Here it is, our regular Friday diet of suggested readings for the weekend:
The decline of public intellectuals and the rise of so-called thought leaders.
Human expertise and the illusion of knowledge.
Many parents still believe a large number of myths about child psychology that have been debunked or lack evidence.
Focused on Trump’s successes, many supporters are unfazed by his reversals.
A 100-year-old “challenge” to Darwin is still making waves. Though in fact it helps the theory of evolution.
Footnotes to Plato 
Markk
Where is the evidence that philosophy lost status? I only see it the other way around, increase in popularization and increase in popularity in universities.
And I call bring on the lack of distrust of authorities. But clearly there’s a distinction between climate scientists and politicians & media pundits.
brodix
Well there is no monolothic anti-Trump movement. DSA, Justice Democrats, the writers of The Intercept, and committed workers for human rights organizations aren’t like Rachel Maddow for instance. Or those protestors demanding to release Trump’s tax returns (even if it does succeed, what the hell does that do?) What you say makes more sense if you mean the Democratic Party, but I hardly count them as left.
American Exceptionalism is quite a different thing, though the American Dream thing is losing its illusion.
Bunsen Burner
One can come up with countless others, including ones continuing among non-Trump people. How many people realize we’re still in the longest war in American History, the war in Afghanistan, and that it had nothing to do with ousting the Taliban?
Robin
We have it worse. Bush justified his invasion of Iraq as he said because God told him to smite the enemy, and tried to use evangelical interpretations of the Bible to convince the President of France to join in. Let’s say he found it really bizarre.
LikeLike
Robin, Saphsin, Bunsen,
Nobody is arguing that politicians and others haven’t made shit up from time immemorial. But I think you are truly missing something if you don’t think there is something disturbingly new in a US President who can brazenly tell lies, be contradicted by evidence available to everyone, and millions of people just not giving a crap about it.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“President who can brazenly tell lies, be contradicted by evidence available to everyone, and millions of people just not giving a crap about it.”
By just that, nope nothing is new, just more outlandish and noticeable. You can argue Trump is worse at that, but that doesn’t justify something absurd as entering a post-truth era.
LikeLike
Obviously, we live on a different planet.
LikeLike
Also if we’re talking about deluded citizens, the country under the Reagan administration was even worse. Reagan had no clue what he was doing, and in quite the literal sense. He was like this retarded shell who had no clue what he was doing. (There was a time he had a state dinner in Brazil and he thought he was visiting Bolivia) He was basically just a guy who had fun living in the White House while rich people wrote down what he had to say on the podium. It was situation described by political activists as that one time in political history when we really didn’t have a President. And at that time, most people across the political spectrum had no clue that their President was like that, and still don’t. I don’t see a post-truth era, if you think so, you had no clue how bad it was before.
LikeLike
This excerpt of Drezner doesn’t go far enough on a big part of his argument. Per a good critique / envelope-pusher I read a few days ago, today’s “thought leaders” are generally whores for the plutocrats he mentions in his subtitle; he gives more detailed examples of that.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Massimo:
I think you are truly missing something if you think Trump’s lies are any worse than Kennedy’s, Johnson’s, Nixon’s, Reagan’s, an so on. The only difference so far is that we son’t have millions dead due to Trump’s lies.
LikeLiked by 2 people
On Trump and his voters, cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning are big deals.
On the debate here, I’d possibly split the difference. I’d say half the issue is Trump is more crude and brazen in his lies and mind shifts than politicians of the past, is part of the issue.
That said, contra Saph, I’d say Trump is politically dumber than Reagan. And possibly dumber period.
LikeLike
Socratic
It’s more like Trump is dumb politically but Reagan is not even dumb politically, but had nothing in his head. He was just an empty shell who thought being President was a nice vacation.
LikeLike
Socratic
There’s a nice short book by Mark Green called Reagan’s Reign of Error that collects a bunch of gaffes when he was President that show how shockingly clueless he was. As dumb & outrageous Trump is, I think some of the things written here were even worse, and the public was totally clueless, including the intellectual class.
Some examples:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R9VJOA6JJQH6C/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0394756444&coliid=I2PZW66NKICILE&colid=3GD69VUJ03LS5
LikeLike
Socratic:
The problem is that looking at American politics from a distance, cognitive dissonance and motivated reasoning are not the exclusive domain of Trump voters. I agree with you though that Trump’s brazenness appears to be what winds up liberals the most.
saphisin:
I don’t think its productive to worry as to which politician is dumber. This often has the undesired effect of underestimating them and even sometimes excusing their actions. It’s best to just accept that intellect is not a high priority in politics, where cunning and other traits provide far greater rewards. Reagan, Bush Jr, Trump, don’t get to where they are just by being simpletons.
LikeLike
Bunsen Burner
I think the situation today is sort of better right now in many ways than since those Presidencies. I mean the NYT is heavily flawed but it has done some good reporting on Trump’s policies on Yemen in the past year for instance. Even some of the crazy right wing pundits have spoken out against Trump shooting missiles in Syria. But if you looked at the degree of distortion when it comes to reporting in supporting the bombing of South Vietnam or intervening in Latin America and how it completely fooled the public, it’s sort of shocking.
LikeLike
Bunsen
I’m not sure I completely agree that we shouldn’t point out how dumb a politician is, though I’m generally with you on most of what you said. In my previous context, I was merely touching on this mistaken idea that Trump is this guy who says outrageous things and all these lies and has no idea what he’s doing and the public believes him, and that such thing never happened before.
LikeLike
in my previous comment**
LikeLike
Bunsen,
I see your and others’ attitude here as an example of the sort of “there is no difference” sort cynicism that eventually gives way to relativism and is – in part – directly responsible for Trump.
LikeLiked by 1 person
saphsin:
By all means point out how dumb a politician is. My point was about dwelling it on it to the point where it stops any further analysis of their actions.
LikeLike
“I see your and others’ attitude here as an example of the sort of “there is no difference” sort cynicism that eventually gives way to relativism and is – in part – directly responsible for Trump.”
In other words, you have no argument and total refusal to engage with the facts. But another thing is that you’re putting forth a total straw man. No one is suggesting that Trump and the current Republicans are not significantly more extreme in terms of policy implementation and how they’re dealing with the political office. What we are saying is that there is no fundamental difference in terms of the total cluelessness of the public under a President’s string of lies.
LikeLike
Massimo:
It’s not cynicism. It’s called taking history seriously and understanding the historical context of political issues. As for relativism? The responsibility for that is all the fair weather liberals who had no problem with Obama’s drone strikes, executive orders, deportations and so on, while ignoring the economic plight of workers in the midwest.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I spent the whole summer last year arguing for the case that Trump was significantly worse and that swing state voters should vote for Clinton. That this is based on “the attitude that helped elect Trump” is flatly false and totally irrelevant.
Hypothetically let’s say the amount of lies that Trump tells is a 10 and which the public doesn’t care and that for the other Presidents, it was like a 3 or a 4. (I don’t even think the gap is like that but for argument’s sake) We can still recognize that Trump is worse but that nothing fundamentally changed. The public doesn’t notice when the President lies about all sorts of issues (especially on foreign policy) and don’t really care unless it’s for partisan reasons. If the public started shouting post-truth era, it’s because they don’t recognize how deluded they were before.
LikeLike
Saphsin: At the same time, the NYT just hired a climate-change denier away from the WSJ to join its editorial board as a columnist.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Massimo: Contra your stance, and as a third-party voter myself, I’d say, not just re Trump narrowly, but on a bigger picture, that you might be in a box of your own making.
LikeLike
Massimo, also, switching topics, and since I’d already seen the piece — how much do Thompson’s ideas influence work on the extended synthesis today, including what you’ve written with your biologist hat on?
LikeLike
A partial “meh” on the post-truth and conservative evangelicals. Libertarians of a Randian bent believe “Atlas Shrugged” is just as true as the Bible. (Actually, most of them believe it’s a lot more true.) Even for non-Randian libertarians, one could point to certain quasi-sacred books of theirs.
Within that worldview, though, it has other problems.
Worthen doesn’t tackle the issue of how both Limbaugh and Beck, tho neither is an evangelical Xn, became “go-to” people. (This is to say nothing of Xns who may listen to the likes of Alex Jones, or to Art Bell in the past.)
Finally, tying back to libertarians of a certain stripe. Her talk about “double reading”? Straussians (as in Leo, not Johann Sr or Jr) do the same.
LikeLike
Socratic:
Your remark triggered something I had suspected but never saw any analysis of. Namely, is not Libertarianism/Objectivism a modern religion? At least a nascent one? We tend to think religions can’t form in our modern times, but there is no reason to think that the social and cultural forces that create religions are no longer at work. In fact Libertarianism seems to fit quite nicely into Judeo-Christian canon if you replace God with The Market.
For example, Libertarians believe The Market is omnipotent. It can create anything and solve all problems – including global warming. It is omniscient – it has to be to value everything correctly. It is omnipresent, or at least they want to make it so that every transaction we make is a market based one. It’s even omnibenevolent as long as you redefine benevolence as Pareto efficiency.
What will they look like in 2000 years?
LikeLiked by 1 person
Socratic, Burner
I think nationalism (and in turn, exceptionalism) probably is the closes thing that has a religious-like mentality on it’s effect on people’s minds, no matter how intelligent and critical they are in other areas. That’s why it’s called by some as “religion of the state”
I agree with Libertarians on some things, like certain civil liberties issues, and their foreign policy stances are generally better than most liberals. Edward Snowden is a libertarian and he seems like a good guy. But their ideology is pretty ridiculous for the reasons stated.
Also, the Austrian Economists (Mises & Hayek) were notorious even among the neoliberals for being extremely close minded and hostile to empirical evidence. Their belief system was really a quasi-religious faith made up of thin aired assumptions, at least other free market espousers try to distort empirical evidence to fit their world view.
LikeLike
Bunsen, actually, a lot of Libertarians have been flirting with Global Warming denial. Ron Paul, the head spokesmen for them for instance.
LikeLike
I think Trump is something unprecedented in the scale of his and his administration’s lies, but “post truth” makes it sound like there was some golden era when politicians levelled with us and the media didn’t just make stuff up. There never was such a time.
LikeLiked by 2 people
saphsin:
I am curious about your remark about the NYT improving on its reporting of Yemen. Is this a recent, post-Trump thing? Or did they start this under Obama? Here in the UK, even the darling of middle class liberalism, The Guardian, doesn’t take much interest in Yemen.
LikeLike
Bunsen: Maybe that’s because one of the British aircraft makers is still trying to cut sweetheart deals with Gulf monarchies?
That said, one could halfway argue for certain strands of libertarianism being quasi-religious. Under a formal definition, involving rituals and other matters, as well as metaphysical beliefs, I’m not sure it would quite fit ..
LikeLike
It started last year I think, though still lacking since then. Just generally don’t be inclined to trust the NYT for anything foreign policy related.
https://www.nytimes.com/subscriptions/Multiproduct/lp89F48.html?campaignId=6Q7KJ&EXIT_URI=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F08%2F17%2Fopinion%2Fstop-saudi-arms-sales-until-carnage-in-yemen-ends.html
The NYT has posted cheerleading articles for the missile strike in Syria though, along with the other media.
LikeLike