Betsy Devos, Secretary of Education
Donald Trump’s ascendancy in American politics has made visible a plague of deep seated civic illiteracy, a corrupt political system, and a contempt for reason that has been decades in the making. It also points to the withering of civic attachments, the undoing of civic culture, the decline of public life, and the erosion of any sense of shared citizenship.
Galvanizing his base of true believers in post-election demonstrations, Trump has transformed politics of bigotry and hate is into a spectacle of fear, divisions, and disinformation. Under President Trump, the scourge of mid-20th century authoritarianism has returned not only in the menacing plague of populist rallies, fear-mongering, hate, and humiliation, but also in an emboldened culture of war, militarization and violence that looms over society like a rising storm.
Trump’s brand of authoritarianism has emerged at a time when there is an overabundance of information, coupled with the rise of new digital and visual media whose cognitive models reinforce the assumption that reality be echoed rather than interrogated and critically comprehended. […]
