Stalin
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2008
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The author and environmentalist Wallace Stegner called our national parks “America’s best idea”.
Certainly, these jewels – 85m acres of parkland throughout all the 50 states – are beloved by the public. So are America’s public libraries, arts organizations and museums.
But that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from threatening or harming them.
These institutions are under siege. They are hurt by deep funding cuts, the loss or bullying of public employees and, in some cases, by threats of extinction.
Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America?
It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th-century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well.
Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated.
“A people that can no longer believe in anything cannot make up its mind,” said Arendt, a student of authoritarianism, in 1973. Eventually, such a public “is deprived … of its ability to think and judge”, and with people like that, “you can then do what you please”.
That’s what Trump and company are counting on.
It’s also part of the effort to divide Americans into two tribes – the elites and the regular folks, the blue and the red, the drivers of dorky hybrid sedans and the drivers of oversized pickup trucks.
www.theguardian.com
comrade stalin
moscow
Certainly, these jewels – 85m acres of parkland throughout all the 50 states – are beloved by the public. So are America’s public libraries, arts organizations and museums.
But that hasn’t stopped the Trump administration from threatening or harming them.
These institutions are under siege. They are hurt by deep funding cuts, the loss or bullying of public employees and, in some cases, by threats of extinction.
Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America?
It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th-century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well.
Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated.
“A people that can no longer believe in anything cannot make up its mind,” said Arendt, a student of authoritarianism, in 1973. Eventually, such a public “is deprived … of its ability to think and judge”, and with people like that, “you can then do what you please”.
That’s what Trump and company are counting on.
It’s also part of the effort to divide Americans into two tribes – the elites and the regular folks, the blue and the red, the drivers of dorky hybrid sedans and the drivers of oversized pickup trucks.
Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions | Margaret Sullivan
The president’s funding cuts and bullying are about dividing Americans and tightening his grip on power
comrade stalin
moscow