It is appalling, and still somewhat surprising, that the people who cut the funding for medicine and science in the United States now hope to present themselves as the best choice to deal with problems such as the Ebola epidemic in Africa, and non-problems such as the Ebola non-epidemic in the United States. This is comparable to the claim of the same group to be the best qualified to manage foreign policy after making some of the worst foreign policy decisions in American history, and to be the best qualified to manage the economy after starting a depression.
Americans in public life in previous eras took some pains to avoid making public fools of themselves. This limited what they could say, particularly when members of the press were present. The restraints that this imposed on public discourse have been largely removed by the devaluation (sometimes extending to demonization) of expertise, the emergence of sources of quasi-information (‘thruthiness’, as Stephen Colbert would have it), and what amounts to a denial of physical reality by a large segment of the public.
It’s no longer a debilitating disgrace to make public statements that are obviously false, that indicate a complete lack of knowledge about essential subjects, or a lack of the intellectual capacity to deal with salient facts and concepts. Presenting completely erroneous quasi-information and discredited ideas is often effective, and being caught out in the most grotesque misrepresentations is no longer debilitating to people who appeal to the low end of the American demographic. How did America lose its common sense?
