I have quite a few childhood friends who are now Fox News acolytes, and I’m convinced that Fox’s “alternative facts” have inflicted untold pain on this nation and the other nations around the globe. From their disinformation campaigns on COVID, to the 2020 election, to climate change, to immigration and race, this is some hardcore criminality at work.
The Americans who voted against Donald Trump in the 2024 election and the vast majority of the citizens elsewhere around the world will read this quote from Steinbeck and hope it doesn’t apply to U.S. democracy.
This is a great example of something that I’ve been talking about for years: climate change is a global phenomenon, and making slow progress in decarbonizing the energy sector in a place like Texas will have an infinitesimally small effect on the local climate (even if the people of the state have the political will to make it happen, which they most assuredly do not). In particular, the hurricanes that are increasingly devastating to Texas generally form off the coast of West Africa, generated and strengthened by rising ocean temperatures.
Of course, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth, and any positive change is good, but I do want to add a dash of reason here.
As I told the emissary of Germany’s state department who asked me what his country could be doing better vis-a-vis renewable energy. After more than an hour of being peppered with essentially the same question, I finally responded, “In large measure, it doesn’t matter. This is a problem we either come together and solve as a global community, or we’re all going to suffer in ways that are completely unprecedented.”
I agree with the author of the meme here, and I believe that if we were to follow the course he suggests we’d be a lot less steamed about these issues than we are now.
Having said that, it appears that science is in the process of proving that our belief systems are wired into our brains, and that we ourselves have far less agency than we think we do in determining how we think and act.
Take me as an example. As readers know, I’m an atheist and a progressive. From my earliest memories at three years old, I’ve been an animal lover and a disbeliever in God. Mustn’t there be some basis for this in my genetic code?
In terms of experiences, I went to a private Quaker (pacifistic, non-violent) school, spent six years of college/graduate school studying Western philosophy, and had a business career that served clients in a dozen different countries. You could take 100 people with this make-up, and I doubt you’d find a single Trump supporter.
Now, do I understand the far right? Of course I do. I had the incredibly good fortune to have all this line up, starting with my birth in Philadelphia, and my adoption at age five months by two kind, intelligent, and honorable people. But it’s not hard to imagine having been born in Saudi Arabia, Paraguay, Mali, or Mississippi.
We all carry with us the idea that our basic personalities are self-determined, that we create our characteristics from our own choosing. I question that.
Dr. Gregg Bloche, a friend who teaches at Georgetown Law School, said on a Zoom call yesterday that the U.S. has transitioned from “a cognitive to a non-cognitive” mode of politics and voting.
What a fantastic phrase. It’s terrifying, of course, but it so accurately describes how it’s possible that a huge majority of Americans want to be led by a pathological liar, career criminal, and wanna-be dictator.
When I was a young boy, the parents of my little friends in my neighborhood in the Philadelphia suburbs weren’t rocket scientists, but they could (and did) read, and a person like Donald Trump would have carried less than 10% of the vote.
All that rationality and gentility has vanished in the blink of an eye.
Perhaps it’s easiest to identify what American voters do not value: truth vs. lies, knowledge vs. ignorance, rule of law, fair treatment of minority groups, environmental sustainability, and democracy.
It would be comforting to think that the outcome of this election was a one-off fluke, but all reason suggests the precise opposite. As Gen Z (and whatever follows it) comes to represent an ever-increasing portion of the electorate, we can only expect more selfishness, less literacy, more apathy, and a diminished capacity for critical thinking.
White folks voted for Trump, 56 – 42.
That’s quite a landslide, one that leaves zero doubt about our appetite for racism, lies, and treason.
Fron the standpoint of the environment, it says something else as well: we couldn’t care less.
We’re just now learning about the factors that put Trump back into the White House. In particular, too few voters are capable of understanding the issues, and, as a consequence, too few showed up at the polls.
Many people, me included, mistakenly supposed that the threat of a full-on fascist in the White House was going to bring voters out of the woodwork After all, do Americans really want to be led by someone who admires the world’s dictators and clearly wants to become one himself?
The answer is that most of them simply don’t care. Involvement in politics would require effort, e.g., taking a few minutes to look up words like “authoritarian,” and familiarizing themselves with the issues covered in Project 2025, a federal policy agenda and blueprint for a radical restructuring of the executive branch, key components of which include:
• Opposing abortion and reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, immigrants’ rights, and racial equity.
• Targeting immigrant communities through mass deportations and raids, ending birthright citizenship, separating families, and dismantling our nation’s asylum system.
Now that all this is clear, an important question arises: What about America’s future, given that our investment in educating our young people is under greater attack with each passing year? I know a young person who buys his beer at a convenience store whose Gen Z clerk was unaware that the United States had an election earlier this week. What’s that level of ignorance going to look like when it keeps increasing exponentially?
Are they laughing? In a word, no. Quite the contrary.
Most of the Earth’s population has historically counted on the U.S. to do the right thing when it comes to things like human rights and rule of law, and they take this quite seriously.
That’s why, when I interviewed a bunch of Swedes during Trump’s first term in the White House, they all agreed, “Trump may have 6% or 8% support in Sweden, but the vast majority of us simply feel sorry for you. If a fascist had come to power in Ecuador or Mali, we would have said, ‘Well, what did you expect?’ But the United States of America? No one ever thought it could ever happen there.”
When Americans went to the polls earlier this week, the idea expressed in the meme here went from a real possibility to a pipe dream.
On a related note, 54% of Americans aged 16–74 read below a 6th grade level, so the outcome of the election really should have come as a surprise to no one, and its tragic consequences are, in reality, exactly what this nation deserves.
Here’s a 
