The unfathomable ignorance

It takes the courage of a Canadian Journ... - MJ Taylor facebook.com

It takes the courage of a Canadian Journalist to really tell it like it is. Apparently, no journalist in the U.S. has the courage to say these things this clearly: I don't think any US journalist has written as tough (and spot-on) a portrayal of the threat facing us as this Canadian, Andrew Coyne of the Toronto Globe and Mail. 

>>Nothing mattered, in the end. Not the probable dementia, the unfathomable ignorance, the emotional incontinence; not, certainly, the shambling, hate-filled campaign, or the ludicrously unworkable anti-policies.

The candidate out on bail in four jurisdictions, the convicted fraud artist, the adjudicated rapist and serial sexual predator, the habitual bankrupt, the stooge of Vladimir Putin, the man who tried to overturn the last election and all of his creepy retinue of crooks, ideologues and lunatics: Americans took a long look at all this and said, yes please.

There is no sense in understating the depth of the disaster. This is a crisis like no other in our lifetimes. The government of the United States has been delivered into the hands of a gangster, whose sole purpose in running, besides staying out of jail, is to seek revenge on his enemies. The damage Donald Trump and his nihilist cronies can do – to America, but also to its democratic allies, and to the peace and security of the world – is incalculable. We are living in the time of Nero.

The first six months will be a time of maximum peril. NATO must from this moment be considered effectively obsolete, without the American security guarantee that has always been its bedrock. We may see new incursions by Russia into Europe – the poor Ukrainians are probably done for, but now it is the Baltics and the Poles who must worry – before the Europeans have time to organize an alternative. China may also accelerate its Taiwanese ambitions.

At home, Mr. Trump will be moving swiftly to consolidate his power. Some of this will be institutional – the replacement of tens of thousands of career civil servants with Trumpian loyalists. But some of it will be … atmospheric.

At some point someone – a company whose chief executive has displeased him, a media critic who has gotten under his skin – will find themselves the subject of unwanted attention from the Trump administration. It might not be so crude as a police arrest. It might just be a little regulatory matter, a tax audit, something like that. They will seek the protection of the courts, and find it is not there.

The judges are also Trump loyalists, perhaps, or too scared to confront him. Or they might issue a ruling, and find it has no effect – that the administration has called the basic bluff of liberal democracy: the idea that, in the crunch, people in power agree to be bound by the law, and by its instruments the courts, the same as everyone else. Then everyone will take their cue. Executives will line up to court him. Media organizations, the large ones anyway, will find reasons to be cheerful.

Of course, in reality things will start to fall apart fairly quickly. The huge across-the-board tariffs he imposes will tank the world economy. The massive deficits, fueled by his ill-judged tax policies – he won't replace the income tax, as he promised, but will fill it with holes – and monetized, at his direction, by the Federal Reserve, will ignite a new round of inflation.

Most of all, the insane project of deporting 12 million undocumented immigrants – finding them, rounding them up and detaining them in hundreds of internment camps around the country, probably for years, before doing so – will consume his administration. But by then it will be too late.

We should not count upon the majority of Americans coming to their senses in any event. They were not able to see Mr. Trump for what he was before: why should that change? Would they not, rather, be further coarsened by the experience of seeing their neighbours dragged off by the police, or the military, further steeled to the necessity of doing "tough things" to "restore order?"

Some won't, of course. But they will find in time that the democratic levers they might once have pulled to demand change are no longer attached to anything. There are still elections, but the rules have been altered: there are certain obstacles, certain disadvantages if you are not with the party of power. It will seem easier at first to try to change things from within. Then it will be easier not to change things.

All of this will wash over Canada in various ways – some predictable, like the flood of refugees seeking escape from the camps; some less so, like the coarsening of our own politics, the debasement of morals and norms by politicians who have discovered there is no political price to be paid for it. And who will have the backing of their patron in Washington.

All my life I have been an admirer of the United States and its people. But I am frightened of it now, and I am even more frightened of them.<<

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What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?

James Greenberg

The MAGA movement isn't just about Trump. It's about rejection—of expertise, institutions, education, science, government. Democrats often interpret this as ignorance or manipulation, the result of disinformation or cultural backlash. But there's another way to understand it, one that anthropology and years of applied research have made difficult to ignore.

What if this anger is rooted not in a refusal to know, but in a history of not being heard?

Across rural, working-class, and marginalized communities, there's a long record of programs, policies, and reforms—often designed by professionals and launched with confidence—that arrived uninvited and left resentment in their wake. These were not abstract debates about truth or data. They were lived experiences of being overruled, bypassed, or told what was good for you by someone who never asked what you needed.

This didn't just happen in Washington. It happened on the ground, in counties, watersheds, school districts, tribal lands, farming cooperatives, and urban neighborhoods. And when you've been treated that way long enough, you start to distrust the entire system that produces these so-called solutions. That's the soil MAGA grew in.

This pattern isn't new. One of the most durable lessons from applied anthropology is that development efforts—whether abroad or at home—fail most often because they don't listen. They assume. They impose. They evaluate themselves on their own terms. And when people don't comply, the system blames them.

Consider the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone and the Northern Rockies. For biologists, it was a landmark achievement. But for many ranchers, it was a federal imposition—made without consultation, disruptive to their livelihoods, symbolic of a deeper loss of control. Cooperation eroded. Poaching rose. The wolves were real, but they became proxies for something else: decisions made by others in the name of a common good that didn't feel common at all.

You see the same dynamic in coastal fisheries, where conservation zones were drawn without input from local fishers, many of whom carried generations of knowledge about tides, migration patterns, and sustainability. They were treated not as stewards, but as risks to be managed. Resistance followed.

In the Midwest, conservation programs promote buffer zones and no-till practices. But many of them are designed without regard for tenancy patterns, equipment costs, or crop insurance structures. To many farmers, they read as prescriptions from people who've never been on a tractor. Participation is low not because the goals are wrong, but because the process is. Again, no one asked.

In cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, tree-planting campaigns and green infrastructure projects often arrive in neighborhoods that have faced decades of neglect. But residents quickly recognize that these programs aren't always for them—they're signals to real estate developers and planning commissions. Beautification isn't benign when it's followed by eviction notices.

These efforts may look different on paper, but they follow the same template: solutions designed in absentia, community knowledge devalued, local adaptations dismissed as noncompliance. When people deviate, it's called a problem. When programs fail, the blame rarely travels up.

And there's a deeper issue at work. It's not just a failure to listen—it's a refusal to recognize other forms of knowledge. What gets counted as expertise is shaped by institutions that credential, formalize, and standardize. A logger's seasonal sense of snowfall and thaw, a mother's knowledge of neighborhood safety, a farmworker's observations of soil change—none of these pass as "data." But that doesn't make them wrong. It makes them inconvenient.

This isn't just a design flaw. It serves power. When only formal expertise is valid, institutions get to define the problem and its solution. Those on the receiving end are not collaborators. They're implementation targets.

The consequences are everywhere now: widespread institutional distrust, a rejection of science and public health, school boards turned into battlegrounds, government viewed not just with skepticism but contempt. Trump tapped into that. He didn't invent it—he exploited it. The rage that animates MAGA isn't just cultural. It's rooted in long histories of exclusion from decision-making, especially when the decisions were made in the name of progress.

And yet, there are other ways to work. In the 1990s, I was one of the principal investigators for a research project that came to be known as the Funds of Knowledge approach [1]. It began with a simple question: What if, instead of seeing working-class, immigrant, and minority families as lacking what schools need, we asked what they already know?

What we found wasn't deficit. It was abundance. Through labor, migration, language, caregiving, and survival, these families had developed deep practical knowledge that schools had failed to recognize. We brought teachers into homes—not to assess, but to learn. One brought a student's father, an auto mechanic, into the classroom to show how compression ratios and conversions work. The math lesson came alive. The family's knowledge wasn't a supplement. It became the curriculum.

This wasn't charity. It was pedagogy rooted in respect. It changed how teachers saw their students. And it changed how families saw the school—not as a distant authority, but as something they had a stake in.

That kind of work isn't limited to education. It can apply anywhere. Conservation, health, infrastructure, climate adaptation—every field that touches people's lives needs to ask not just what we want to accomplish, but who needs to be part of the conversation from the beginning.

Because when people are excluded, they don't forget. And when someone finally comes along who says, "They've lied to you, ignored you, used you," that story lands. Even when it's false, it lands.

This is the part many progressives still miss. You can't counter authoritarian populism with fact sheets and better branding. You can't fix the trust gap with another rollout. You have to build relationships, redistribute authority, and start by acknowledging the ways institutions have failed—not just materially, but relationally.

Democracy is not sustained by procedures. It lives or dies by whether people believe the system sees them, values them, listens to them. If they don't believe that, they will turn elsewhere. And they have.

We're not going to repair the damage until we stop treating listening as symbolic and start treating it as foundational. Otherwise, we'll keep handing the microphone to those who claim to speak for the unheard, even when all they offer is grievance.

Endnotes

[1] Greenberg, James B., Luis C. Moll, and Carlos G. Vélez-Ibáñez. "Community Knowledge and Classroom Practice: Bridging Funds of Knowledge with Pedagogy." In Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms, edited by Norma González, Luis C. Moll, and Cathy Amanti, 115–132. New York: Routledge, 2005.
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