Carl Sagan Predicts the Decline of America (1995)

Carl Sagan died the year after this quote. With the greatest respect to him as a science communicator, he has not lived to see an entire generation of politics. When he died, the liberal capitalist post-historical consensus was in full swing. World leaders believed that all notions of identity and nationhood would gently fade away, to be replaced by a world of fungible, peaceful shoppers, administered by an all-knowing, all-loving class of technocratic managers.

The election of Trump (especially Trump 2.0) is a ground-up repudiation of this consensus by ordinary people, who have a completely different life experience to the managerial cosmopolitan class (of whom this website largely represents). Trump, and various other right-wing ascendants throughout the world, are a statement by the common people of the belief that a desire for identity, sovereignty and representation does not disappear the moment a McDonald's appears in their home country.

The (understandable!) lamentations of the academic class towards the current actions of the Trump administration have, to my mind, a deficit of self-reflection and theory of mind towards the people supporting these actions. For decades, the stage of "democracy" has been increasingly garnished with explicitly non-democratic embellishments. NGOs, panels of "experts", bureaucratic oversight, international "obligations" and so on.

This is the exact same situation that motivated the people of Britain to vote for Brexit 9 years ago. Michael Gove, while I have very little time for him as a politician, made a point in a news interview that was condemned for years, but that I think was an accurate capture of working-class sentiment in that time. The soundbite form was "Britain has had enough of experts". And he was exactly right.

For decades, academia has been part of an ongoing anti-democratic, elitist movement to effectively take control away from common people. Health matters are deferred to "listening to the experts", and ordinary people were made to feel as if they didn't deserve a say on if they should be allowed to leave their own homes in 2020-21. NGO-funded academic studies serve to tell normal people that despite their own experiences, mass immigration has been an unambiguous good in their lives, and they have no right to express otherwise. This idea of deference to unelected experts peaked when normal people started being told that it was not within their jurisdiction to define for themselves what the words "man" and "woman" mean -- these two words that are foundational to human civilisation and the language spoken in it were to become the domain of a sect of largely self-appointed modern-day clerics, who expected the public to believe that they were completely rational, objective, and blind to ideology.

This is what the conversation on "anti-intellectualism" very often misses, when being discussed by those in the intellectual classes. While criticising the "uneducated" masses for being so unenlightened, they fail to notice that they also have biases, incentives, and ideological motivations, and it is these that the public are pushing back against, not the noble pursuit of objective knowledge.

A swift google suggests that your assertion that China's economy is "on the decline" to any great extent is quite false. As they say, citation needed.

And, well put this way: the management in China seems to be more grown-up and stable, which is better for long-term prospects.

Well, 1995 was seven years before Congress passed the statute that the FEC was misinterpreting in the Citizens United case.

The Citizens United ruling had essentially noting to do with "money in politics" and was just a bog standard first amendment ruling against a federal agency attempting to read the power to regulate political speech into a statute that had been passed a mere eight years earlier.

Contrary to the misinformation spread through the media, the court did not rule that "money is speech", but ruled almost exactly the opposite: it was the FEC that was attempting to argue that "speech is money" -- that using resources to speak in a way that might persuade voters was equivalent to donating those resources directly to a candidate -- and therefore they had the right to restrict the publication of "electioneering communications". The court ruled that no, speech is not money, and is protected by the first amendment under all circumstances.

So the ruling put things back the way they were in 1995, before the FEC had ever gotten the idea that they had the power to censor speech.

That was back then when people believed in their country, in republic and democracy...

> For decades, academia has been part of an ongoing anti-democratic, elitist movement to effectively take control away from common people

When you declare that "studying things" is elitist, that's when you know your argument is cooked.

A PhD student earning $40k a year is not, in any sense, part of the elite.