The Inevitable Rise of Trumplandia: Market Ideology Ate Our Democracy
Writing in 2000 specifically about education reform, Michael Engel [1] acknowledges: "Market ideology has triumphed over democratic values not because of its superiority as a theory of society but in part because in a capitalist system it has an inherent advantage."
Nearly four decades before Engel's claim, Raymond E. Callahan [2] confronted what he labeled the cult of efficiency in education:
The tragedy itself was fourfold: that educational questions were subordinated to business considerations; that administrators were produced who were not, in any true sense, educators; that a scientific label was put on some very unscientific and dubious methods and practices; and that an anti-intellectual climate, already prevalent, was strengthened.
What is disturbingly clear here is that despite the enduring claims that universal public education -- often attributed to the idealistic foresight of framer of the Constitution Thomas Jefferson -- serves our democracy, public schooling has in fact worked almost entirely in the service of market ideology: sorting children for the workforce and instilling compliance in those young people become good and compliant workers [3].
And here we have a subset of the entire country.
While many are wringing their hands about the post-truth US, our newly minted Trumplandia is not anything new, but the logical outcome of who we have always The Inevitable Rise of Trumplandia: Market Ideology Ate Our Democracy: