Trump and the Un-education of America

Today Wikipedia’s Random page took me to an unexpected but delightful place: linguistic agglutination.

Agglutinating languages form new, specialized words by tacking together simpler base words. An illuminating English example is un-whole-some-ness.

The Extremes section regales us with a (for us non-Turkish speakers) stunning piece of trivia knowledge:

A recent addition to the claims has come with the introduction of the following word in Turkish «muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine», which means something like “(you are talking) as if you are one of those that we were unable to turn into a maker of unsuccessful people” (someone who un-educates people to make them unsuccessful).

At first, the fact that this word doesn’t surprise Turkish speakers certainly came as a surprise to me!

Then, a deeper uneasiness sank in: what do you mean by un-educating? Arguably, educating someone is an irreversible process; you can’t un-educate anyone any more than you can make time flow backward.

For a while, my mind delved for a credible instance of un-education. When I felt I’d found it really hit me.

I remembered my Trump-supporting friends, neighbors, colleagues. Warm, respectful, law-abiding people. Many of them well-educated and affluent. Yet, statistics show a whopping 73% of Trump voters (over 52 million people!) believe the 2020 election was stolen from them.

How can this be? If faith is believing in the absence of evidence we’d need to coin a more precise term for believing in spite of contrary evidence. No matter how we spell this neologism, its semantics will be closely related to that of un-education.

I’ve seen a similar state of mind in some people approaching bankruptcy. Faced with the loss of purchasing power and anxious to restore their previous stand they’ll believe implausible promises made by charlatans claiming to possess recipes for quickly repairing credit, for instance.

Under normal circumstances, these people would quickly discount such claims based on their being too good to be true. However, when consumed by uncertainty and fear they’ll easily ignore the red lights in exchange for being promised what they so sorely want to believe.

Today’s America is radically different from the young, energetic nation that won WW2 under the lead of the “free white race”. The US Census now projects that by 2044 whites will become a minority.

Such a tectonic demographic shift can be expected to instill uncertainty and doubt among a white population that (accurately) perceives this country as their historical homeland.

In such a collective state of mind, a sufficiently intrepid opportunist(even if as politically inept as Trump) can grab power and un-educate a great nation on empty promises such as making [white] America great again.