Donald Trump has moved at warp speed to nominate people to serve in his Cabinet and other important government posts who have chosen loyalty to him as their most important virtue, making a mockery of merit even as the nominees claim to uphold meritocracy.
Moreover, like Trump himself, his nominees denigrate science and scientific expertise, subscribe to conspiracy theories, are eager to impose litmus tests in the arts and education, and seem hostile to the world beyond America’s borders.
Elections have consequences, so the saying goes.
And if that wasn’t enough to remind us that elections have consequences, the president-elect announced that on the first day of his administration, he will order a mass deportation of millions of immigrants and impose stiff tariffs on this nation’s most important trading partners.
While much of the post-election commentary has focused on its implications for American democracy, there is another side to what will unfold starting on Jan. 20. When he takes office, Trump, who promised to Make America Great Again, seems determined to lead America into a period of scientific, cultural, educational, and global retrenchment, which collectively might be called the new “Dark Ages.”
Some see Trump as reviving the so-called Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, an era of great prosperity as well as technological and industrial growth. It was an era dominated by corrupt “captains of industry” or “robber barons” whose corrupting influence also extended to government and politics.
However, leaders in the Gilded Age did not reject science and rationality. Quite the contrary, they embraced both because they saw them as essential to the growth of capitalism. And they invested in culture and the arts, rather than trying to make them hue to a particular orthodoxy.
Yes, Trump’s era may ultimately have some attributes of the Gilded Age, I think it will be much worse.
Trump and his MAGA followers reject the cultural legacy of the people who founded this nation. The people who led the American Revolution and wrote the Constitution were, deeply impressed by “the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution and its emphasis on empiricism, objective observation, and using rationality over faith or tradition as the foundations of truthful knowledge.”
They founded “an Enlightenment country” and borrowed from the Enlightenment hostility toward the “hierarchically ordered societies of Europe.”
The president-elect seems determined to end all that.
In 2017, Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of the writers group PEN America, warned of Trump’s “repudiation of the American ideals — grounded in the Enlightenment — of self-expression, knowledge, dissent, criticism, and truth.” What Nossel predicted then seems even more apt today.
During the 2024 campaign and transition period, Trump and his cronies have broadcast their determination “to entrench within the machinery of the U.S. government… elemental disdain for intellectuals, analysts, and experts.” They regularly denigrate rationality and elevate superstition, tradition, and hierarchy.
I call their program a recipe for the return of the “Dark Ages.”
Though the term is now much disputed, the phrase “Dark Ages” is used by some historians to describe a “’ period of intellectual depression in Europe from… the fifth century to the revival of learning about the beginning of the fifteenth….’” During that time, Europe experienced “a decline in culture (and) learning…. and a shift towards a feudal society with limited literacy and widespread superstition.”
Petrarch, an Italian scholar who lived from 1304 to 1374, described the time when he lived as an era of “darkness and dense gloom.” As he put it, “My fate is to live among varied and confusing storms” and to experience the “sleep of forgetfulness.”
The era that Petrarch described was also marked by a deep skepticism about science and rationality, a personalistic form of politics marked by a clear division between “lords” and vassals,” religious domination over culture, and the collapse of trade networks among European nations.
Sound familiar?
Let’s start with Trump‘s threat to impose stiff tariffs on goods coming into this country from Canada, Mexico, and China. As he put it in a Truth Social post, “On January 20th… I will sign all necessary documents to charge Mexico and Canada a 25% Tariff on ALL products coming into the United States.”
This is no small matter. Reuters reports that “The U.S. accounted for more than 83% of exports from Mexico in 2023 and 75% of Canadian exports” and that “Trump’s threatened new tariffs would appear to violate the terms of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) on trade” which guaranteed “largely duty-free trade between the three countries.”
The president-elect also threatened China, promising the Chinese “an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America.”
Whether or not Trump follows through on his threats, they immediately sent shock waves through our trade networks and promise to ignite trade wars as countries respond to Trump’s tariffs by imposing their own tariffs.
As Reuters notes, “Trump’s overall tariff plans… would push U.S. import duties back up to 1930s levels, stoke inflation, collapse U.S.-China trade, draw retaliation, and drastically reorder supply chains.” That would put the Dark Ages monarchs of Europe to shame.
If that is not enough to capture the Dark Ages vibe, consider what the new administration will do to education, the arts, and science.
On education, the incoming Trump Administration hopes to give free rein to “an army of far-right Christians” and attack “the very foundations of free, secular education.” Last week, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, called for “an ‘educational insurgency’ where ‘you build your army underground” of children, so they can grow up to be the next generation of fundamentalist culture warriors.’”
For the arts, Trump’s first term was something of a disaster. As Judy Berman, television critic for Time, explained, “the arts and entertainment…suffered mightily as Trump held court in the White House….(H)is policies…made it harder to subsist as a creative professional…as he lashed out at the arts and their practitioners.”
More damaging, she argued, were Trump’s “repeated attempts to defund already-strapped federal arts organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which helps fund PBS and NPR) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.”
“Trump’s rhetoric, Berman concluded, “intensified an enmity between the arts community and the right… that dates back to Reagan-era censorship of transgressive artists…Put simply: Donald Trump was bad for art.”
Now, the country is facing “four more years of antagonist cultural policy (and the outright antagonism of people and places that do not align with Trump’s values).”
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Finally, consider what Smart News dubbed Trump’s “Cabinet of quacks and hacks.” They are science skeptics, conspiracy theorists, and eager supplicants to their “lord,” Donald Trump.
Chief among these Dark Ages throwbacks is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s nominee for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services. Among other things, he has spoken out against “vaccines that have saved millions of lives.” Showing his conspiratorial bone fides, Kennedy claims that “the COVID-19 virus was targeted so that Chinese and Jewish people are more immune.” And he has not just targeted the COVID vaccine.
Kennedy and his allies in the incoming administration are deeply suspicious of “expert authority,” which they claim “hides elite power.” That is why US News predicts that they will lead “a radical antiestablishment medical movement with roots in past centuries… threatening the achievements of a science-based public health order painstakingly built since World War II.”
And if Kennedy is confirmed, he will have plenty of company in doing Trump’s bidding by pushing this country toward a new Dark Ages in medicine, health care, scientific research, education, and the arts. To avoid that fate, we must mount sustained and effective resistance in each of those domains.
Ultimately, we can only hope that what Petrarch said in his time is true in ours. “This sleep of forgetfulness,” he predicted, “will not last forever. When the darkness has been dispersed, our descendants can come again in…pure radiance.”
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