The disturbing link between Trump, declining interest in the humanities and the death of American values
During April 2019 several pieces appeared on the HNN website dealing with the decreasing interest in the humanities, including history. One of them was entitled  âUS declining interest in history presents risk to democracy.â Commenting on President Trumpâs poor knowledge of history, it observed that he âis a fitting leader for such times.â Another article, abridged from The New York Times, was âIs the U.S. a Democracy? A Social Studies Battle Turns on the Nationâs Values.â These essays stirred me to ask, âWhat is the connection, if any, between President Trump, the decline of the humanities, and U.S. values?â
Letâs begin with American values. While any generalizations present difficulties, they can at least help us get closer to important truths. A valuable indicator of American values, first published in 1950, is historian Henry Steele Commagerâs The American Mind.  Regarding âthe nineteenth-century American,â he wrote, âOften romantic about business, the American was practical about politics, religion, culture, and science.â In the next several pages, Commager also generalizes that the average Americanâs culture âwas materialâ; there âwas a quantitative cast to his thinkingâ; âtheories and speculationsâ disturbed him, and âhe avoided abstruse philosophies of government or conductâ; his âattitude toward culture was at once suspicious and indulgent,â and he expected it (and religion) to âserve some useful purposeâ; and âhe expected education to prepare for life â by which he meant, increasingly, jobs and professions.â âNowhere else,â the historian noted, âwere intellectuals held in such contempt or relegated to so inferior a position.â
A dozen years after the publication of Commagerâs book, Richard Hofstadterâs Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962) appeared. Over a year ago, I discussed that historianâs insights as they applied to present-day U. S. culture and President Trump.  Hofstadter noted that âthe first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualismâ arose during the Jackson era. This anti-intellectualism was common among evangelicals and it was reflected in the popularity of the Horatio Alger rags-to-riches myth, the increasing emphasis on vocational training, the popularity of self-help gurus like Norman Vincent Peale, and the strong impact in the early 1950s of McCarthyism.
I then indicated how all these points were connected to Trump, that he âepitomizes the anti-intellectual strain in American culture,â and that he has never âevidenced any interest in the humanities or liberal arts. Literature, history, philosophy, the arts, and any interest in foreign cultures have remained alien to him.â
At the end of Commagerâs book he asked a number of questions about the future. What would U. S. education educate people about? How would Americans use their increasing leisure?  Increasingly abandoning âtraditional moral codes,â would âthey formulate new ones as effective as those they were preparing to abandon?â âWould they preserve themselves from corruption and decadence?â âCould they preserve their pragmatism from vulgarization?â
In the seven decades that have passed since the publication of The American Mind, the answers we have provided to these questions regarding education, leisure, morality, corruption, decadence, and vulgarization have been more negative than positive.
In 1985, Neil Postman wrote in Amusing Ourselves to Death, âOur politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.â  In 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser to U. S. President Jimmy Carter, stated that television had âbecome prominent in shaping the [U. S.] national culture and its basic beliefs,â that it âhad a particularly important effect in disrupting generational continuity in the transfer of traditions and values,â and that it helped produce âa mass culture, driven by profiteers who exploit the hunger for vulgarity, pornography, and even barbarism.â By 2005, Postmanâs son Andrew noted that entertainment had considerably broadened including the Internet, cell phones, and iPods.  By 2018, there was further broadening, and historian Jill Lapore wrote, âblogging, posting, and tweeting, artifacts of a new culture of narcissism,â became commonplace. Social media, âexacerbated the political isolation of ordinary Americans while strengthening polarization on both the left and the right. . . . The ties to timeless truths that held the nation together, faded to ethereal invisibility.â
How appropriate then that in 2016 we elect a TV celebrity (on The Apprentice), who in the words of historian Niall Ferguson, âis the incarnation of the spirit of our age. His tweetsâhasty, crude and error-strewnâare just one symptom of a more general decline in civility that social media have encouraged.â
If Trump tells us something ugly about ourselves, what does that have to do with the present state of the humanities? In a 2018 essay, âWhy Trump's Crassness Matters,â I indicated that âTrumpâs crassness and lack of aesthetic appreciation reinforces an unfortunate tendency in our national characterâto undervalue beauty.â The Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville observed this already in the early nineteenth century, noting that we tended to âcultivate the arts which serve to render life easy, in preference to those whose object is to adorn it. . . . [We] will habitually prefer the useful to the beautiful, and . . . . will require that the beautiful should be useful.â
At times, some of our leaders have demonstrated an appreciation of beauty. Historian Douglas Brinkley has written long books on both of our Roosevelt presidentsâ appreciation of natureâs beauties, and John Kennedy once said, âI look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.â
Unfortunately, however, Donald Trumpâs philistinism and disrespect for our environment is all too common, as is lack of aesthetic appreciationânote his constant budget proposals to kill the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. Does not the fact that fewer university students are selecting courses in history and the other humanities and arts reflect some of the same reasons we elected our liar-in-chief Donald Trump? We overvalue such things as making money, âgetting ahead,â glitz, and celebrity status and undervalue what the humanities and arts emphasizeâbeauty, truth, and goodness.
A month after Trumpâs election I wrote that he reflected the âugly side of American life.â A comparison that didnât occur to me then, but does now is that our culture is like the popular understanding of a Robert Louis Stevenson characterâDr. Jekyll and his alternative personality, Mr. Hyde. Trump is the diabolical Mr. Hyde of our national personality. We also have a good Dr. Jekyll side represented by such individuals as Carl Sandburg, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Like the Jekyll/Hyde multiple personality, the two sides are battling for our soul.
Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University a Contributing Editor of HNN. For a list of his recent books and online publications click here. His most recent book is In the Face of Fear: Laughing All the Way to Wisdom (2019), which treats humor from a historical perspective.
