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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/opinion/tucker-carlson-general-milley-republicans.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
What Underlies the G.O.P. Commitment to Ignorance?
June 28, 2021
Damon Winter/The New York Times
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.”
Paul Krugman: Get a better understanding of the economy — and an even deeper
look inside Paul’s mind.
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.
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