As the Right pushes to make America dumber, it should see its fate in Baghdad. Reagan started the decline. Trump put it on steroids.
America is becoming Baghdad.
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Summary
America is entering a slow, stealthy descent toward irrelevance—much as Baghdad once fell from being the intellectual capital of the world. This decline is linked to forces that suppress science, dismantle public education, and elevate anti-intellectualism. Without a cultural renewal, America may lose its leadership in innovation.
- Baghdad (AD 800–1100) thrived as a cosmopolitan center of mathematics, astronomy, and diverse intellectual exchange.
- The decline began when certain religious scholars discredited secular inquiry, framing mathematics as heretical.
- There are parallels in contemporary America: efforts to weaken science education, censor ideas, and promote dogma.
- The nation is slipping down a slope— ”you barely notice it” —until it no longer leads global innovation.
- Corporate media and right-wing political forces are complicit in degrading the public sphere, while independent media must resist.
The analogy to Baghdad carries urgent warning: when a society pivots away from inclusive inquiry and toward dogma, it begins to erode itself. America’s elites must reclaim public education, defend scientific thinking, and dismantle the structures that perpetuate ignorance. Only by doing so can the country avert irreversible decline and restore itself as a force for emancipatory progress.
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Baghdad should be a cautionary mirror: once the world’s intellectual magnet, it succumbed not overnight but through a gradual unraveling—first by delegitimizing open inquiry, then by elevating dogmatic authority over reason. In that vibrant era (circa AD 800–1100), scholars of diverse faiths and philosophies gathered, debated, discarded flawed ideas, and built upon what proved durable. The fall did not begin with a single act of destruction; it started when voices claimed mathematics, astronomy, and critical thinking were decadent, even sinful. From those roots, the cultural movement of intellectual curiosity faltered.
There is a direct line from that moment to our present: America, once a 20th-century engine of innovation, now faces a creeping delegitimization of science, education, and reason. The decline was not a sudden collapse but a daily erosion (“the slope”)—you don’t see yourself slipping until you are too low to climb back. The comparison to Baghdad is vivid: America, like Baghdad, risks becoming intellectually sacked from within, undone by internal forces that repudiate inquiry, restrict thought, and weaponize ignorance.
In this analogy, the election of anti-intellectual leaders and the rise of movements to censor curricula, suppress climate science, and recast history become not anomalies but symptoms. The “moral majority” era, book bans, alternative histories, and attempts to impose religious doctrine in schools were stepping stones in that trajectory. While other countries (especially China) push forward in green energy and technological capacity, America lags, constrained by a defensive posture and self-imposed intellectual barricades.
What undergirds this argument is a critique of structure and power: if two-thirds of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, educational travel, exposure to ideas, and cultural mobility shrink. That constraint compounds the vulnerability to narratives based on fear rather than on curiosity. When the media bows to corporate or oligarchic interests rather than public truth, the degradation accelerates. Independent media must step into that breach, because only media whose loyalty lies with citizens can reclaim an informed public.
From a progressive vantage, we must demand a bold collective strategy. To prevent descent into irrelevance, America must reemphasize public investment in science, education, and infrastructure. It must protect academic freedom and defend the open marketplace of ideas against censorship and ideological bias. It must dismantle barriers that prevent working people and marginalized communities from fully participating in intellectual life. A democracy cannot survive when its citizens are discouraged from reasoning for themselves.
The Baghdad metaphor is not just a rhetorical flourish; it is a warning about cyclical decline. Intellectual flourishing is fragile, and prestige is not permanent. As Glasp’s commentary on the Golden Age of Islam underscores, that era declined as regional fragmentation, political pressures, and ideological retrenchment stifled the collaborative spirit that once soared. Similarly, America’s greatness cannot rest on past innovation or global dominance. It must continually renew its allegiance to curiosity, equity, and collective uplift.
In sum, America stands at a crossroads: permit the suffocation of inquiry, and it fades; reclaim the public sphere, and it may lead anew. The task is political, cultural, and moral. If citizens dare to insist on truth, if institutions dare to defend knowledge, then the nation may reverse the slope, recapture vigor, and become not an echo of Baghdad’s fall, but a renewed project of democratic intellect.
