Diminished power of critical thinking afflicts nation

President Trump's rise to power and his astonishing, un-American prejudices are not the fault of Academic America's permissiveness with respect to definitions of truth, as Kurt Andersen has argued in his widely discussed September Atlantic Monthly essay. Nor, unfortunately, can Trump's prejudices be characterized as an exotic aberration. His racist views are shared by 10 percent to 20 percent of Americans, most of whom are more discreet in airing their views in public.

Trump's rise came about from the confluence of at least three major influences: the persistence of racism as a fourth phase of the American Civil War; the fascination of the American public with commercial TV and associated merchandising, and third, the corruption of the presidential selection process.

Historians have only lately more accurately traced the importance of racism and slavery in early America. The Civil War was about slavery, not independence. The crushing defeat of post-Civil War Reconstruction allowed the revival of racism. The replacement of Reconstruction by the Jim Crow system, including the creation of a portrait of a mellow, antebellum South, became the foundation for maintenance of an intense racism for another century throughout a broad swath of America.

[Critical thinking takes a holiday]

President Lyndon Johnson, though a Southerner, saw the evil in the system and as a part of his war against poverty he defeated Jim Crow through the Civil Rights Acts, or so he thought. Passing the acts did not automatically end hostility to people of color. It ended the most obvious forms of discrimination and took it out of the mind of well-meaning whites. The persistence of a resentful racism among those who opposed Johnson's 1964 Civil Rights Acts, and their heirs, can be described as the fourth stage of the Civil War, creating a constituency that Trump, maybe aware of Nixon's "Southern Strategy," spotted and successfully courted.

Trump's "good people on both sides" response to the Charlottesville, Virginia Nazi, racist march affirms, as finally as could reasonably be required, that Trump sympathizes with that suppressed voice in America that believes that blacks are inferior and unfairly privileged.

As Trump continues from his racist anti-Obama "birther movement" to election and service as president, a chorus of writers have rushed to explain how America got here, including the natural consequences of New Age Democrats promoting permissiveness with truth.

Which brings us to the charge that Trump's election was the fault of academic emphasis on the relativity of truth. Give me a break. The rise of marketing as the dominant form of communication and salesmanship as the ultimate skill have been far more influential throughout the United States. Conservative governments, backing away from "regulation" (tut — such a terrible word), have been giving freedom to a full range of deceits in the unceasing drive to take real choices away from consumers of both goods and political ideas. Donald Trump, a master of marketing but wildly incompetent as the manager of a national administration and its policies, just took a ride on the marketing blitz.

Good science teaches that absolutes are rare and subject to challenge – to a point. The topic is "critical thinking" and there is darn little of it in most K-12 education. Religion can derail a critical thought through its appeal to the supernatural.

[Trump runs on his fantasy of himself — and his ability to sell the fantasy]

So Trump, an established veteran in this marketing world with a huge advantage in experience in shaving the truth and getting away with it, goes for the nomination.

Both the Democratic and Republican routes to nomination are antiquated relics — making some of us long for the days when party bosses met in cigar-smoke-filled rooms to consider who would do a good job. They knew the candidates personally and not through the sieve of national marketing. No, we needn't go back to that, but let's have some critical thinking about qualification, throw out the dummies early and let local organizations — be they neighborhood convocations, Rotary assemblies or congregations — using academic standards of debate, give us a better knowledge of candidates. Sniping by TV personalities did not tell us where candidates stood on complex issues.

Whatever the inevitability of Trump's rise, as explained by large social developments, we the people of the United States need to remove him from office at the earliest opportunity.

John Havelock is a former Alaska attorney general, White House Fellow and professor of justice at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

The views expressed here are the writer's and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary@alaskadispatch.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@alaskadispatch.com.