John Rachal's Blog

As of yesterday, seventeen days since Russia invaded Ukraine, Putin’s war had moved into western Ukraine, increasingly beginning to threaten the capital. Putin’s military has proved to be less capable than expected, and Ukraine’s more so. But size and weaponry matter, and artillery is now targeting civilian targets—against all conventions and making the Russian decision-makers war criminals. Several hospitals have been attacked, and Putin is attempting to strangle all the larger cities and to block western aid from getting in. Mariupol has no electricity, and food and water are at a point of dire scarcity.

It is clear that NATO will neither put boots on Ukrainian ground or planes in its sky or strike Russian targets inside Ukraine from bases within NATO countries. I understand it—World War III we are told—but I hate it. So many people will have to die because of this man. He will ravage the cities, decimate the infrastructure, and kill tens of thousands, including so many in his own army. Zelenskyy will neither leave nor yield, and I fear he will die in a bunker under artillery fire, or be arrested and sent to the Gulag. But the Ukrainian Resistance will fight on, and Russia’s installation of a puppet regime in Ukraine will not be stable, especially as an extended occupation by Russia increasingly becomes too costly and Russian support for the war ebbs. As the sanctions take hold, as western businesses abandon Russia, as modern conveniences Russians have accustomed themselves to crumble, as the last vestiges of a free press are extinguished, as unemployment and costs for everything rise, as Russian boys come home in body bags, as Russians realize the propaganda they hear is all a lie, as they weary of a war most of them probably never supported in the first place, my hope is that Biden will say, Do you want this to end? Do you want sanctions lifted and your boys brought home? Then let us examine, at a site of our choosing, the body of Vladimir Putin; or, if you prefer, send him to The Hague to stand trial for war crimes. We prefer the latter—but will accept the former.

When I was in the sixth grade, there was an undersized, poorly dressed, somewhat unkempt kid named Robert Alexander. I remember that he looked vaguely Hispanic, with dark eyes and unruly dark hair. He had very large, protruding front teeth; he had not one friend that I knew of. He slept a lot on his crossed arms at his end-of-the-row desk, which, to my surprise, the teacher let him do. It’s possible that Miss Burks, probably in her fifties, had given up on him. Alternatively, her knowledge of him may have been much deeper than ours and she may have felt that decency entitled him to sleep. He was clearly from the other side of the tracks.

One day another kid in the class, Craig Burton—the biggest kid, and a bit of bully—said something mean to Robert, but Robert did not respond. My memory may be faulty here; it may have been that the big kid generally treated Robert with contempt. But in any event, a third kid in the class took Robert’s side, and the third kid and the big kid determined to settle things at recess. I remember that part well: right around the pitcher’s mound (which really was not a mound), after possibly a few moments of mutual staring, the third kid landed a fist to the jaw of the big kid, which sent him crying from the field and ultimately to the principal’s office. For some reason the teacher did not send the third kid to the principal, but made him sit by her on the low wall overlooking the playground in the shade of a large oak.

Nuclear weapons were not even a threat, of course. But was the third kid wrong?

Yet another Joe Biden crime in the long rap sheet compiled by Republican hypocrites: Pledging to appoint a black woman to the Supreme Court if he gets a pick. Now he has one, after Justice Breyer announced his retirement. We currently have a 6-3 conservative-to-liberal Court, and with Breyer being on the liberal wing, the political alignment of the Court will not change with Biden’s choice. If it were not for the Electoral College, which gave us Presidents Bush Jr. and Trump instead of actual vote winners Gore and H. Clinton, the Court would have a radically different composition, with six moderate-to-liberal justices and three conservatives, or even eight-to-one if President Gore had won a second term (Alito and Roberts were appointed in late 2005, in Bush’s second term). If the person with the most votes had won—in other words if democracy had prevailed in those elections—there would quite possibly be no Roberts or Alito, and definitely no Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, or Barrett on the Court. Three of those five, and possibly all five, would be Gore and Clinton appointees, coupled with Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer, also Democrat-appointed justices. Thus six-to-three or even eight-to-one moderate or liberal, not six-to-three conservative. Maybe one of them might even have received hizzerher law degree from somewhere other than Harvard or Yale.*

 There has never been a black woman even nominated to the Supreme Court. So in the primaries, Biden pledged in the racially diverse state of South Carolina to appoint a black woman. There are 21.7 million black women in America. Yes, it was pandering, of course, but it was also principle: Isn’t it time to have just one black woman among the other 115 justices in the Court’s history? But Biden’s “crime” was making a pledge to do it. USA Today quotes four gravely offended Republicans (two of whom will be running for president in 2024 if Trump passes): Republican Nikki Haley said that Biden should choose someone “without a race/gender litmus test.” Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker lamented the pledge as “affirmative racial discrimination” and “sort of a quota.” Senator Ted Cruz of Texas called the pledge “offensive,” while Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey moralized that “the president should pick the person most qualified for the job, irrelevant of race or gender.” Hmmm. Did George H. W. Bush do that when he picked deeply conservative black judge Clarence Thomas to replace liberal and first black on the Court Thurgood Marshall? Don’t think so.

How noble that Republican chorus. How principled. How convenient. Now, when someone other than a white male is eligible, let us be color blind and gender blind. Of those 115 justices the Court has had, 108, or 94%, have been white men. Were we color blind and gender blind for any of those until Thurgood Marshall and Sandra Day O’Connor? For the great majority of those 115, was a stated pledge even necessary, even considered? Would McKinley or Taft or Wilson have needed to say “I pledge to you that if elected, I will appoint a white male to the Supreme Court”? Of course not. That pledge was assumed: “I, as president, will nominate a white male”—obviously. The racial discrimination Wicker bemoans now was a self-evident and necessary virtue when white males were the only choice. Our racial divide was so wide that, at least until Thurgood Marshall, no president would even consider someone other than a white male. Would Haley, Wicker, Cruz, Toomey and their Republican confederates have protested that? No, they would have been fine with the assumed, unstated pledge then since of course it would be a white male. That pledge was acceptable because it did not need to be stated; Biden’s was “offensive” because he made clear that his choice would be someone whose identity would not match the previous 108—or even the other seven. 

Note: The black or female seven: Marshall, Thomas (black males); O’Connor, Ginsburg, Kagan, Barrett (white females); Sotomayor (Hispanic female).

*2024: The current Court is comprised of four members receiving their law degrees from Yale, four from Harvard, and one from lowly Notre Dame. Presumably no one from a southern, midwestern, southwestern, or west coast university is qualified. The Court is also comprised of one Jew (Kagan), two Protestants (Jackson and Gorsuch, who was raised Catholic), and six Catholics (22% of the American population).

Dear Mr. Madison,

My name’s John, and I’m writing from the year 2021. I really don’t know how you’re going to get this letter, but I hope you will. I’m hoping the country you helped found will figure out some sort of time travel machine, and you will get this letter and go back and revise the Constitution you wrote for the country—and try not to get too mad that the forty-fifth president we had, by far the worst one ever, said that your friend Tom Jefferson wrote the Constitution. You thought the king of England was bad? This fellow, besides being as ignorant as a housefly, makes George III look like the soul of justice and righteousness. But I’ve got a lot to tell you, and I want it to focus on the Constitution, so I’ll forgo almost all the history that has transpired since your time.

In those Federalist Papers you wrote with Hamilton and Jay, there was a lot of concern about “faction” and the contending forces that inevitably arise in human affairs, especially in the area of governing, where power is the supreme, well, not “supreme good” exactly, since the supreme good would be justice, but the supreme end sought by those in the political arena.  Boy, were you right about “factions.” Until the last few years, our differences were always more or less on public display, but we were at least modestly civil to one another. That changed with this new president back in 2016, although others might reasonably argue that it started eight years earlier when we elected the first black man as president, who was loathed by many for having the audacity to get elected and sit in the Oval Office. Yes, we have come a long way since the day that a man whose ancestor could have been one of your slaves could become president.

But maybe the best thing about your Constitution was that it provided for a mechanism to make amendments, so not only can folks other than white, male landholders vote, but they can run for president. Had it not been for one of the flaws in your Constitution, we would have had a woman president right after a black one. That probably shocks you, even as well-read and enlightened as you are. It took a while, but the country finally decided that its voters and its leaders did not have to all be of one race and one sex. I don’t mean to sound like I’m chastising exactly, but on this point, yes, I am: It’s a grave blind spot, a sin and a crime almost without peer, that you were unwilling to reject slavery, to see that it was morally repugnant, so much so that it caused the country to almost be torn apart in a civil war a mere seventy-two years after your Constitution. But like I said, it’s not my purpose to be holier-than-thou and chastise—you wrote a great thing, even though it was flawed; and besides, I hate to think of what people 234 years after me will say about how blind I was to various evils of my own day.

Anyway, here are some problems I see with the Constitution that have not been fixed by amendments, and I’d like you to consider fixing them yourself, presuming we get that time-traveling machine invented. I’ll list them more or less in my order of priority.

The Electoral College. I understand that back in your time travel was slow and there were all sorts of problems collecting votes, so you needed electors representing the wishes of the people to get together and render a judgment as to who won. No need for that anymore. In fact, it’s not just a matter of no need, since we now have communications systems that count votes almost immediately. The real problem is that the Electoral College is anti-democratic; it allows the loser to win. And that has happened five times since you were president. We have had forty-five men as president (one of whom served two non-consecutive terms, so we now call our current president number “46”), and your Electoral College gave five of them the presidency even though another candidate got more votes. That’s 11% of the time that the loser won. Is that really what you wanted? Here we have the very definition of democracy being violated. It even happens that just one county can determine a majority in one state, and then that state’s electoral votes all go to one candidate, and that state might make the difference in the Electoral College outcome, all because of one county out of well over 3000 in the country. The Electoral College also means, not incidentally, that conservative votes in liberal states and liberal votes in conservative states are literally meaningless, at least as far as influencing the outcome. Shouldn’t every vote count? I did the arithmetic, and it would now be technically possible for one candidate to win as little as 22% of the popular vote, and the other candidate 78%, and the Electoral College still could, mathematically, give the presidency to the one with 22%. Surely you didn’t mean for that to be even remotely possible. There are several ways to fix this—I’ve mentioned my own elsewhere—if only there were the will to do so.

Gerrymandering. When you designed the House of Representatives, which gave each state representation based on its population, you didn’t say much about how the districts in the state were to be drawn up. So what has happened is that usually the faction that dominates a state’s legislature draws them up so that it minimizes the impact of the other faction and maximizes their own. The population of North Carolina, for example, has very roughly the same number of total voters in each faction, meaning it’s a “purple” state. But the state legislature drew up the districts so that of its thirteen districts prior to the 2020 census, only three are drawn to favor the minority faction in the state legislature, meaning only three of that faction will likely be elected to the House of Representatives but ten of the other faction will likely be elected. Based on the state’s voters, it should be closer to six and seven. Even during your lifetime, some wit said that Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry had approved a district drawn up in his state that looked like a salamander, so the wit gave it a name, and that’s what we call it now: gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows totally partisan state legislative bodies to divide congressional districts in ways that will almost insure that most districts will go to one faction or the other, often totally misrepresenting the wishes of a state’s citizenry. One of our conservative political writers, George Will, has said that 90% of congressional districts are “safe” for one of the two main factions because of gerrymandering. This one could easily be fixed by having districts drawn by bipartisan committees or even based on, say, latitude or longitude.

The Senate itself. I understand that you were trying to balance the House of Representatives, with its multiple representatives based on population, with another chamber that would not be based on population, one that might even be, well, more sedate and less prone to the bickering in the House. So what I’m about to say approaches sacrilege, but there is something seriously flawed when the 39 million people in liberal California and the 29 million in conservative Texas each get only two senators, while the 600 thousand of Wyoming also get two. (Yes, the country now goes all the way to the west coast of the continent, with now fifty states, most of which you have never heard of.) Do you approve of the idea that one state, with less than two percent of the population of another state, gets to have the same number of senators? Doesn’t that give smaller states an inordinate amount of power? This probably can’t be fixed without eliminating the Senate, an admittedly draconian solution; and I know that you were trying to give fair representation in congress to small states. But your cure seems worse than the disease—the small states are disproportionately powerful.

Unlimited terms of Representatives and Senators. Yes, term limits would diminish the importance of experience, but I’ll take that risk to try to at least reduce (though hardly eliminate) the influence of the rivers of money flowing into Congress. Here is just one example: In my own faction there is a senator who owns a coal company that has made him over four million dollars, and he shovels in more money from what we call the fossil fuel industry than anyone else in congress. Naturally, to keep that money flowing, he votes to protect those sources of fuel, even though there are safer sources. Those fossil fuels are causing our climate to change in dangerous ways since your day. Naturally he, like almost all the other congressmen and congresswomen (Yes! Women in congress!), often votes not for the common good but to keep those groups happy so they will continue to buy his influence for their benefit in congress. If we had term limits (and by way of amendment we now do for our presidents), he and others might actually vote their consciences rather than pander to groups who purchase congressional power to serve those groups’ corporate interests. In your day, what I’m calling “corporate interests” were not nearly the malignant influence on government that they are today. As wise and as prescient as you were in 1787, you would be astonished at the influence they buy and the accompanying power they wield in my century.

The filibuster. Actually there is no filibuster anymore—only the threat of one. You don’t actually have to go to the well of the Senate to talk to death a bill you don’t like; you only have to say to the other faction that’s what you’ll do, and a bill dies unless 60 senators approve it. Actually, you are not responsible for this one; it’s not in your Constitution. It’s one of the rules that subsequent congresses came up with. But it needs to go. Isn’t 51 a majority? Then let the majority rule. At the very least, require a bill’s opponents to actually filibuster it, and reduce the number to block it from 60 to 55.

Unlimited terms of Supreme Court Justices. I suggest eighteen-year terms, with one justice rolling off every two years. This means every president gets at least one pick, probably two, and some of the grandstanding in the hearings process would diminish, and maybe there could even be a return to more bipartisan voting on nominees. Each nominee must be voted on within three months—no violating the “advise and consent” rule by stalling a nominee until the next president (as has happened). If a justice dies or retires from office, that president gets an extra pick to fill out the decedent’s or retiree’s term.

No Senate or House voting representation for the District of Columbia. This of course presumes the Senate itself is permanent in its two-senators-per-state formulation (which I know it is). D.C. currently has a non-voting “delegate” in the House, but has no representation at all in the Senate, despite having a larger population than one of our states, Wyoming. Part of what so angered the colonists of your day was the idea that they were being taxed but they had no representation in British government: The cry of your day was “no taxation without representation.” Almost 700,000 American citizens live in Washington, D. C., but they have no national-level voting representation at all. Would those in the faction of wealth—who would never agree to the District having Senate representation since its voters would tend to vote for the faction of modest means—be willing to forgo federal taxes from the people of that area since they have no national voting representation? No, of course not. But even if the answer to that were yes, the fair thing would be to have both, not neither: Senate and House voting representation, and federal taxes due.

I hope these cavils do not offend you. You wrote what is almost certainly the greatest political document of all time. Even the Magna Carta blushes by comparison. Excluding the extra-Constitutional filibuster rule, what I have listed are all structural flaws, of course, some being almost inevitable in such a lengthy and complex document. As I said above, the greatest feature of your magnum opus is its design allowing its flaws (most importantly, denying suffrage to all women and most men and recognizing and allowing slavery) to be corrected through amendments.

But as I write today, the real problem with our current democracy is a kind of moral one: the fracturing of our former, relative American solidarity and tranquility, at least in the sense of seeing each other as legitimate Americans, whatever our differences. This seemingly unbridgeable factionalism, this tribalism, this house divided against itself as our sixteenth president said of our civil war, is due largely to one man, the forty-fifth president—whose presidency, I must emphasize, was not the will of the majority of voters. But this man Trump—a man for whom you would in your day have used the word “tyrant”—had the enormous assistance of twenty-first century technological platforms. These technologies have allowed hatred and ignorance and lies to enter the bloodstream of the American body politic, polluting it, and poisoning it. Yet even that is too simple; power hungering, fear mongering, vote-buying have always been there, and they contribute greatly to the fissures in our democracy.

But until Trump, presidential candidates from both parties have fallen within the elastic boundaries of normal political bombast and prevarication. None has been a criminal megalomaniac—none a “tyrant.” Until Trump, no president tried to steal an election after the votes were counted and then, failing to do so, blamed the true winning faction of stealing it; until Trump, we did not have state legislatures trying to pass laws allowing their state’s legislature to simply throw out their voters’ choice and impose their own choice; until Trump, ignorance and credulity did not seem quite so dangerous; until Trump, only a tiny few worried about authoritarian drift. Trumpism is a serpent’s poison in our body politic, and I am by no means certain that it is a disease the nation can long endure. 

Your humble and obedient servant,

John Rachal

So what are we witnessing? A period of unusual turmoil and hatred, which will eventually—but not too eventually—re-balance into some semblance of normalcy? Or are we seeing a true American decline, a crumbling modern Roman empire, a retreat from democracy, headed for the exit as the world’s brightest beacon of light? For the first time in my life I am truly fearful for my country. The Republicans see themselves as uber-patriots, some even donning the mantle of 1776, and fair as I might try to be to them, the only conclusion possible is that with too few exceptions Republicans in Washington and state capitals see power as the only virtue. Anyone with a D after hizzerher name is not only suspicious but dangerous and thus must be contained, the threat eliminated. As their own numbers are threatened, they seek to diminish the numbers of their opposition through voter suppression and gerrymandering. Not one, not one, not one—much less ten—will vote for any kind of voter reform bill. After all, a national voter reform bill would be the very thing to nullify those nearly 400 proposed voter suppression laws their confederates in state capitals are trying with considerable success to pass.

Manchin’s “compromise”? Dead on arrival, according to Mitch McConnell. Not one Republican will support it. End the filibuster so congress can actually accomplish something with a simple majority vote? Again, not one.  For McConnell—evil in a blue suit—power is all that matters, and obstructing and nullifying democracy are the means to that one end. For him, voter suppression laws are good; gerrymandering is good; taxing Washington D.C. citizens but denying them senate voting representation is good; an Electoral College which benefits small, rural and typically Republican states (and five times has given the presidency to the person with fewer votes) is good. Moreover, he’s said if a Supreme Court vacancy came up in Biden’s last year, he would hold up Biden’s nomination just as he did Obama’s if the GOP takes back the senate, and just as he infamously did not do when Trump got a third crack at the SC in his last year. Apparently some in the GOP are, as a natural reflex, saying Biden crumbled against Putin (though that may be harder in view of Putin’s own remarks about Biden after the summit), while not a peep was heard from them during and after four years of Trump licking Putin’s boots. For the modern Republican party, hypocrisy—never mind what we said or did yesterday—and lies—enormous, democracy-destroying lies—are out of the shadows now; they are no longer badges of shame.

Obviously the country and world are magnitudes better off under Biden than they would have been with four more years of Trump’s corruption and embrace of autocrats and autocracy. But the country, fed by the GOP’s proto-fascist wing, Fox News, the internet, QAnon, et al., still reels from a Trumpist plague, worse than the coronavirus. And there is no effective vaccine for this plague. January 6 was not, we are told, an insurrection or riot. One Arizona congressman informs us that police officers, “lying in wait,” “execute[d]” a citizen making her patriotic sentiments known. A Georgia congressman says if it had not been known as the January 6 insurrection, we would have thought that instead of a frenzied mob who violently overwhelmed police, broke windows to enter the Capitol, and attempted to break down doors as they searched for Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi with righteous murder on their minds, we were actually witnessing not terrorists or insurrectionists or rioters but merely tourists peacefully wandering the halls, marveling in wonder at the glory of constitutional government. He is telling us not to believe our own eyes. There is a picture of this very same elected leader helping hold up a piece of furniture to block those gentle tourists from battering down the door and possibly putting his miserable life in danger.

And now we are told that the whole insurrection was instigated by the FBI. Meanwhile another member of congress tells us that the fires out west were caused by Jewish space lasers, and that the requirement of wearing masks is the equivalent of Jews having to wear the Star of David on their outer clothes in Nazi Germany. Along with the over 60% of Republicans in the country who still believe the 2020 election was “stolen,” how many Americans actually believe the mind-exploding claim that powerful Democrats run an underground child sex-trafficking ring and literally drink their blood? Are those Republicans’ paranoia and gullibility that profound?

Even the bubonic plague of the 14^th century, which killed between a fourth and a third of Europe, eventually, after a dozen or so years, receded. This Trump Plague—we must hope—will as well. But how much damage will it do to democracy in the meantime?

Abstract

Americans have a choice on the near horizon, and truth—and democracy—are at the center of that choice. We live in convulsive times, as did our adult education predecessors of a century ago. Yet our own turbulent day, abetted by social and other media, is even more tempest-tossed, more tribalized, more dependent on citizens’ capacity for critical assessment of the written and spoken words of anyone with a keyboard or megaphone, including both those who claim to lead us and those who wish to recruit us to their perceptions and judgments. Our adult education ancestors of the 1920s and 30s, having endured a World War, encountered reactionary elements at home, witnessed a communist revolution in Russia, watched the rise of fascism in Italy, and (for those attuned) gaped at the malignancy spreading in Germany, argued for education, and specifically adult education, as a necessary antidote to those kinds of anti-democratic forces. That torch has been handed down to us.

In his successful courtroom defense of the British soldiers who killed five American colonists in what was soon called the Boston Massacre, John Adams observed: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence” (p. 337). The Adams rule seems even more acute today as social media, slanted news organizations, and traffickers in “alternative facts” clamor for adherents, often with prevarication, mendacity, and credulity as their primary modus operandi. Dark corners of the internet, both foreign and domestic, spread lies and bizarre and cultish QAnon conspiracy fantasies on a scale unavailable to the dissemblers of Adams’ day.

As of this writing, one-third of Americans believe that the current president was not legitimately elected, and nearly three-quarters of those claim that their belief is based on “solid evidence” rather than suspicion (CNN/SRSS poll, 2021). For that huge swath of Americans, the stubborn fact that over 60 court cases found no evidence of widespread voter fraud is not stubborn enough. For those Americans, their wishes, inclinations, and the dictates of their passions rule. “I wish it so; it must be so; therefore it is so” can never serve as our standard of truth. Social justice is built upon the twin bedrock principles of fairness and truth. Though they are intertwined, and both must constantly be defended, my focus here, prompted by recent events, is on truth. Truth is under assault, initiated or abetted by people in elected positions of power, and adult educators have a role to play in its defense.

Now would not be the first time that leaders in adult education saw a significant component of their role to be advocates of adult education as a bulwark against autocracy and the disinformation and “alternative facts” which give it traction. If disinformation and “alternative facts” are the fuel of autocracy, the obverse is that truth is the fuel of democracy. “The undereducated,” as Rachal (2015) notes in his discussion of Eduard Lindeman’s views,  “could too easily be swayed by demagogues, but a society that valued adult education was less likely to succumb to the hate-mongering and fear-mongering that were, and always have been, demagogues’ stock-in-trade” (p. 2). Democratic themes abound in Lindeman’s work, and he feared the potential threat of Italian fascism to the United States (1927). The word democracy also found voice in others, reverberating through articles and speeches of the fledgling American Association for Adult Education (AAAE). Some of these themes are possibly descended from John Dewey’s iconic Democracy and Education (1916), published when he was at Columbia (1905-1930) and only eight years before Lindeman began teaching at the New York School of Social Work in 1924.

 Aside from Lindeman, other early though lesser-known advocates of the interrelationship of adult education and democracy include Alexander Meiklejohn, who addressed the 1924 American Library Association (ALA), just as it was forming an alliance with what would become the AAAE in 1926 with the financial support of the Carnegie Foundation. In stark terms, he declared: “Democracy is education. . . . In so far as we can educate the people, in so far as we can bring people to an understanding of themselves and of their world, we can have a democracy. In so far as we cannot do that we have got to have control by the few” (p. 183). J. T. Jennings, speaking on “Adult Education” at the 1925 ALA Conference, noted that “the success of a democracy depends upon an educated and intelligent citizenship.” John Finley, co-editor of The New York Times, opined in the two-year old Journal of Adult Education (forerunner to Adult Education Quarterly) that “adult education today—insurance through life against intellectual unemployment—is the hope of a continuing democracy” (1931).  AAAE President James Russell (1931) observed that “Democracy can last on just one condition: getting everybody educated” (quoted by Cartwright, 1931, p. 363). The very first issue of the Journal of Adult Education (1929) contained articles on the education-democracy theme by Everett Dean Martin (“Liberating Liberty”) and Glenn Frank (“On the Firing Line of Democracy”). As adult education began to coordinate and centralize in the 1920s, Lindeman, Martin, and others saw it as integral to a defense of democracy.

So where do contemporary adult educators fit in this tradition? We have now been given an object lesson, one insisting that truth and democracy are sometimes fragile. That fragility has been on display for several years, reaching its apogee on January 6^th. We have politicians, beginning with the former president, who peddle lies as if they were facts, and in doing so, they corrupt truth and rend democracy.  Facts are foundational to truth, and truth is foundational to democracy (there may be other, more transcendental, more revelatory avenues to truth, but I leave them to theologians and metaphysicians). Writing in 1926 about “crowd thinking” and conspiracy-mongering in a fine chapter on “the educational value of doubt,” Everett Dean Martin decries the contemporary yet ageless problem that “acquaintance with facts does not seem to be necessary for the formation of opinion. I can easily assert alleged facts on my own authority; it hurts my pride when I am asked for evidence” (p. 98). Almost a century later, Martin’s concern rings even more true. After January 6^th no imagination is required to see where such alleged facts and reality-free opinion can lead.

If facts are foundational to truth, let us start with facts, those stubborn things that, at their most elemental, constitute data bits of reality derived from our own or from others’ sensory experience. Mary arose at six a.m., Bill was born in the United States, a new president won by a specific margin in the state of Georgia; these are all facts, each one derived from observed data. We can interpret them differently (Lincoln was the best president; no, FDR was), we can be misinformed about them (pine is harder than oak), and most dangerously, we can invent them so that others will believe them, as in the oxymoron “alternative facts.” Alternative facts, i.e., false facts—better termed lies—are the nurseries of autocracies. We as educators have a responsibility to combat them.

When I taught freshman English long ago, I was expected to expose my charges to the fundamentals of grammar and punctuation so that they might avoid technical problems as they sought to narrate, explicate, compare, or persuade, not only in the weekly short essays they submitted to me, but also in the prose of their later lives. But I was also, I believed, obligated to help make their writing more convincing, more explicit, and—hope springs eternal—even more interesting. Many times a forlorn student, dissatisfied with a grade, would acknowledge the technical errors, but would offer the defense that more credit should be given to the content of her essay because it was her opinion, on the apparent assumption that one’s opinion lies beyond the pale of criticism, since any critique is itself mere opinion. I don’t believe that I ever actually made the insufferable observation that informed opinion is better and more credible than uninformed opinion. But I did insist that opinion, to be based in reality and to be persuasive, needs facts, examples, and specifics. These are the elements, the atomic particles, of truth. As I came to teach graduate adult education students, aside from technical suggestions about their writing, the most common observation that I made concerned the need for those same three things—facts, examples, and specifics. Evidence mattered. In the over 30 years I have reviewed manuscripts for three journals, the same rule applies: No evidence? Case dismissed. Probably every educator of adults seeks this emphasis on supportive fact and detail in her students’ writing and speech. But in an age of pandemic levels of untruth, that emphasis should be intentional and central in our teaching.

John Kozy, chair of the Philosophy Department at my undergraduate alma mater, was the best professor I ever had. His classes were pure Socratic method, alive with his probing questions about, for example, The Republic, followed by our callow yet earnest answers. Particularly memorable was his desire that in writing multiple papers over the term, we should never go to the library in search of secondary sources. Unthinkable as that might seem for graduate students, learner interaction with the primary sources, unfiltered by others, was far more important to him. He wanted us to critically think through the subject matter for ourselves, responding one-on-one to the primary sources, rather than become youthful scholars who could recite Smith and Jones’s gloss on The Republic, only to forget it shortly after the course. While knowing Smith and Jones might be useful, he preferred that we arrived at our own conclusions unencumbered and uninfluenced by secondary sources. He meant for us to think. Possibly some variant of that, for certain assignments, might be possible for graduate students, but equally so for adult educators working with other clienteles, whether in HRD or adult basic and secondary education. Where discussion, dialogue, and debate are appropriate, clarity of thesis supported by factual evidence in search of truth should be our north star.

It is this kind of individual critical thinking, as opposed to the “herd opinion” (Martin, 1926, pp. 175, 196) that is so pernicious in our current tribalized culture, that I believe is at the heart of a liberal education. Surely a liberal education is not a collection of memorized quotations or a listing of books read or the number of certifications and degrees acquired, valuable as those things might be. Rather it is a critical habit of mind, imbibed perhaps through a curiosity about perennial ideas, human achievement, and scientific inquiry—not merely a mental cataloguing of those ideas, achievements, and inquiries. It is a modest skepticism about the information we encounter, and a willingness to question not only the thinking of others, but, far more challenging, our own. To be clear, no branch of learning has a monopoly on a liberal education. Any field, from art to mathematics to zoology, participates in liberal education to the extent that critical thinking, rather than rote learning, is central to its pedagogy. Possibly this critical habit of mind is best taught through modeling it, as Professor Kozy did. But we can also ask our learners, “Is it rational?” “What are the supporting facts?” “What are the contradicting facts?” “Do you believe this because you want it to be true?” Or, alternatively, do you disbelieve it because you don’t want it to be true?” “Are you viewing it through the filter of an ideology?” “What is the source?” “Does that source seem credible?” “Are you willing to entertain the possibility that both the asserted perspective, and thus you, could be wrong?” These questions are embedded in a liberal education, but they have even more salience in the tumult of our present politics.

For some who are way too deep in an ideological rabbit hole, those questions will swirl overhead and never be considered at all; or if they are considered, they will be answered to satisfy their owners’ wishes, inclinations, and passions. Sometimes the truth is too complex and a preferred simplistic and mistaken explanation or agenda is offered in its place. Other times the truth is so simple that some conspiracy fantasy is conjured, stoking anger and providing the solidarity of special or secret knowledge among the believers. For the overly credulous, “truth” must align with their belief system; there is little room for nuance or outliers. Those “stubborn things”—facts—will not be faced. This is challenging for educators, especially, perhaps, for adult educators. Yet an underlying assumption of teaching, so obvious that we don’t even recognize it, is that what we teach, the knowledge we value, is accurate, is true. So inherently we value truth. Only one step remains, though a long one: to acknowledge that teaching something about discerning truth from falsehood is also part of our charge. Perhaps some not distant adult education conference might have a roundtable to explore other means of promoting a critical habit of mind in our learners, or it could be a theme issue of one of our journals.

None of this is an argument for politicizing our courses or classes. It is not a polemic about Left vs. Right. My theme, my purpose, argues for inculcating in our learners a natural skepticism and an instinctive resistance to the sly beckoning of herd opinion so as to distinguish truth from misinformation and disinformation. It is an argument for fostering truth-seeking in our learners, with the political and sociological chips falling where they may. Education has often been portrayed—as in some of the quotes above—as the best inoculation against both misinformation and its far more destructive cousin disinformation, and thus as a champion of democracy. So we have a role in this, especially now. It is not just the rational politicians, the Cronkite-esque journalists, the fact-checkers, the scientists, and our own adult education ancestors who advocate for reality. We too are guardians of truth.

References

Adams, J. 1992/1770. Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. J. Kaplan, general editor, sixteenth ed. Boston, New York, London: Little, Brown and Co.

CNN/SSRS Poll. January 9-14, 2021. Cited in Applebaum, A. January 20, 2021. Coexistence is the only option. TheAtlantic.com.

Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and education, an introduction to the philosophy of education. New York: Macmillan.

Finley, J. H. (1931). The Clearing House. Journal of Adult Education, 3, 334.

Jennings, J. T. (1925). Third general session: Adult Education. Bulletin of the American Library Association, 19, 121-123.

Lindeman, E. C. 1956/1927. Selected writings. In R. Gessner (Ed.), The democratic man: Selected writings of Eduard C. Lindeman. Boston: Beacon Press.

Martin, E. D. (1926). The meaning of a liberal education. New York: Norton.

Meiklejohn, A. (1924). The teaching of reading as a part of education. Bulletin of the American Library Association, 18, 182-184.

Rachal, J. R. (2015). Reflections on the Lindeman legacy. PAACE Journal of Lifelong Learning, 24, 1-6. First appeared in Italian, trans. E. Marescotti, as Foreword to E. Marescotti, Il significato dell’educazione degli adulti di Eduard C. Lindeman [The meaning of adult education by Eduard C. Lindeman], 2013. Rome: ANICIA.

Russell, J. (1931). Cited in M. Cartwright, American Association for Adult Education annual report of the director. Journal of Adult Education, 3, 362-385.

“Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt! Marc Antony’s soliloquy after addressing the crowd at Caesar’s funeral in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

His presidency began with Trump’s claims of “American carnage,” and it ends with Trump’s incitement of American carnage. His people—at least those who stormed the Capitol and their sympathizers—are cultists, idol worshippers, idolaters of their chosen Messiah, with Him as the closest thing they will have to a religion. They are slaves to their cult leader and slaves to an ideology, incapable of critical thought, dupes for fairy tales and fantasy. As cultists, they are only drawn to a man who is fundamentally aberrant. It is impossible to imagine their being drawn to a Bush or a Romney or a McCain; they may vote for such men if they vote at all, but only because of their hatred for the mainstream media, those they see as the undeserving elite, and the Other. Their interest in actual politics is negligible. Bush, Romney, and McCain are not aberrant; they fit within political norms and thus have none of the appeal necessary for a true worshipper. The stormers’ interest in politics is limited to their grievance, their fear of marginality, and their sense of loss, and thus they are easy targets for a demagogue who can stoke those grievances and fears with lies, norm-breaking, and self-proclaimed deification. Trumpism is, for them, long-awaited, and he their savior. They are called to a Great Awakening, making them hallowed participants in a quasi-religious movement, where violence, as with ISIS, is within the pale. They flatter themselves as 1776-style patriots, but they are its enemies, and their waving of American flags an abomination. There is no truth, however obvious, that they are capable of accepting if it conflicts with their ideology; and no fantasy, however absurd, that they are capable of rejecting if it fits that ideology. Trump’s appeal is to the long-languishing demons hidden in the dark recesses of the American soul. With him, they crawled and slithered to the surface, and January 6th was their greatest coming-out party to date. He called them forth, and they came.

It is worth noting that Roman Emperor Caligula, whom historian Mike Duncan called both psychotic and the worst of the Roman emperors, declared himself to be a god, not to mention committing many, many acts of murderous depravity. He also lasted only four years. Even if some might quibble about the worst Roman emperor, given the many candidates, it is difficult to imagine any present or future academic historians having any trouble at all coming to a quick consensus as to who the worst American president was—at least as of 2021. The Republican party has gone from the acknowledged best president—Lincoln—to the soon-to-be, indeed already, acknowledged worst president—Donald Trump.

One other historical parallel. Now, two days afterward, we are hearing preposterous claims by those on the neo-Nazi right that the rioters were really antifa dressed up as Trump supporters. How they say that with a straight face is almost amusing. In 1939, Germans dressed as Polish soldiers “attacked” border positions in Germany, and left numerous dead bodies of concentration camp inmates dressed as Polish soldiers, all to give a justification for the German invasion of Poland. So the world was supposed to believe that those actual Germans were “really” Polish invaders, just like those actual neo-Nazi Trumpers were “really” antifa.

Of the six senators voting even after the riot for the objections to the vote in Arizona, only one (Marshall of Kansas) was outside the South. Those infamous five include, unsurprisingly, Mississippi’s Cindi Hyde-Smith, an epic non-entity. So here are six senators, and a majority of House Republicans, quite content to publicly take a stand that opposes democracy. They want the will of the majority of voters in Arizona and five other states simply thrown out in favor of the guy they wish had won. Conservative George Will has it right: Senators Cruz and Hawley, both hoping to be Trump 2.0 in 2024, should be ostracized and ignored, permanently, and should have a scarlet S emblazoned on their coats: Seditionist. 

“O, that way madness lies; let me shun that; / No more of that.” King Lear

One-hundred-forty House Republicans, thirteen Senate Republicans, and roughly one-third of American voters have declared that their loyalty to Donald Trump and his assault on American democracy exceeds their loyalty to the country they claim to defend. There have been some sixty lawsuits challenging the election results, all of which have been frivolous, lacking a scintilla of evidence, and thus dismissed. What those court challenges have succeeded in, however, is ramping up the outrage and paranoia of the Gullibles and the radical far right. These lawmakers are set to challenge the electoral votes as they are counted on January 6, claiming that as many as six states that Trump lost have participated in or succumbed to electoral fraud by declaring, truthfully, that their voters elected Joe Biden. The objectors’ claims of voter fraud are evidence-free; they want Trump to have won, so therefore he did win. Never mind that some down-ballot Republicans did win in those states; were those wins also thus fraudulent? Never mind that not one single case of alleged fraud was brought before the judiciary in states Trump actually won. Fraud only could have occurred in states he lost.

If these 140 House Republicans, thirteen Senate Republicans, and Trump himself were to have their way, we as a nation would be a banana republic where elections are a charade for totalitarian rulers, a proto-fascist country where democracy is the fig leaf we use to cover our despotism. Mimicking other countries pretending to democracy and submission to majority will, we could call ourselves The Democratic Republic of the United States of America or The People’s Republic of the USA. The mantra of the GOP would be—indeed, may already be—“Power is all that matters; if it can be achieved by honest democratic means, wonderful. If it must be achieved by corrupt and unscrupulous means, then corrupt and unscrupulous means will be used—but always under the cover of ‘democracy.’” 

But those 140, and those 13, the so-called “sedition caucus,” should consider the consequences of their sedition. Will they slink to their dens, or will they be honored among the Trump adorers? What they prove by their very existence is how fragile our democracy is at this moment (even aside from its structural flaws, like the Electoral College, for starters), and possibly for an indeterminate future. At the very best, what can be said of them is that they have a high degree of moral flexibility. At worst, they are fascistic conspiracy fantasy-mongers. Ted Cruz should win two Academy Awards, one for hypocrisy and one for sycophancy. What happened to the Cruz who called Trump a “pathological liar” then, but leads the charge for overturning an American democratic and fair election now? Could even one of these people (who all, no doubt, purport to be good Christians) put a hand on the Bible in the privacy of their own home and say, “I truly believe Trump won”? Is it just their cowardly fear of balking Trump and alienating the trumpaholics, or is it that they’re hoping to emerge as Trump 2.0 themselves? Which ones aspire in 2024 to a strongman grab for power built on national resentment and chaos that they themselves, along with Trump, have inflicted on us? Given these options, let’s hope for mere cowardice.

In the fevered minds of Trump and the forever-Trumpers, his instantly infamous phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is conceived as an Alamo-like stand for electoral integrity and justice. Rational people, however, saw immediately that that way madness lies. The call was the perfect analogue and the domestic equivalent of the Ukraine call—a mobster intimidating someone he regards as an underling. My question, aside from the call’s legal implications, is whether Trump actually now believes his claims of fraud, and thus proves himself beyond any sliver of doubt to be a deluded psychopath who, if we were not days away from the end of his presidency, should be removed under the 25th amendment; or is he simply practicing his lifelong skills of lying and bullying, and thus, if time allowed, should be removed through an impeachment conviction? Or is it both? We know he’s always been a liar and a bully, but neither of those precludes the possibility that he is quite mad. I’ve listened to enough of the tape to conclude that he could actually believe his assertions of fraud. His grandiose claims that he couldn’t possibly have lost Georgia have a ring of delusional self-deception. His unquestionable hubris—or in today’s lingo, his psychopathology—and his possible madness are of such an enormous scale that maybe he believes his own fantasies, and is better suited to join the frantic screamers in yesteryear’s asylum at Bedlam than the convicted inmates of Attica.