The GOP Base: The Beginning Of The End Of An Informed Democracy’

The Founding Fathers embraced knowledge and education and believed that for the democratic republic they founded it was essential that the nation's populace be informed and as willing to embrace knowledge with as much enthusiasm as they Founders did themselves.  For a long time that model worked for the most part subject to the technological and media limitations of the day.  Now, we see that concept dying, especially among the know nothings of the Republican Party base where ignorance is celebrated and objective fact and science are ignored.  GOP politicians willing to do anything to prostitute themselves to these ignoramuses make matters far worse.  And then there are worthless elements of the media that go along with the parade of ignorance and merely parrot the idiocy coming from the far right without ever challenging the lies and stupidity.  A piece in Think Progress looks at the phenomenon and what it portends from America.  Here are excerpts:

We should complain about what the electorate does. I’m an educator, so I see it as one of my duties, especially as a science educator, to alert people of what science is and how it works. About what it means for there to be an objective truth that we would then act upon. 

If you want to lean in a political way because that’s your politics, you should do that based on an objective truth rather than cherry-picking science before you even land at an objective truth. You can’t just cherry-pick data and choose what is true about the world and what isn’t. 

So I’m not blaming the electorate in that sense. I’m blaming an educational system that is not positioned to educate an electorate such that they can make informed decisions in this, the 21st century, where informed decisions based on objective scientific truths will play a fundamental role in what kind of society we create for ourselves.

There’s this journalistic ethos saying if I get one opinion then I need to get another opinion that countervails that. So if I say the world is round, are you obligated to say the world is flat, lest someone think you are being biased in your reporting? Well, that’s absurd. You wouldn’t do that, you’re educated. You know that there are certain points of view that have no foundation at all in objective truth. 

So the question arises then at what point should a journalist give equal time to equal points of view that are opposite or in denial of emergent scientific truths. If you allocated column inches in proportion to the scientific consensus of experiments, there would be one sentence talking about people who deny climate change and the rest of the ten columns talking about research that supports it. But that’s not what we see in the public. 

[T]he moment the politicians start saying they are in denial of what the scientists are telling them, of what the consensus of scientific experiments demonstrates, that is the beginning of the end of an informed democracy. 

I think journalists are abandoning what would be their sensibility of following the emergent truths and in some cases painting a debate as though there’s a scientific debate when in fact there isn’t one