On paying attention — to the news and in class

Tell the truth now. Don’t you wish you’d paid more attention in high school and college when your history and social studies teachers started talking about tariffs?

You likely would have a much stronger foundation for discussing the primary topic roiling the country, and indeed the entire world, today.

The Tariff of Abominations, Smoot-Hawley, Dingley, Fordney-McCumber … 1789, 1822, 1837, 1893, 1922, 1930, 1934, 1937 … All these odd-sounding names and seemingly pointless dates that caused your eyes to droop and your head to bang embarrassingly against the desktop in American History 101 suddenly don’t sound so irrelevant to your daily life, do they?

In fact, if there are silver linings to the early days of the Trump Tariffs — a more descriptive name yet to come while the historians wait to assess the ultimate impact — they must surely include the surge in Americans’ historical consciousness as we all suddenly rush to google “impact of tariffs on my 401(k).”

We’re probably also all becoming more literate in the ambiguous “dark science” of economics.

Or think we are.

This newfound confidence may not be entirely a good thing if it settles us into mindsets that don’t allow us to talk with reason and openness about the events the president has set in motion. The challenge facing us economics lay people — like so many of the challenges we encounter — is that you can read one persuasive doom-and-gloom article today and its also-persuasive polar opposite tomorrow.

They don’t call it “the dark science” for nothing, after all.

Of course, when it comes to tariffs, one finds an overwhelming consensus that they have done more harm — and more intense harm — than good. Thus, we find a standoff between the preponderance of experts and the instincts of Donald Trump.

An optimist will turn to history and point out that Copernicus and Galileo were ridiculed (and in Galileo’s case, even imprisoned) for espousing theories that defied the conventional wisdom of the experts of their day.

But, a Lloyd Bentsen will counter that Trump is no Copernicus or Galileo.

So, how amid all this, do we read the news today?

My response is, as it is for most of the controversies that disquiet our political and social discussions, by reading lots of news. And by that, I don’t mean one should read and listen to the news all the time. I mean one should read and listen to a wide variety of sources.

Perhaps even Trump is thinking about taking such advice. He is widely reputed to be a fan of the economic policies of William McKinley, which originally evoked the love of tariffs that Trump himself has expressed for decades. But with his announcement Wednesday of a 90-day delay on most of his reciprocal tariffs outside of those on China, he seems to be warming to the mounting market evidence against his position, and perhaps he has at last run across McKinley’s final word on tariffs, delivered in Buffalo, New York, on Sept. 5, 1901, a day before his death: “The period of exclusiveness is past. Commercial wars are unprofitable. … Reciprocity treaties are in harmony with the spirit of the times; measures of retaliation are not.”

With any luck, he has also read more of that speech to find his hero declaring, “The telegraph keeps us advised of what is occurring everywhere, and the press foreshadows, with more or less accuracy, the plans and purposes of the nations.”

And: “No nation can longer be indifferent to any other. And as we are brought more and more in touch with each other, the less occasion is there for misunderstandings …”

As for the rest of us, hopefully we are getting an object lesson in why we should have paid more attention in school. We might do our children a favor by impressing it on them while they still have time to use what they learn when their time comes to shape the world.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His new book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.