The Dumbing Down of America

Ruminating with author Susan Jacoby on why it goes way beyond people voting for Trump.

Susan Jacoby

I met Susan Jacoby nearly 15 years ago when her landmark book, The Age of American Unreason, was first published. With deep historical knowledge and a piercing prose style, she validated what I was increasingly coming to believe: That despite record levels of college graduation, we were getting stupider all the time. Politicians, television programmers and others had succeeded in dumbing down American culture without any accountability.

Raised on the South Side of Chicago and in Michigan, Susan was a reporter at The Washington Post before a long career as an author and independent thinker, a rare quality nowadays.  

JONATHAN ALTER:

You were raised Catholic. How did that affect you? And do you remember the moment when you knew you didn't believe in God?

SUSAN JACOBY:

I think that for me, being raised Catholic (or, rather, attending Catholic elementary schools) probably made me an atheist sooner than I would have become otherwise. Because so much of my formal education was devoted to promoting the Roman Catholic religion, I learned about some things that seemed utterly ridiculous to me long before I would have learned about them otherwise.  Like the infallibility of the pope. And transubstantiation [the conversion, in church, of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ]. What kid learns about such things except in a Catholic school? However, my own parents were anything but conventional in their responses when I'd bring questions home. My mother would say, "Well, you don't have to agree with everything that Sister says." Not exactly a conventional response from a pre-Vatican II Catholic mother. There was no one moment when I knew I didn't believe in God. Certainly, by age 13, I didn't believe in Catholicism. For a time, I explored other churches and decided that, for me, none of them made any more sense than the other.

JON:

But you are an atheist, right?

SUSAN JACOBY:

I am not a "militant" atheist, in the sense that I have no desire to "convert" people to atheism. Unlike my friend Christopher Hitchens, I never participate in debates about the existence of God. It's a complete waste of time. He even did it for no fee. I am interested in atheism only because it is not considered respectable (still) in the United States, and this quirk (in developed countries) is closely related to the many problems created by those who wish to turn us into a form of theocracy. Indeed, a lot of these people are already under the illusion that this is a theocracy.  

JON:

When you were a teenager you learned you were half Jewish. Did that change your thinking or intellectual development?

SUSAN JACOBY:

I was 16 when I figured out that my father was Jewish. By then, I had read enough to realize that anyone named Jacoby, or its many European variants, was undoubtedly a Jew. I began exploring family history in a serious way in the 1990s, and the results are in "Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for her Family's Buried Past" (2000). One thing I will never forget is my father's answer when, while I was still in my teens, I asked him why he had lied about having been a Jew. He replied, "I never wanted you and your brother to think that if you didn't get something you wanted in life, it was because you were Jewish."

You may have read the first page of my memoir, which details an accidental encounter with Estelle Frankfurter, the sister of Felix Frankfurter. She told me a number of things about my family--all prominent German Jews in New York knew each other then--that had to do with my grandfather having been an addicted gambler who lost the family fortune. Now I could understand why my father concealed [things from me]. My dad considered the very word "Jew" impolite. I'll never forget his astonishment at the title of Alfred Kazin's "New York Jew" being displayed in the window of the Old Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on Broadway.

JON:

You believe that secularism has been essentially written out of American history. How so?

SUSAN JACOBY:

How many Americans know that Article 6 of the Constitution states that "no religious test shall ever be required as a Qualification" for any public trust or office. NO RELIGIOUS TEST. The question Lindsay Graham asked Ketanji Brown Jackson about how she rated her faith was, in fact, not permitted under the Constitution. That no one wrote a column about this the next day is a disgrace. I wasn't surprised that Jackson chose not to answer the question. Journalists should be ashamed of themselves for not having commented.

---

“The question Lindsay Graham asked Ketanji Brown Jackson about how she rated her faith was, in fact, not permitted under the Constitution. That no one wrote a column about this the next day is a disgrace.”

---

JON: 

I saw some comments on Twitter about it from smart people and I think I re-tweeted it. But that's no excuse. Because tweets often get more of a response than columns one sweats over, it's often just easier to tweet or retweet and say to oneself, "OK, I've made the point to the people following me." It's another example of how social media truncates public debate. Your point about secularism being in the very marrow of the republic should be amplified, not miniaturized.

SUSAN JACOBY: 

That more people often respond to abbreviated tweets than to long, thoughtful articles and commentary of the kind that Bill Moyers used to provide on television, is a clear demonstration of what's wrong with the way we acquire and think about (or don't think about) information. 

JON:

Well, I think people like Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes, Lawrence O’Donnell (admittedly my MSNBC colleagues) and others at MSNBC and CNN are contributing to the debate, with longer Bill Moyers-ish essays. But I agree that the secularist roots of American history are underplayed.

SUSAN JACOBY:

Secularists are never even mentioned in the endless coverage of the abortion debate. Various Pew Polls show that roughly 29 percent of Americans under 35 consider themselves "nones"—a larger number than most religious denominations. This doesn't mean these people don't believe in some form of a deity; it does mean they don't want to force their beliefs or non-beliefs on anyone else.  Article 6 doesn't say "no religious test except for the non-religious." That the major founders were predominantly deists [believers in a distant Supreme Being who didn't intervene in the world at all after creating the universe] is largely unknown. That religion was every bit as important in upholding slavery as it was in the abolitionist movement is largely unknown. That Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony had to hide their agnosticism to be accepted in the mainstream woman suffrage movement is largely unknown. My 2004 book "Freethinkers" is still earning royalties because it's the only book history professors can find that covers the subject, so they keep assigning it to their classes. According to Ted Cruz, declining church attendance is one of the main causes of school shootings. The paradox is that while we as a country know almost nothing about our secular heritage, the idea of secularism is nevertheless demonized.

---

“The paradox is that while we as a country know almost nothing about our secular heritage, the idea of secularism is nevertheless demonized.”

---

JON:

Why is it meaningful that "Under God" wasn't added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954?

SUSAN JACOBY:

"Under God" was added to the Pledge in 1954 because it was considered a rebuke to godless communism.  I remember the first time we recited "under God" in Catholic school, and the nun told us that little Russian children could be killed for saying that. One irony here is that when the (godless) Pledge was written in the 1890s, it was in large measure the result of a concern on the part of Protestants at the rise of parochial schools. The Pledge was thought to be something that would unify all. As it turned out, Catholic schools didn't really adopt it regularly until well after World War I.

JON:

Beyond Trump's election, what are some other good examples over the last 20 years of how we've dumbed down the country and entered the age of Unreason?

SUSAN JACOBY:

The most recent, obviously, is our response to Covid. That roughly a third of the country rejected vaccination altogether, and that only a minority of eligible children and teenagers are vaccinated, is proof. This is not merely "politicization," but manifests the lack of understanding of science that was already evident at the turn of the millennium.  

Second, what I call "junk thought." The former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy provided a stunning example of the combination of junk thought and junk science in a 2007 decision upholding a ban on "partial birth abortion." He cited the "severe depression and loss of self-esteem" that may follow an abortion as a rationale for the Court's 5-4 decision, even though he admitted that there was no reliable data to measure this so-called syndrome. Just an opinion. Junk thought.

Third, I'm not going to blame the internet for everything. But the influence of the internet in persuading people that anything in print, anywhere, must have some validity is a huge change since 2008 [when the Age of American Unreason came out] and cannot be denied as a major factor in the dumbing down of America as well as other parts of the world. It's particularly bad here because so many more of us have access to unfiltered technology. I'd add something else. Children today may have the Internet, but they have much less freedom to explore and imagine than children did while we were growing up. This is especially true of middle and upper middle-class children. When I was a teenager, I spent most of my summers on my bike, exploring everything from the Michigan State University campus to the State Capitol. During that time, I started writing for the local newspaper, among other things. I would NEVER have been allowed that liberty today. Kids are programmed to be involved in organized, supervised activities every day of the week right now. It makes them more constrained intellectually than kids even of the previous generation.

---

“But the influence of the internet in persuading people that anything in print, anywhere, must have some validity is a huge change since 2008 and cannot be denied as a major factor in the dumbing down of America as well as other parts of the world.”

---

JON: 

I agree with you that the absence of unstructured time offline inhibits creativity and, arguably, intellectual development and maturity.  

SUSAN JACOBY:

And the decline in the teaching of history and civics, the interference of parents now, in relation to Critical Race Theory etc., only makes it worse.

JON:

On another subject, I was just reminded by one of my first ruminators, Newt Minow, that Adlai Stevenson was a character witness for Alger Hiss. You wrote a book on Hiss. What was your larger point about him?

SUSAN JACOBY:

I was asked to write that book by Yale Press for reasons that mystified me. It was not a biography of Hiss but an account of shifting attitudes toward Hiss among academics, journalists, and liberals (like Stevenson). A lot of liberals simply assumed that Hiss wasn't a spy or a communist because of the many people whose lives had been destroyed by false accusations during the Red Scare.

JON:

And because Hiss had attended the right schools and had the right prestigious jobs and knew all the right people, he couldn't possibly be a communist. Or so a large number of good liberals assumed from the ‘40s to the ‘90s.

SUSAN JACOBY:

My larger point in this little book was the ways in which political fashion affects what ought to be evidence-based judgment. The evidence that Hiss was a spy was accepted by all respectable Sovietologists as early as the 1960s, and I was strongly influenced by them because I lived in Moscow with my then-husband, who was the bureau chief of The Washington Post. I wrote my first book there and had a good contact in the spy division of the press-minders, and there I found that all Soviet Americanologists (the good ones) also thought Hiss was a spy. Though not a particularly effective one.

JON:

But for all the faults of elites like Alger Hiss, your main point later was that we should have more respect for brains and expertise. At the very beginning of the Age of American Unreason, you pay tribute to Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.  Why was that book so important and how much worse did it get between 1963, when he published it, and 2008, when you wrote your book?

 SUSAN JACOBY:

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was so important because it was so ahead of its time. It was much more important by the time I published The Age of American Unreason, though everything he wrote about is so much worse today that I don't think Hofstadter could possibly have imagined it. 

JON:

And your book was before Trump's election. But it was also before Obama's. In the 2008 primaries, Mark Penn, an adviser to Hillary Clinton, said Obama could never win because he was "another Adlai Stevenson." Were you surprised when he won? I assume you were not surprised when Trump won, right?

SUSAN JACOBY:

Mark Penn, and everyone else who took that line about Obama being like Stevenson, was wrong. One of the most important points I made in The Age of American Unreason was that the American tendency to rely on personalities is one manifestation of our Unreason. Yes, Obama did win, and look where we went next. I was not surprised when Obama won; I think he was a once-in-a-century phenomenon. All of the qualities that made Penn compare him to Stevenson were the result of the tricky path the first black president had to tread—they had nothing to do with Stevenson's wishy-washiness (perceived as well as real).  I was, alas, not surprised when Trump won--though many of my friends were. I grew up in Michigan and Chicago, and I was in touch with enough people to see how many ordinary Democratic voters disliked Hillary Clinton. My grandmother, who was born in 1899 and who was immensely proud of never having voted Republican, said she voted for Stevenson instead of Eisenhower because, "Even though I didn't like Adlai--he looked down on people like me--when I remembered which party gave us Social Security and which fought it, there was no way I could vote Republican." She said, "I don't vote for people because I like them, I vote for them because of what I think they're going to do."

JON: 

I used to respect that line of reasoning--when Democrats voted for Democrats they didn't much like personally and Republicans did the same, because of what they stood for. But nowadays, I'm disgusted by well-educated Trump voters rationalizing their support for him by talking about Israel or taxes or whatever issues they think will allow them to excuse their voting for a demagogue--and an ignoramus.

You argue in that 2008 book that "America is now ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism" that is "promoted by everyone from politicians to media executives." I assume you agree that the illness has advanced in the last 14 years. Is it incurable?

SUSAN JACOBY:

Is our descent into unreason incurable? As an American, replying in the affirmative is too painful. I presume politicians like Chris Murphy (D-CT) feel this way too. As a journalist, as a writer, as a thinker, I fear this may be incurable. The speed with which we've gotten stupider is a big part of what worries me so much, and that does have something to do with my age. I realize now that the speed and depth of political change in the Sixties was nothing like what has happened in the last 14 years. The conditions for Trumpism were there, or he would never have been elected. And look at where we are now. Some of those Republican governors, like Abbott and DeSantis, are every bit as bad as Trump.

---

“The speed with which we've gotten stupider is a big part of what worries me so much…I realize now that the speed and depth of political change in the Sixties was nothing like what has happened in the last 14 years.”

---

JON:

I don't agree. Abbott and DeSantis are terrible and would be terrible presidents. But they won't appoint Michael Flynn as secretary of state and Sidney Powell as attorney general—and by the way, even if the Senate objects, they can be imposed as recess appointments. And while Abbott and DeSantis lie on occasion, they don't lie literally every time they open their mouths, and they have not yet proven that they don't believe in the peaceful transfer of power. They might not, but they haven't been tested on this core democratic idea, as Trump has. Finally, they aren't as good demagogues as Trump, and the gap between their ability to implement bad policy and Trump's (widely assumed because they are smarter, or at least DeSantis is) would shrink in a second Trump term because Trump knows more now. If Trump is re-elected, it's lights out for democracy; if a Trump wannabe wins, the dimmer is still on.

I understand you have a bone to pick with the press re Uvalde.

SUSAN JACOBY:

I have been horrified by the way in which the press, in "legacy" print, online, and on television has completely abandoned all other stories for what happened in Uvalde. There has been almost no news from Ukraine in the last ten days. We are engaging in an orgy of what I call unearned grief--that is to say, considering ourselves virtuous because we are so sad that other people have suffered the loss of their children. As if we were somehow virtuous because we are human enough to grieve for dead children. 

Wallowing in unearned suffering is one of the marks of an intellectually and morally lazy society. It is not only wrong but dumb. 

---

“Wallowing in unearned suffering is one of the marks of an intellectually and morally lazy society. It is not only wrong but dumb.”

---

 JON:

That's a terrific, subtle point, but I'm not as concerned about the fire hose coverage. There's time now to get back to Ukraine. I remember when I was covering media for Newsweek in the '80s and I called up the great David Halberstam when I was bothered by the same phenomenon you describe. So was he, and he described it as "the media’s inflatable map of the world." A story inflates to great size, then deflates to the point where almost no one remembers it. But nowadays, this is far down my list of problems with the media. In fact, it seems to me the real problem with saturation coverage is not that it takes place but that it has no apparent effect. At least in the old days, if the media reported on some outrage, something would happen. Laws or perspectives would change. But now we're so dug into our positions that it makes one despair over whether journalism can help bring any change. But we have to hope that maybe in some small way--a red flag law?--this time might be at least a little different. Or maybe not. 

 SUSAN JACOBY:

I regret having lived long enough to see so many of my youthful hopes destroyed. There's nothing unusual about that. The pace, however, has picked up enormously. I think many of the developments I emphasized in 2008, particularly the gap between American educational attainment and that of other developed countries, has contributed to what we are seeing today. Empathy is good. Who would say otherwise?  But empathy without action is like faith without good works. 

 JON:

You're arguing that effective action requires intelligence and other Enlightenment values—or nothing gets done.

 SUSAN JACOBY:

Without reason, empathy is useless. We lie to ourselves in order to feel good about ourselves. 

JON: 

On that cheerful note....Thanks, Susan.