because it not only actively eschews
experience, knowledge, relationships, insight, craft, special skills,
tradition, and shared values but because it celebrates its ignorance of
and disdain for those things. Donald Trump, champion and avatar of the
shallow state, has won power because his supporters are threatened by
what they don’t understand, and what they don’t understand is almost
everything. Indeed, from evolution to data about our economy to the
science of vaccines to the threats we face in the world, they reject
vast subjects rooted in fact in order to have reality conform to their
worldviews. They don’t dig for truth; they skim the media for anything
that makes them feel better about themselves. To many of them, knowledge
is not a useful tool but a cunning barrier elites have created to keep
power from the average man and woman. The same is true for experience,
skills, and know-how. These things require time and work and study and
often challenge our systems of belief. Truth is hard; shallowness is easy.
The commander in chief of the shallow state, for example, does not have
much use for reading. Or briefings. Or experts. He is famously driven
instead by impulse, instinct, and ideology. He and the team around him
care very little for facts. (The Washington Post has been tracking his
performance, and so far the president has not let a day go by without a
major lie.) Indeed, as we have seen, Trump & Co. are allergic to
demonstrable, proven facts whether they be of the scientific, political,
social, cultural, or economic variety. With leaders like these, the
shallow state exists only on the surface, propelled only by emotion and
reflex. Therefore, anything of factual weight or substance disturbs,
disrupts, or obliterates it much as a rock does when dropped onto an
image reflected in a pond.
We have seen shallow leaders before. Abraham Lincoln decried the
Know-Nothing party and its adherents, who were a notable movement on the
U.S. political landscape in the middle of the 19th century. Recent
leaders like George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan were not seen as leading
intellectual lights. But the Trump phenomenon is more extreme. The
president of the United States with all the resources available to him
wouldn’t offer up major distortions of the truth every day for more than
a month absent a deep disinterest in learning or a recognition that lies
may be more supportive of his positions than the truth (and that his
followers are perfectly happy accepting lies). Or both. In my view, it
is both. Further, Trump’s team has seemed much more focused on offering
up something that is more like a television show about a president than
actual governance. It plays not to newspapers — which it seeks to
discredit — but to social media, animated by the belief that the actions
of a government can not just be explained in 140 characters but can
consist largely of tweets and photo ops and packaged images. When things
require real work behind the scenes but are hard to translate to tweets
or chat TV, they just don’t seem to be prioritized (like nominating
people for the almost 600 open Senate-confirmable positions) or get done
(like anything hard with regard to legislation).
It is convenient to blame Trump and write this off as a flaw in his
character and that of his acolytes and enablers. But, honestly, you
don’t get a reality TV show president with no experience and no interest
in big ideas or even in boning up on basic knowledge (like the nature of
the nuclear triad — after all, it has only three legs) without a public
that is comfortable with that … or actively seeks it. Think about the
fact that two out of the last four Republican presidents came from show
biz (and a third gained a chunk of his experience as a baseball
executive). There is no doubt that the rise of the cage-match mentality
of cable news has undercut civility in American political discourse, but
it has also made politics into something like a TV show. You switch from
the Kardashians to Trump on The Apprentice to Trump the candidate in
your head, and it is all one. Increasingly shows are about finding
formulas that produce a visceral reaction rather than stimulate thoughts
or challenge the viewer. That’s not to say that not much is wonderful in
the world of media today … but attention spans are shrinking. Social
media contributes to this. But the way we consume even serious
journalism does, too. Much of it is reviewed in quick snippets on a
mobile device. The average visit to a news website is a couple of
minutes, the average time spent with a story shorter still. We skim. We
cherry-pick.
When we read the news, most of us do so via the internet, with the
majority of those under 30 doing so via social media. That means your
Facebook page. It means not only do your friends influence what you see
and read (thus creating an echo-chamber effect) but your news pops up in
a stream of content that includes baby pictures and cat videos. That’s
right — cat videos, among the most popular destinations on the web, are
responsible for Trump, too. Because they are the competition of the
news, and therefore unless it is as quick, easy to digest, visual, and
satisfying as a cat video (or baby pictures), it doesn’t get read.
Much has been written about the dumbing down of America. Some of it has
been pretty facile (appropriately enough). But seen in the light of the
shallow state of the Trump presidency, the idea needs to be
reconsidered. The electorate has not just become less patient with depth
(if it mattered in elections, Hillary Clinton would have been the first
unanimous winner of the presidency); it now seeks its political
discourse in a form that is not that different from a reality TV show.
And the consequence has been electing a former reality TV show host as
president of the United States.
Life is once again imitating art. Actually, it’s worse than that. Now
this president has decided that if he is shallow and his followers are
shallow, he shall do what he can to make our society shallower. Perhaps
that’s his most ambitious goal given the level to which we have sunk.
But he is doing so nonetheless, now offering up a budget that would
eliminate those small pockets within the U.S. government that promote
depth or real knowledge. Scientific and economic data that undercuts his
theories is being suppressed. Dissent, even from within his own ranks,
is being met with firings. And he is seeking to defund the National
Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities,
and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. These are small programs by
government standards — the NEA’s annual budget is smaller than that
required to provide protection for Melania Trump to live in her New York
City penthouse each year. But they celebrate those things that add depth
to our collective lives, the exploration and contemplation of the human
experience, of the nature of our society. And they deliver work that
forces audiences and citizens to think.
Art is not an adornment to society. It is not a luxury. It is the
purpose of society. It becomes our legacy. It is also, however, our
teacher; it helps us consider that which is around us and what we want
to be. It makes demands on us that in turn lead us to place demands on
ourselves and those with whom we live and work. And that is precisely
why these programs have been targeted by Trump. They are the enemies of
the shallow state. So, too, of course, are the members of the press whom
Trump has mislabeled as “enemies of the people.” The only people they
are the enemy of are those who are at war with truth and thought: Trump
and his supporters, the champions of the shallow state. That is why,
while it is easy to simply be angry or to laugh at a president who
doesn’t read or to be distracted by half-baked conspiracy theories like
the deep state, we must recognize that the shallow state is much more
pernicious. This administration has come to power because America has
allowed public discourse, the quality of education we give our kids, and
the standards we set for ourselves to decline. Trump seeks to
institutionalize that decline. He is at war with that which has made our
society great. He seeks to eviscerate the elements of our government and
discredit those within our society who are champions of the depth on
which any civilization depends.
And we cannot switch the channel. We cannot tweet this out of existence.
We cannot unfollow him. We must fight, or we will lose that which is
best about ourselves and our country.