It is Not Good.
It is Not Good.
It is Not Good.
There are many things that can be said. But this seems to be the key point.
The false promise of the economy over the clear lies. Too many Americans either can not see through Donald Trump’s lies or they do not care, and it may be both unintellectual motivations. I did warn that if Trump won the 2024 election its about the decline of American education.
“This issue of Encounters/recontres/Encuentros on Education reunites historians working in Departments of History and Sociology with historians and sociological historians working in Faculties of Education. History of Education brings with her particularities inherent to the subject matter and, when situated in faculties of education, the contextual power of teacher education programs. Historians of education in faculties of education, particularly in the USA and Canada, are finding it increasingly difficult to insert themselves in their faculties’ agenda.”
Rosa Bruno-Jofre with Daniel Tröhler,
Introduction, The Historian’s Métier: A Critical Engagement With History of Education in Encounters in Theory and History of Education, Vol. 15, 2024, xiii.
And the quote continued:
“In the last decades, the technocratic ideal has prevailed over other ideals in most faculties of education (Bruno-Jofré, 2014a). As Nel Noddings (2007) has pointed out, educational aims are neglected; not enough attention is paid to the ideals guiding us in the construction of goals and objectives in the enactment of our pedagogical approaches. Gert Biesta (2014) has gone even further, calling our attention to a shift toward ‘the new language of learning’ in education – one that focuses on process and misses questions of content, relationship, and purpose – and to the current talk of ‘effective education’ (not necessarily good), without a discussion of what and for whom. Both philosophy of education and history of education are losing ground in most faculties.”
Academic leadership in education had, not only forgot the theories of schooling in era of critical theory (e.g. Habermas 1991a-b, 1992, 1997, 2010; Giroux 1981, 1983, 1985, 1991; etc.), from frameworks of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, too many academic leaders do not know how they have got to the States of Affair in the present time. The explanation for the spiraling and networking presentism comes in models of Randall Collins, who stated clearly in his The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
Back in the 1980s, Francis Schaeffer’s endpoint and the new claim among the supporters of ‘Christian nationalism’ is for dominion, not democracy [19] Schaeffer’s critique of the old ‘Christian nationalism’ was directed towards a cultural Christian view of ‘Manifest Destiny’, but for Schaeffer it was only that the providence was not manifest in Americanism. Rather it was providential that the ‘Church of Lord Jesus Christ’ would reign, not merely as a promise, but an active fulfilment of the postmillennial hope.[20] Members of the Kingdom of God needed to seize what opportunity providentially prevailed, and the Church would trump the State. Given the policies of Donald Trump’s second administration, it will be an American, extreme, Christian Nationalism beyond what Schaeffer thought was “moderating.”
Many American progressivist evangelical believers would simply find these comments bizarre. It is quite clear that Schaefferan Apologetics is entangled in the schema of the New Christian Right.[29] At a forum in 2017 on ‘Studying Religion in the Age of Trump’ Schaeffer was labelled “the intellectual godfather of the Religious Right”.[30] Jerry Falwell and Francis Schaeffer were interlinked into a political program that, if centrists were able to look straightforward at the apologetics in wider disciplinary thinking, the apologetics would be seen as far too compromised for faithfully thinking of the neo-evangelical semantics.[31]
George Marsden is the best American historiographer for evangelical belief and American ideology. His The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s Liberal Belief, provides a fair assessment in the decline of American liberalism from the perspective of Marsden’s traditional conservative beliefs:[14]
“[Marsden]… show[ed] how America moved quickly into a state of intellectual fragmentation. Mass culture became subject to impassioned debate while such authors as David Riesman, Erich Fromm, William H. Whyte, and Betty Friedan condemned a conformist mentality. Walter Lippmann called for a return to nature law, Reinhold Niebuhr advanced ‘Christian realism,’ and Daniel Bell and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. expounded a non-dogmatic relativistic pragmatism that eschewed any quest for first principles. None, however, offered clear solutions to the country’s fragmentation. All this time mainline Protestantism was going into rapid decline, giving way to secularism and rightist fundamentalism. The author’s own sympathies lie most strongly with Martin Luther King’s call to honor a higher moral law, expressed in King’s 1963 ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail.’ Drawing upon Dutch Calvinist theologian and prime minister Abraham Kuyper, Marsden, realizing that the consensus of the fifties is no longer possible, seeks a fully inclusive pluralism respectful of a variety of Christian and non-Christian worldviews.”
A well-functioning democracy is dependent on truth itself. Trump’s success in undermining the press, undermine the availability and credibility of truth, threatens the foundations of American democracy. The nonsense of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance is rejected by all intelligent philosophers. It is a matter of the ongoing learning in the fields of epistemology and ontology, and Trump and Vance are only practicing wilful ignorance. Furthermore, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are not practicing the American national mythology as in its historical intentionality. The American state militias were never meant to become a permanent military force to defend state rights; least of all its violent rhetoric and its violent historical incidents.
It is difficult to understate the loss of memory and the inability to understand a comprehensive worldview, and it can only be understood in the decline of the American curriculum and the standard of education. The populist nonsense on Covid-19 and the presidency of Donald Trump brought together, on one hand, common sense conservatives, and on the other hand, democratic rights radicals, into a much needed alliance. These are educated classes, and the United States has rejected the educated classes.
Hannah Arendt, in her essay, ‘The Concept of History’[1], speaking about Giambattista Vico as “one of the fathers of modern historical consciousness”, stated:
In the modern age history emerged as something it never had been before. It was no longer composed of the deeds and sufferings of men [and all life], and it no longer told the story of events affecting the lives of men [all labels in community]; it became a man-made [person-made] process, the only all-comprehending process which owed its existence exclusively to the human race. Today this quality which distinguished history from nature is also a thing of the past. We know today that though we cannot “make” nature in the sense of creation, we are quite capable of starting new natural processes, and that in a sense therefore we “make nature,” to the extent, that is, that we “make history.” It is true we have reached this stage only with the nuclear discoveries, where natural forces are let loose, unchained, so to speak, and where the natural processes which take place would never have existed without direct interference of human action. This stage goes far beyond not only the premodern age, when wind and water were used to substitute for and multiply human forces, but also the industrial age, with its steam engine and internal-combustion motor, where natural forces were imitated and utilized as man-made [person-made] means of production.
The contemporary decline of interest in the humanities, and especially in the study of history, which seems inevitable in all completely modernized countries, is quite in accord with the first impulses that led to modern historical science. What is definitely out of place today is the resignation which led Vico into the study of history. We can do in the natural-physical realm what he thought we could do only in the realm of history. We have begun to act into nature as we used to act into history. If it is merely a question of processes, it has turned out that man [person] is as capable of starting natural processes which would not have come about without human interference as he [and she/her/they, whatever] is of starting something new in the field of human affairs.[2]
Today, Donald Trump has made history, but it is not good.
Culture war and cultural wars concept or USA heritage and divided American politics as different philosophy as cultures and ideology in conflict in the United States in a 3D illustration style.
Neville Buch
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