The Triumph of Opinion Over Knowledge

History will record the period from 2000 to 2018 as the era of the triumph of opinion over knowledge. It is a by-product of what Tom Friedman described back then as the democratization of information, the democratization of technology, and the democratization of finance - all of which emerged after the Cold War. These phenomena combined to form a major changeover event: a Third Industrial Revolution. And it’s no less consequential than the First Industrial Revolution, characterized by the advent of steam energy, or the Second Industrial Revolution and the birth of electricity. What evolved from this Third Industrial Revolution were the two factors that shaped the 2016 debates: the impacts of globalization and technological innovation on the American economy.

That’s really what it was all about. It was a battle to determine who will steer the American economy in this new era: the Republican plutocracy, owned and operated by the Koch Brothers et al., or the American Democratic Party. And both parties appear to be crumbling under the weight of this new revolution that has emerged.

Current explanations of why our politics are so distorted, explanations such as: fear of loss of status among white working-class men, the cultivation of a cult of whiteness that underlies Republican immigration policy, the loss of a communal sense of compassion among Republican voters, the free-floating hysteria that springs from imaginary government plots to disarm the nation, and the belief that government is, by definition, inept - are less explanations than a description of Republican tactics in the service of their plutocratic objective. It is the psychic glue that binds their inchoate congregation of the biddable. And it’s the sum of an historic disinformation campaign conceived and executed by the Republican Party to subvert Democracy by cultivating greed, insecurity, anger, and grievance - the very currency of the relentless Trump demagoguery.

But it isn’t merely Trump. It’s also the puerile ideology of Paul Ryan and his sophomoric embrace of Ayn Rand's "Objectivism". It’s a Republican worldview that translates into policy Tennyson's depiction of nature as "red in tooth and claw". It's a philosophy that's long past its shelf-life, where "bombing ‘em back to the stone age" is, at this point, simply reflective of the stone age in this newly competitive and globalized world. The Republican narrative is rooted in magical thinking and wants its 80s back.

But what is the Democratic narrative? From their new Senate slogan, “A Better Deal”, it looks to me like the Democratic Party wants its 30s back.