The Politics of Not Knowing

How willful ignorance became identity, and why learning together is the last act of civic repair.

Ignorance protects the powerful. Understanding protects the people.

This essay continues my inquiry into epistemic harm and moral repair, tracing how ignorance has been weaponized into a form of belonging, and what it might mean to reclaim knowledge as an act of love.

(For further context, listen to David Frum’s conversation with Tom Nichols here.)

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The Opening Image

David Frum recently called it politicized stupidity—a condition in which ignorance is not an accident but an identity. He described a public sphere where loyalty is measured not by what one understands but by what one refuses to learn. In this world, to know too much is to betray the home team; to question the story is to risk exile.

Politicized stupidity, if you feel so compelled to accept the term, as I do, explains the contradictions we’ve come to accept: citizens railing against “handouts” while depending on the programs that sustain them; parents decrying “indoctrination” while quoting think-tank talking points; leaders mistaking cruelty for law and order.

Ignorance has become a moral stance, a declaration of independence from the facts themselves.

The Edification of Ignorance

Politicized stupidity isn’t just misinformation; it’s a defensive architecture. When truth threatens belonging, ignorance becomes a form of loyalty. People turn away from obviously immoral acts, including self-enrichment schemes and extrajudicial killings, because they grasp the risk of losing a worldview for fear of discomfort and the difficult work of introspection and honest values alignment. More, divorced from the ecosystem, worth must be generated through internal transformation and relationships, not slogans and apparel. Expose the bruises of our own insecurities by agreeing to set down the mistaken view that for you to have more, others deserve less.

The refusal to engage systemic ideas—racism, inequality, public goods—protects the myth of personal virtue. I didn’t own slaves. I worked for what I have. These are not arguments; they’re escape hatches. Meritocracy becomes an alibi for unexamined advantage.

We bleach conquest out of the founding story, teach freedom without contradiction, and call it patriotism. The result is an aesthetic of denial: a nation that mistakes comfort for virtue. Politicized stupidity isn’t the absence of thought; it’s the triumph of comfort over conscience. Is it comfort we prioritize? Maybe only when we construct narratives to justify our comfort while remaining willfully ignorant of suffering.

Moral Inversion and the Cult of Wealth

When people cheer Elon Musk’s approach to trillionaire status as proof of entrepreneurship, for example, they aren’t celebrating innovation; they’re rehearsing devotion. The spectacle of accumulation becomes a sacrament.

“Capitalism as creed, not enterprise.”

I didn’t own slaves becomes He earned it. Both rewrite injustice as virtue.

Peter Singer called it speciesism—failure to extend moral concern beyond one’s own kind. We are now failing even that: abandoning pro-species solidarity, forgetting that humanity is a shared project.

When civic illiteracy becomes fashionable and social cohesion dissolves, oligarchy, essentially the moral failing of greed with impunity, is perpetuated by the myth of freedom, leaving people numb to exploitation because we imagine this is the just reward of a meritocracy. Each act of deliberate unknowing carries a moral price: a culture that prizes innocence over accuracy cannot face its reflection.

To know becomes an act of resistance.

To learn together becomes an act of repair.

And so, Universities and the Department of Education are rendered rogue institutions, and museums must censor content under the auspices of “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

The Reversal of Conservative Values

Ronald Reagan’s 1986 EMTALA Act affirmed that everyone has a right to emergency care. George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” at least gestured toward mercy.

Today, those moral traditions have been replaced by grievance and cruelty as spectacle. The older conservatism valued continuity, protecting institutions that maintain a society's decency. Now, stewardship has been traded for demolition.

The phrase I hear or read often in social media comment sections, “We’re a constitutional republic, not a democracy,” is semantic camouflage. It reframes democracy’s failures as democracy’s fault, teaching citizens to resent the very structure meant to serve them. What would these skeptics of democracy say to Alexander Hamilton when he lays out the Federalist project?

Are societies capable of good governance through reason and choice? Or does good governance arise simply by accident and force?

When people can no longer envision government as an instrument of the common good, one that we can design to promote a well-reasoned and representative structure to represent each of us, they cease to imagine the common good itself.

Yet the vocabulary for recovery still exists: responsibility, duty, neighborliness.
We only have to remember that duty is care, discipline is restraint, and freedom without solidarity is power in disguise.

The Enabler: Trumpism and the Emotional Economy of Ignorance

If ignorance is the architecture, Trumpism is the brick and mortar. It gives moral permission to every evasion, turning fear into policy, resentment into creed. Trump didn’t invent the malady; he spread it. He offered humiliation a home and called it authenticity. He capitalized on a faux populism that validates misguided ideologies by not asking that they be questioned.

Clearly, it must be said, many of his supporters are not monsters. They’re frightened, disoriented, and unseen. False populism tells them their enemy isn’t the billionaire who hoards, but the immigrant who hungers.

White fear, wounded masculinity, nostalgia for lost supremacy—all fuse into one consoling story: you didn’t fail; someone stole your world. Trumpism offers belonging without accountability, power without reflection, community without compassion.

It makes cruelty feel like agency and ignorance feel like pride. Decency is redefined as loyalty to the constructed worldview. It is difficult for me to imagine that 30% to 40% of the country thinks that I want to “mutilate children’s genitals” for my LGBTQIA alliship, but when we choose not to learn, equality feels like a loss, and the fear of being replaced is, at its root. the fear of being forgotten.

Personal validation, acceptance, pursuing my goals, and accessing social services have been challenging for me. Why should I extend it to you?

We see this expression in less dramatic ways when people argue against medical debt or student loan forgiveness. Namely, that removing someone else’s obstacle threatens the story that you overcame yours. The lesson I’ve learned is that my hardship can be a source of hope and instruction, not a tool of guilt and denial.

The work of reconstruction begins there, with invitation, not contempt.

Breaking the Spell: Learning as a Civic Act

The spell of ignorance can be broken, but not by ridicule.

Humiliation hardens; curiosity softens. The work ahead is pedagogical, not punitive, building cultures that reward understanding more than outrage.

Democracy is not a system of votes but a system of meaning. To connect personal experience with public structure is moral work.

Ignorance fractures those lines; knowledge restores them. Class consciousness is civic consciousness. When the working class sees its taxes as a welcome responsibility to promote the common good rather than charity for those who don’t deserve it, resentment becomes stewardship.

We are one republic with many lives, bound by the pursuit of our happiness and the promotion of a common good. Couched in these terms, learning is an act of solidarity—a refusal to be detached. We restore, enrich, and humanize the faces of our immigrant siblings ripped from their communities by reminding those who choose masks that their fear of replacement in a dynamic, multicultural society is only hastened by opting out of good governance through reason and choice by choosing accident and force.

Ignorance may feel like belonging, but it is the loneliest place in the republic. The cure for politicized stupidity isn’t brilliance, it’s courage: the courage to know what your comfort depends on, the courage to look at history without flinching, the courage to see one another as partners in maintenance, custodians of an unfinished democracy.

Ignorance protects the powerful. Understanding protects the people.