Today's GOP: Only the Incompetent Need Apply

A column in the New York Times looks at an issue this blog frequently focuses upon, namely how the Republican Party went from being a political party that respected science, knowledge and expertise and accepted objective reality to a party that now embraces utter ignorance and promotes the wildly incompetent.  Indeed, the more insane and incompetent one is, the higher the chances for advancement within today's GOP where subservience to ideology at all cost is among the highest accolades. The piece doesn't have an answer for what happened to the GOP although it lays out the symptoms.  I for one continue to believe the ruin of the GOP as a party that honored knowledge and reality tracks almost directly to the rise of the Christofascist and evangelicals within the party, a demographic that (i) has always rejected objective fact, science and knowledge if any one or all three challenged their house of cards, fantasy "world view," and (ii) lies incessantly to further their anti-modernity and anti-democratic agenda. Here are column excerpts:

I wrote a few days ago about how ignorance — ignorance about history, about science, about economics and more — has become a core conservative value. This exaltation of ignorance naturally goes hand in hand with disdain for expertise: A vast majority of scientists may agree that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, but hey, it’s all just a gigantic hoax.

But wait, there’s more. On the right, expertise isn’t just considered worthless, it’s viewed as disqualifying. People with actual knowledge of a policy area — certainly those with any kind of professional reputation — are often excluded from any role in shaping policy. Preference is given to the incompetent — often the luridly incompetent.

I’m currently reading “Nightmare Scenario,” an account by Yasmeen Abutaleb and Damian Paletta of the Trump administration’s catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic. Much of what they report falls into the category of “shocking but not surprising.” One thing I didn’t know about, however, was the special destructive role played by Stephen Moore, an outside economic adviser.

It was Moore, the authors report, who walked into Donald Trump’s office just days after America went into lockdown to urge reopening by Easter. . . . and it contributed to a public health disaster that has so far claimed 600,000 American lives — with 95 percent of the deaths happening after Easter 2020.

It goes without saying that Moore isn’t an expert on epidemiology. But he isn’t an expert on economics, either. In fact, he has a reputation among many economists for being wrong about almost everything. . . . . it is unusual for him ever to get the facts right, or even manage to land in the remote vicinity of the truth.

Yet in right-wing circles Moore has failed steadily upward, serving as a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, becoming chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, and more. Trump tried to appoint him to the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors and might have succeeded if Moore hadn’t been found in contempt of court for failure to pay alimony and child support.

And there he was, at a crucial moment in the pandemic, urging Trump to downplay the medical emergency and endanger American lives.

Yet by Philipson’s own account, pretty much nobody took his advice. And in general, the U.S. right — not just Trumpists but the movement as a whole — distrusts anyone whose competence has resulted in an independent professional reputation. After all, you never know when someone like that might take a stand on principle.

I’ve written in the past that “the modern G.O.P. doesn’t want to hear from serious economists, whatever their politics. It prefers charlatans and cranks, who are its kind of people.” And it turns out that the same is true for epidemiologists.

The right’s hatred of Dr. Anthony Fauci is a familiar story.  However, much of “Nightmare Scenario” follows the saga of Dr. Deborah Birx . . . . Trump’s inner circle never trusted her precisely because she was knowledgeable and had a reputation to defend. She was shut out in favor of politically reliable quacks.

So how did we end up here? How did one of our two major political parties come not only to reject democracy, but to exalt ignorance and despise competence of any kind?  I don’t know, but if you aren’t terrified, you aren’t paying attention.