The Barbarians Aren’t At The Gates… We Already Allowed Them To Take Possession Of The Gates

Part One Of Today’s Two Henry George-Related Posts

They're agile, they're mobile & they're elusive. They're stateless, they're disruptive & they're violent.

A couple of years ago, we took a look at the work of San Francisco-based journalist Henry George who wrote a huge international best selling book in 1879, Progress and Poverty, An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depression, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth… The Remedy. He wrote in his intro that “It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share… It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.”

His remedy was to tax land (a wealth tax, rather than a tax on work) and to use the revenues for public benefit. It’s worth noting that George also crusaded for other reforms— from the secret ballot, votes for women, anti-trust, and ending discrimination against immigrants and minorities to public ownership of natural monopolies like utilities. And, remember, this is pre-Bernie, pre-Elizabeth Warren. With labor support, George ran for New York mayor in 1886, coming in second to the Tammany (corrupt conservaDem) candidate, but beating the GOP candidate, Theodore Roosevelt. After his untimely death, the Georgists had their day— right into the New Deal… and were finally vanquished by Reagan and the anti-property tax movement.

In Progress and Poverty, George had written that when growing wealth creates more inequality and corruption, civilizations collapse from within. The barbarians who sacked Rome in 410 AD met little resistance. George warned that the same could soon happen here— and might have happened but for the powerful reform movement he inspired. “Whence shall come the new barbarians?” George demanded. “Go through the squalid quarters of great cities, and you may see, even now, their gathering hordes. How shall learning perish? Men will cease to read, and books will kindle fires and be turned into cartridges.” Today’s new barbarians smashed their way into the US Capitol. The book burners weren’t far behind. My indie label, 415 Records, released this song on a 3-song EP by The Mutants in 1980, just as American voters decided Reaganism was what was called for in our country:

On Tuesday, The Atlantic ran an essay by Adam Serwer, The New Dark Age. “The warlords who sacked Rome,” he wrote, ominously, “did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking— a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall... The Trump administration has launched a comprehensive attack on knowledge itself, a war against culture, history, and science. If this assault is successful, it will undermine Americans’ ability to comprehend the world around us. Like the inquisitors of old, who persecuted Galileo for daring to notice that the sun did not, in fact, revolve around the Earth, they believe that truth-seeking imperils their hold on power. By destroying knowledge, Trumpists seek to make the country more amenable to their political domination, and to prevent meaningful democratic checks on their behavior. Their victory, though, would do much more than that. It would annihilate some of the most effective systems for aggregating, accumulating, and applying human knowledge that have ever existed. Without those systems, America could find itself plunged into a new Dark Age.”

The money these institutions have lost (or could still lose) is not merely symbolic. Federal grants fund research, scholarship, and archival work on college campuses. Without this money—unless schools raise the funds from other sources—labs and departments will close. The right-wing activist Chris Rufo recently told the New York Times that in addition to using funding to force universities to teach or adhere to conservative dogma, he would like to “reduce the size of the sector itself.” Students will have fewer opportunities. Research in many fields will be put on indefinite pause. America will make fewer scientific breakthroughs.

The Trump administration’s attack on knowledge is not limited to academia, however. Across the government, workers whose job is to research, investigate, or analyze have lost funding or been fired.

These are people who do the crucial work of informing Americans about and protecting them from diseases, natural disasters, and other threats to their health. Thousands of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have been let go, including most of those whose job it is to maintain workplace safety standards. Experts at the Food and Drug Administration including, according to The Times, “lab scientists who tested food and drugs for contaminants or deadly bacteria; veterinary division specialists investigating bird flu transmission; and researchers who monitored televised ads for false claims about prescription drugs” have been purged. Workers in the Department of Agriculture’s U.S. Forest Service research team, who develop “tools to model fire risk, markets, forest restoration and water,” have been targeted for layoffs. The Environmental Protection Agency’s entire research arm is being “eliminated.” The administration has made “deep cuts” to the Department of Education’s research division.

The most devastating cuts may be those to the government’s scientific-research agencies, such as the NIH and NSF. According to CBS News, since January, more than $2 billion has been cut from NIH and 1,300 employees have been fired. One former NIH employee told CBS that “work on child cancer therapies, dementia, and stroke slowed or stopped because critical lab and support staff were let go.” The administration is also trying to halt financial support for projects that commit wrongthink, and has already drastically reduced the number of NSF grants.

… Trump has sought to justify these cuts by exploiting Americans’ bigotry or ignorance— for example, during his address to Congress in March, the president complained about government funds for research on “making mice transgender.” … The first-order effects of the attack on knowledge will be the diminution of American science and, with it, a decline in the sorts of technological achievements that have improved lives over the past century. Modern agriculture and medicine were built on the foundation of federally funded research. Many of the most prominent advances in information technology were also made with government support, including the internet, GPS, and touch screens.

For the past century, state-funded advances have been the rule rather than the exception. Private-sector innovation can take off after an invention becomes profitable, but the research that leads to that invention tends to be a costly gamble— for this reason, the government often takes on the initial risk that private firms cannot. Commercial flight, radar, microchips, spaceflight, advanced prosthetics, lactose-free milk, MRI machines— the list of government-supported research triumphs is practically endless. To the extent that private-sector research can even begin to fill the gap, such research is beholden to corporations’ bottom line. Exxon Mobil knew climate change was real decades ago, and nevertheless used its influence to raise doubt about findings it knew were accurate.

… The reasons for this wholesale destruction are as ideological as they are short-sighted. Conservatives have made no secret of their hostility toward higher education and academia. In 2021, as my colleague Yair Rosenberg recently noted, J. D. Vance, then a Senate candidate, gave an address in which he quoted Richard Nixon saying, “The professors are the enemy,” and laid out his belief  that colleges and universities “make it impossible for conservative ideas to ultimately carry the day.”

Vance’s premise is falsified by the simple existence of the second Trump administration. But it also reveals the administration’s apparent objective, which is to destroy the ability to discover, accumulate, or present any knowledge that could be used to oppose Trumpism. Although Vance couched his objections in terms of universities teaching dogma instead of “truth,” the administration’s recent actions suggest it believes that the only truth is Trumpist dogma. “The voting patterns of most university professors,” Vance posted on Twitter over Memorial Day weekend, “are so one-sided that they look like election results in North Korea.” A MAGA re-education to impart the correct political beliefs is demanded.

Workers must be disciplined, the media must be silenced, schools must be brought under political control, and research institutions must not broach forbidden topics. Information that might contain the seed of political opposition— that might interfere with conservative ideas carrying the day—must be suppressed.

…Trump and his allies see highly educated people, in the aggregate, as a kind of class enemy of the MAGA project. [I’m old enough to remember Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.] Highly educated voters have trended leftward in recent elections, a phenomenon that has not-so-coincidentally appeared alongside the conservative movement’s growing conviction that higher education must be brought under right-wing political control. In short, destroying American universities will also limit the growth of a Democratic-trending constituency— fewer educated voters will translate to fewer Democrats in office. The tech barons supporting Trump have companies that rely on educated workers, but they want submissive toilers, not active citizens who might conceive of their interests as being different from those of their bosses.

A formal education does not immunize anyone against adopting false beliefs, but two things are true: Many of Trump’s supporters have come to see knowledge-producing institutions and the people who work for them as sources of liberal indoctrination that must be brought to heel or destroyed, and they do not want Americans trusting any sources of authority that are not Trump-aligned. This is of a piece with Trump’s longtime strategy regarding the media, which, as he told CBS News in 2018, is “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”

…In March, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration was “moving to privatize a sweeping number of government functions and assets— a long-standing Republican goal that’s being catalyzed by billionaire Elon Musk.” Part of this effort will be to replace human workers with large language models, or artificial intelligence,” automating parts of the federal government with an untested technology that amounts to a bailout for the private companies that have developed AI without finding a profitable use for it. This will make government functions worse, but it will help sustain investment and profitability for the wealthy investors backing the technology. Like most other IT technologies, of course, AI was developed with support from the same federal agencies that the tech barons are now helping dismantle.

By this time, Serwer had me chasing Musk down a rabbit hole. So let me take a little break from his essay for a moment and talk about the public’s mistaken tendency to conflate domain-specific intelligence with general wisdom or authority. Even if we grant that Musk— and others like him (including the other South African robber barons)— are “geniuses” in investing or even, in a stretch, at innovating within a certain techno-capitalist framework and that they’re brilliant at seeing market opportunities, navigating risk and perhaps even shepherding technical projects to success, that “brilliance” is highly contextual. It's like following a chess grandmaster who knows the 64 squares intimately but then assuming that makes him a philosopher king. The fallacy here is what’s sometimes called the “halo effect”— the idea that if someone is excellent in one domain, that excellence bleeds into others. But being able to manipulate capital markets— or even build rockets— doesn’t grant you insight into how democratic institutions work, how social trust is maintained, how inequality is produced and reproduced or how to structure a society that values justice over profit.

In fact, virtually all of these tech geniuses operate within systems that are profoundly anti-democratic. Venture capital and the tech world reward unilateralism, speed and disruption— none of which translate well to the slow, deliberative, consensus-driven mechanisms of democracy. To them, government looks like “red tape,” regulation looks like “inefficiency,” and democratic accountability looks like a drag on innovation. And so they start to talk about governments like they're legacy software in need of a complete rewrite— by them, of course.

You can see this clearly in Musk’s recent behavior: buying a place in Trump’s regime so he could undermine public institutions, casually amplifying disinformation, promoting authoritarian-curious ideologies— all while wrapping himself in the libertarian mythos of the heroic innovator. He’s not unique in this; he’s just the loudest right now because he has the most money and, I suspect, because he’s the most loutish.

Many of these technobros are idiots— dangerously so— in areas outside their domain. And what's worse, their wealth and platforms often mean they’re treated like polymaths, like modern-day philosopher kings, when in fact they may just be technocratic monarchs with no clothes. You want to solve climate change, okay, maybe call a few engineers to help. But you want to solve climate justice? Social breakdown? Democratic backsliding? That’s going to take people who understand power, history, and human beings— not just market dynamics.

It can be tempting, especially for people who don’t live New York, Boston, Chicago, DC, Atlanta, Austin, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles— and especially in our age of tech billionaires and messianic CEOs— to believe that extraordinary success in business or innovation implies a kind of universal genius. Musk has been lauded as a visionary, a genius, a problem-solver for everything from electric cars to space travel. But let’s not forget that this elevation more often than not comes with a dangerous sleight of hand: we start treating proficiency in one realm— say, speculative investment or engineering management— as proof of deep insight into how democracies should work, or how societies ought to be structured. I wouldn’t ask Bernie or Pramila or AOC— nor even Elizabeth Warren— for investing advice. Why would we trust the worldview of someone whose entire framework is built on disruption, competition and extraction to guide decisions in arenas that require consensus, equity and historical understanding? I still have Henry George’s warnings— how even in an era of rapidly increasing wealth, poverty not only persisted but deepened— in mind. Remember that “wedge” George described? Today’s wedge is supercharged by algorithms and ideology— a techno-oligarchy that presumes its own wisdom even as it accelerates inequality.

Serwer’s warning that the extent of the Trump-Musk “looting will be difficult to determine, because in effect, the attack on knowledge is also an attack on political accountability. Accountability requires information. The public must know what is happening if it is ever going to demand change. But without information about what the government is doing, the administration and MAGA more generally will entrench themselves, such that their corruption, destruction, and mismanagement can occur without oversight or risk of a public reckoning. Notwithstanding Musk’s insistence that he is reducing ‘waste, fraud, and abuse’ in the government, the Trump administration has been gutting the very institutions charged with gathering information about what the government does— not just with finding wrongdoing or inefficiency, but with preserving its own records and those produced by investigations of private firms."

Trump’s attack on knowledge will harm not just the so-called elites he and his allies are punishing. The long-term price of solidifying their power in this way will be high— perhaps even higher than Trumpism’s wealthy benefactors expect. One obvious cost is the damage to technological, scientific, and social advancement. Another will be the impossibility of self-governance, because a public denied access to empirical reality cannot engage in self-determination as the Founders imagined.

“We’ve been having a conversation about who should be the arbiter of truth online for some time, because misinformation was such a major issue, all the way dating back to 2016 and before,” Atiba Solomon, the Yale professor, told me. “And I feel like now it’s not just who’s the arbiter of truth online; it’s who’s going to be the arbiter of truth in the public, formal record. That’s what’s at stake here in terms of long-term stuff. You’re not just talking about uncomfortable lacunae in the knowledge-production process. You’re talking about the possibility of a knowledge-production process.”

A population dependent on whatever engagement-seeking nonsense is fed to them on a manipulated social-media network is one that is much easier to exploit and control. By destroying knowledge, including the very scholarship that would study the effects of the administration’s policies on society, the Trump administration and its allies can ensure that their looting of the federal government and public goods can never be fully rectified or punished.

For Trump and his allies, this large-scale destruction of the knowledge-production process could be quite lucrative in the short term. Some examples of this, such as Musk using his influence to secure himself federal contracts and the administration removing regulations on pollution on behalf of Trump’s oil-industry allies, are obvious. But fewer restraints on business means more corporations getting away with scamming and exploiting their customers, and more money for unscrupulous hucksters like those surrounding the president.

The disappearance of high-quality empirical evidence means not only fewer rebuttals of right-wing dogmas, but also a bigger market for wellness pseudoscience and other scams— such as Kennedy’s imbecilic suggestion to treat the growing measles outbreak in the Southwest with cod-liver oil. America under Trump is rejecting one of the most effective health-care infrastructures in human history and embracing woo-woo nonsense on par with medieval doctors measuring the four humors. 

The book burnings of the past had physical limitations; after all, only the books themselves could be destroyed. The Trumpist attack on knowledge, by contrast, threatens not just accumulated knowledge, but also the ability to collect such knowledge in the future. Any pursuit of forbidden ideas, after all, might foster political opposition. Better for Americans to be as gullible and easily manipulated as the people who buy brain pills from right-wing podcasts, use ivermectin to treat COVID, or believe that vaccines are “weapons of mass destruction.” This purge will dramatically impair the ability to solve problems, prevent disease, design policy, inform the public, and make technological advancements. Like the catastrophic loss of knowledge in Western Europe that followed the fall of Rome, it is a self-inflicted calamity. All that matters to Trumpists is that they can reign unchallenged over the ruins.