The Totalitarian Uneducating of the USA

Imagine a group of people – say, a hundred or so – migrating to a remote unclaimed territory somewhere in the world (if such a thing ever existed – perhaps Antartica, once) to establish a community. Imagine, improbably, that it is a Rousseau-esque group in which everyone other than infants-in-arms participates in decisions about how things should be organised. They agree on a division of labour, allocating tasks and functions among themselves. Some cut wood, others draw water, others again hunt; the handy build huts, those skilled in fashioning cloaks from animal skins do so, those who know about medicinal herbs tend the frail. As the settlement becomes more established, the group decides in convocation on next steps and ways of implementing them, and makes arrangements for dealing with problems including any conflicts between individuals – inevitable in any group.

In this idealistic scenario the group is self-governing, the allocated functions serving its collective interests. Note the word ‘serving’. Now let us sprinkle some reality over the picture. Certain individuals begin to emerge as having an authoritative presence in the group. They might be individuals who are wiser, more experienced, admired and respected by the others. They might be individuals who are bigger, stronger, more forceful as personalities. There might be – probably would be – a mixture of both. A need to enforce decisions in cases of disagreements within the group arise, and the emerging leaders will have a significant role in this, as they do in influencing the general direction of the group’s affairs. Some of the allocated functions in the division of labour assume particular importance to the group’s welfare – for example, defence if other groups appear in the region and compete aggressively for resources – and the functionaries themselves therefore become key figures; either themselves as leaders or as close allies of them.

Because there will almost certainly be more than one emergent leading personality, they might disagree over certain matters. In the case of important disagreements, the different leading individuals might find themselves supported by different subgroups in the community; with, in consequence, debates in the community’s convocations growing noisier. Divisions of opinion become just – divisions. And as the community grows in size…

You get the picture. Fast forward to the present and you see how government has ceased to be a set of functions both subordinate to and in service of the collective, but has become politics. The crudest, starkest, most naked, most glaring example of how the institutions of government can be reduced to mere instruments of a political agenda, is Trump’s USA today. Of course, this has been obvious enough to anyone taking notice since extensions to franchises in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries necessitated ever tighter party political organisation, reflecting divisions in ideas about socio-economic public policy and security issues. But the incremental nature of the process has masked the transition of government as a service into a mere instrument of partisan political agenda enforcement. That is undisguisedly so in authoritarian regimes, of course, but it is also so in the democracies, especially in those fifty or so ‘Westminster Model’ plurality-voting (First Past the Post) systems which produce two-party binaries, the two parties vying for dominance in the form of a one-party-controlled state government. The US, to the surprise of some perhaps, is a partially-modified Westminster System polity.

Proof, if needed, is offered in the plainest terms by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts in his forward to Project 2025: ‘This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors. With enemies at home and abroad, there is no margin for error. Time is running short. If we fail, the fight for the very idea of America may be lost.’ For ‘the very idea of America’ as the right-wing Heritage Foundation conceives it, read ‘an America in which White privilege and money-interests are defended, where uppity women and people of colour know their place, where people who do not conform to traditional binaries of sex, gender or sexuality are to be forced to conform to them at risk of ostracism (aka ‘cancellation’) into social ghettos or even prison.’ A miasma of one kind of ‘Christian values’ outlook, derived from the early days of the invader state’s Puritan origins, is to be spread over everyone and everything because it well serves the rigidities of ‘tradition’ and simplistic binaries as the likes of Kevin Roberts perceive them.

There is an unfolding multiplicity of endeavours in the vomitus of Executive Orders, signed by Trump with his big sharpie marker pen, which enact the coup being carried out on Project 2025 lines. The abolition of the Federal Education Department is one of the most lurid examples. Even if Congress wholly or partially resists its abolition – as a statutory body it is Congress alone that can determine its fate – the gutting of the department has already begun; its Trump-appointed new head, Linda McMahon, has already fired half its staff.

Consider the aims of the Education Department’s abolition, and the mixture of likely consequences. As a preliminary, consider a thought some might have: that public education in the US is a failure and needs a shake-up. A stunning fact is that 54% of American adults have a literacy level below eleven years of age; one in five Americans is illiterate, a third of the population has at best only the lowest level of basic numeracy, in many cases below it. Vox pop street videos of Americans being asked questions about geography and history – admittedly, the videos select the most staggering examples of ignorance for fun – afford a glimpse at the dimensions of an iceberg of which they represent only the tip. All this would suggest a systemic failure of the public education system.

Or does it? Could it be that the heroic efforts of teachers in the US prevent matters from being even worse? The unwillingness of too many children and adolescents to learn, and by transitivity of parents to encourage them and require it of them, has as much if not more to do with general social conditions and attitudes to education; it is what you might expect of a society that exists in a perpetual state of social civil war, highly unequal, where drug, violence and crime problems are endemic in too many places and at alienated levels of society, standing in contrast to e.g. Asian attitudes to education (yes, a generalisation, but it has a point). Given that just over half of Americans self-identify as ‘middle class’ (2% say they are ‘upper class’, defined by having incomes above twice the median income level, thus >$153,000 p.a.), it would seem that, even among them, enthusiasm for education is not always what it should be. If stereotypes of some in the working class (working two or three jobs to get by) and underclass (living in trailer parks or urban ghettoes, or among gatherings of fentanyl-dazed homeless under freeway overpasses) illustrate the deep sump into which an unforgiving capitalist order can drain people, you see how it reflects a society that does not sufficiently value education, treating it as a good to be privately purchased rather than communally promoted as a matter of national importance and pride, and above all as vital to individual possibilities for good lives.

In the sharpest of possible contrasts with the dispiriting figures for general literacy and numeracy, the top end of US education – the ‘prep schools’ and elite universities – are world-class. But just 1.9% of the 32.5% of Americans who have a college degree attend ‘elite’ institutions; as a proportion of the population as a whole this is a tiny number: 2.2 million people in a country of 340 million. The offspring in the top 1% of wealthy families are twice as likely to get into one of the Ivy League universities than are the offspring of less wealthy families. Compare France, where the public education system is very good: 70% of the French are ‘middle-class’ in income and lifestyle (‘comfortably so’, one reports says); and something like 60%-70% of school leavers go on to higher or further education. Coincidence?

All these considerations aside, the aim of the Trump attack on an already staggering and hugely divided education system is as clear as it is simple, and the numbers again speak: in the November 2024 presidential election 54% of college graduates voted for Kamala Harris, 54% of voters without a college degree voted for Trump. The view that, as a tendency, the more educated a person is the more liberal s/he is, coupled with the assumption that the higher levels of education a person attains, the (as a weak-ish generalisation: it is by no means invariably so) more intelligent s/he is likely to be, suggests why authoritarian instincts are opposed to too much education for the generality of the population. Or at very least, too much education of the ‘wrong’ type, this being education that encourages independent thinking and a wider horizon of view over the world and its varieties and possibilities. For note that a primary aim of the Trump attack on education is ‘to return control of education to the states’, for which read ‘to Republican-controlled states where education can be directed at reinforcement of conservative attitudes and beliefs’ (thus: where books can be banned, creationism taught, homosexuality condemned, sex education limited, discriminatory speech and action ignored, and the First Amendment proscription against institutionalisation of religion unpicked: think ‘Ten Commandments in schools’).

Putting K-12 (i.e. kindergarten to high school year 12) education into the hands of right-wing state legislatures is one prong of the attack. The other is the Trump assault on universities, especially the top-end ones, considered by conservatives to be bastions of liberal sentiment. Perfectly straightforward bullying and bribery is already in full flow here: hundreds of millions of federal dollars are being withheld from e.g. Columbia and Penn State universities to force them to comply with Trumpian wishes about protests, DEI programmes and Title IX protections against discrimination and harassment. Some other universities are timidly hurrying to fall into line for fear of losing funds, others are urging resistance by taking legal action. Divide and conquer, threaten, bully, defund, frighten and coerce: these are the Trump ‘deal making’ strategies (excluding how he deals with Putin, it seems), and in this first assault it is certainly causing disarray and uncertainty, though what will eventuate is yet unclear.

There are, however, straws in the wind. ‘Red’ (Republican-voting) states receive the largest share of federal education funding, and if Trump has his way this will now dry up. In comments to CNN the head of the US National Education Association, Kim Anderson, said that Republican areas of the US will see ‘a lot fewer dollars to spread around to take care of students’ needs, class sizes are going to go up, after-school programs are going to go down. There are so many gaps that are going to impact students and what they need to thrive’. Think staffing, field trips, museum and gallery visits, visiting speakers, quality of canteen food, security against school massacre perpetrators, library and IT resources, sports facilities, and more.

Vandalised Teslas, like measles spots, are symptoms of a growing backlash. Not a few Republican congresspersons are getting a rough ride at Town Hall meetings in their districts (constituencies) from already-upset voters. Polls show that the majority of Americans do not like the idea of abolishing the Education Department. The precipitate rush of Trumpian disruption might be going too far too fast. It has stiffened Canadian sinews, united the EU, pushed the UK back towards Europe (so: silver linings), bristled China, weakened the US internationally and badly marred its image. Backlash and blowback at home and abroad are well on the cards. The education policy might be popular among Republicans keen to quash ‘Wokism’ and to have the opportunity to redirect education into traditionalist channels, but finding themselves lumbered with the cost – they would likely cut education provision rather than raise taxes – and opposition from constituents (e.g. those who only manage their employment commitments because after-school programmes look after their children) will prompt different feelings.

It is important not to imbibe too much ‘copium’ (the ‘opium for coping’) in the form of thinking bad things must inevitably defeat themselves, and that therefore one can sit back and wait for it to happen – the strategy of Sun Tzu’s ‘Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake’. Even if the Trump assault is defeated or self-defeated ultimately - and there is no guarantee that it will be: the arrogant and ignorant dogmatism involved is backed by an ocean of money and an army of lickspittles – a great deal of harm can be done if the defeat is too long coming. That is why vigorous opposition by all lawful means is necessary.

As it happens, if there were just four Republicans out of 218 in the House of Representatives, and five in the Senate out of 100, who had a conscience and some principles, Trump could be stopped in his tracks. Those are the margins by which Republicans hold Congress. One can dream further: if there were eleven Senators thus spectacularly endowed, the current move by Democrats to bring articles of impeachment against Trump would see him thrown out. What a frabjous day that would be. Voters in four Congressional districts and half a dozen states could scare their representatives with the prospect of losing their seats, if conscience and principle remain absent. So it is not as if there are no means available. The courts – some of them – are doing a decent job, or trying to. The unrelenting and apposite ridicule heaped on Trump and Musk by the Jimmy Kimmels and Stephen Colberts of the telewaves, although enjoyed mainly by the already-converted, could eventually begin to erode the confidence of others outside those tents, not least because Trump’s thin-skinned reactions advertise them. But again: one must not take too much copium. One must not leave it up to others. One has to find whatever way to resist lies within one’s power. And since we are all at the mercy of a US veering wildly off course, like a giant oil tanker rudderless and on fire in a yachting marina, all of us anywhere in the world have to find what we can do or say to resist. Boycott American goods, protest outside US embassies, insist that our own governments oppose Trump’s bullying: whatever one can do must be done. To bring down Trump is to weaken all the other bullies and authoritarians around the world so delighted and empowered by him.

The watchword accordingly remains: Resist. Resist, de peur que le pire à encore venir.

For dessert:

Trump sitting among fourth-graders in a Potemkin schoolroom practising how to write his name with a sharpie is one of the most appropriate images of him yet, so paradigmatic of his operating level is it. The comedy script-writers should be having a field day.