Margaret Sullivan , The Guardian; Parks, libraries, museums: here’s why Trump is attacking America’s best-loved institutions
"Why would any politician – especially one as hungry for adulation as Donald Trump – go after such cherished parts of America?
It seems counterintuitive, but this is all a part of a broad plan that the great 20th century political thinker Hannah Arendt would have understood all too well.
Take away natural beauty, free access to books and support for the arts, and you end up with a less enlightened, more ignorant and less engaged public. That’s a public much more easily manipulated.
“A people that can no longer believe in anything cannot make up its mind,” said Arendt, a student of authoritarianism, in 1973. Eventually, such a public “is deprived … of its ability to think and judge”, and with people like that, “you can then do what you please”.
That’s what Trump and company are counting on."
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