Yesterday I was surfing through Drudge and I came across a video of McCain supporters getting booed as they marched through the Upper West Side. The video features running text commentary. "Infidels in the Liberal Mecca" "Area intellectuals boo and jeer them just as they have been taught to do." "Fact: The number of middle fingers in a ‘progressive’ crowd is directly proportional to the number of PhD degrees in the ten-block radius." And so on.
Listen to a Palin speech, watch a Micky D’s commercial,
or hang out in the darker edges of the blogosphere and you’ll get more
of this. Here the message is: Average people have an instinctual wisdom
that is much more honest and true than anything that can be gotten from
years of study. Actually, smart people have secret goals of oppressing
you and taking your money. They collude with others in their gang (the
media, business owners, university professors) to oppress you. They are
laughing at you right now.
The word intelligent has permanent scare quotes around it.
On Sunday, David Brooks explains that their
disdain for the educated class is bad for business.
Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her
convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American
politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody
so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack
American” and the coastal elite.She is another step in the
Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill
and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who
prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical
understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down
before the common touch.And so, politically, the G.O.P. is
squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the working class by sins of
omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic
anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by
telling members of that class to go away.
(Or
else they’ll keep the working class through the sport of mocking smart
people and keep the rich, educated people because they are getting a
tax break.)
Instead of hating educated people, I think more energy should be
spent outing stupid ideas. When I was talking with my husband about the
bailout conspiracy theories, he responded, "that’s fucking stupid." I
loved it. It was very Simon Cowell.
When someone tells me that John McCain’s $5,000 tax credit will
cover health expenses for a year. I’m going to say, "that’s fucking
stupid." When someone tells me that dinosaurs were around 5,000 years
ago, I’m going to say, "that’s fucking stupid." Scare quotes are
stupid. Walking down the Upper West Side and complaining about getting
flipped the bird is stupid, stupid, stupid.
Apt. 11d 
It has interested me both in this election and the last two presidential elections how being a “regular” guy is viewed as better than being an intellectual. Tim Robbins on the Daily Show said it best- “I just want a president that’s smart!” Amen to that. I want a president who’s brilliant, who leaves me in the dust with his/her thoughts, ideas, understanding of the issues etc.
It does seem that maybe this time the electorate is starting to realize that smart, educated, intelligent DOES count for something when running the country.Finally!
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Just wondering: is getting pregnant at 17 also fucking stupid? 🙂
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Getting a PhD when there are no jobs is fucking stupid. So, I’m the biggest jerk.
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Living in a state that is so blue that my vote is meaningless seems pretty stupid right now. I should move to New Hampshire!
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I read someone on Twitter who said “Palin says she is just like my friends and family. My friends are assholes, I don’t want them to be President either.”
Intellectual curiosity is needed in any leadership role, especially this one.
The $5K insurance tax credit? $5K would buy us catastrophic coverage- $10K deductible per family member- no dental, no vision. I know of what I speak, that’s what we’ve had for the last year.
And our income is low enough this year that with four kids we won’t pay 5K in taxes anyway, making the credit worthless to us.
Give me real insurance options. Decent care at an affordable price.
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Laura, I love you guys. Your University of Chicago educations are showing. Careful now! but seriously…it is fucking stupid.
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RC, it depends on the people doing it.
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Well, I thought the ACLU was at its best when they struggled to safeguard the American Nazi Party parading through Skokie. I think Brooks has it right, on the Reeps doing poorly at making a home for intellect.
Where is AmyP on this? as a trends-right, educated, professor’s wife – AmyP do you think the Reeps are reaching out to you?
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Just a reminder. If you guys want a diverse comment section, you can’t fight. Please ignore people who annoy you. Please develop a thick skin, if you are challenged. I don’t have enough time to appease all parties, sort through the accusations, or act as the blog dominatrix. I will have to close the comments or even shut down the blog, if this becomes too much of a burden for me.
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I am not a member of any party–my political beliefs are not well represented in either of the big two, at the most simplistic level because I support both abortion and RKBA. I have friends in all parts of the political map, though, and the conservative ones (not all Republicans) don’t mean that being intelligent is bad. In fact they’d say it’s typical of the progressives to reframe what they really say that way, because progressives believe all conservatives are either stupid or evil.
You can be intelligent without believing that your intelligence (and more importantly, your education) entitles you to decide how other people should lead their lives. The regular guy they like might well have a masters in engineering or even English lit, but doesn’t think that endows him or her with special wisdom outside that area; this is how the regular guy differs from the ones who call themselves the elites.
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Kai, I am a reluctant supporter of RKBA. I don’t like guns, I will never carry one, but after much thought I have come to believe that the Framers did intend for it to be a constitutional right. I think all rights can be regulated to some degree, so I will support gun control, and I think some kinds of guns/weapons can/should be banned. But barring amendment, I can’t see banning all guns.
FWIW, from this pacifist/gun-hater.
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“You can be intelligent without believing that your intelligence (and more importantly, your education) entitles you to decide how other people should lead their lives.”
Hmh, characterized this way, I can see why the “regular guy” might be offended by people who think they are intelligent. And, I have nothing to say for people who think that their intelligence or education gives them a special right to tell others how they should live (especially outside of their field of expertise). But, I need to reconcile this with the fact that I believe that the immunologists are the best folks to give advice about vaccinations, and that the engineers should build bridges. Yeah, those folks to tell other people how they should live (and sometimes they mandate it by law, in the form of building codes & vaccination rules & so on). I simply don’t see how we can get around that, given that I’m not willing to let the “regular guy” decide which plans we should use for our local bridge.
And, I do think that there’s something I call intelligence — which is the ability to acquire (learn), analyze, and synthesize information — that is extremely important, independent of education or expertise. There’s no reason to assume that intelligence doesn’t exist in any particular individual, but not valuing it is something I simply don’t understand.
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I think the stupidest part of the video would be the conflation of having a PhD and being an intellectual. In fact, I think the extent to which “average people” fear or envy “smart people” (or at least, people who have devoted years of study to a subject) is proportional to their unfamiliarity with academia. The average person would, as laura points out, be pretty perplexed and amused by the adjunct pulling down a cool $18k/year or even the tenure-track new prof at a marginal and overpriced college who will never make above $60k in his lifetime. They just don’t realize to what extent academia is made up of these sort of people. (They also don’t realize how much junk research academics produce, and how totally unimpressive the fruit of all those years of study can be.)
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“I think the stupidest part of the video would be the conflation of having a PhD and being an intellectual.”
Or just how many years you can be ABD.
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Orwell wrote, “some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals could believe them.”
There are folks for whom life-of-the-mind is utterly central. Some of them are in the academy, and when they are well engaged, it’s great for them and often for their students. Some of them go off in angels-dancing-on-pinheads endeavors, too, and it’s sometimes hard to tell which you are doing from inside.
And then in the society, we have really lathered up the whole ‘school’ enterprise with financial success, high social class, worth. It’s a pretty toxic brew.
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Shorter version of myself: if you want people to stop hating “educated people”, find a way to get them to read First Person columns from the Chronicle.
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“But, I need to reconcile this with the fact that I believe that the immunologists are the best folks to give advice about vaccinations, and that the engineers should build bridges. Yeah, those folks to tell other people how they should live (and sometimes they mandate it by law, in the form of building codes & vaccination rules & so on). I simply don’t see how we can get around that, given that I’m not willing to let the “regular guy” decide which plans we should use for our local bridge.”
I’m currently reading a book by William Easterley called “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.” There have been many spectacular foreign aid failures involving conscientious highly-trained development experts, and Easterly thinks that a lot of the unintended consequences have been due to a lack of feedback and buy-in from native populations, as well as a lack of incentive structures for success. (He’s got an interesting case study about the failure of a mosquito-net program that was handing them out for free to everybody, followed by the success of a program that had nurses sell them below cost to mothers coming in for antenatal clinics, with the nurses getting a cut of the proceeds.)
The chapter I’m in the middle of discusses the disastrous consequences of the “shock therapy” that top US economists applied to Russia in the 90s, that historical episode being one of the things we have to thank for Russia’s hostility toward the US today. The Harvard economists who were involved have forgotten more about economics than you and I have ever known, but they still managed to give Russia negative 40% growth during the late 90s, because there were a lot of local factors that they were not aware of or didn’t take into consideration.
In another example, Easterley talks about how Western lawyers and accountants rewrote Eastern European legal codes after the fall of Communism. “Eastern European legislatures passed the Western-drafted laws, satisfying aid conditions for the West, but the new laws on paper had little effect on actual rules of conduct. At the behest of donors, Albania dutifully passed a bankruptcy law in 1994, one of the elements of property rights. Only one bankruptcy case ever made it to the Albanian courts, even after a national pyramid scheme in the mid 1990s led to losses for investors amounting to 60 percent of GDP.”
Anyway, my point is that letting experts work unmolested in their areas of expertise may sound good, but in practice, it’s not a good idea. The native population (rather in Russia or Malawi or the US) is a resistant material, and has to be reckoned with.
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bj: If I hire an engineer to build a bridge or an immunologist to make recommendations about vaccine schedules, then I’m granting her expertise and mastery in the area she was trained. I don’t think her opinion on social issues (like whether society ought to allow gay marriage–which I support) is more important than mine because she has a college degree and I don’t. The elites don’t restrict their recommendations to areas in which they are trained or credentialed *and* are recognized authorities; they give the impression that they believe their eliteness is general rather than specific.
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rather should be “whether”
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” they give the impression that they believe their eliteness is general rather than specific.”
How?
Immunologists & bridge engineers are giving opinions as experts on gay marriage?
In my experience, I know no one who disses people without college degrees simply because they don’t have a degree (though I know that a lot of people feel that way, when they’re stuck in environments where the degree is presumed). Yes, formal education does *trying* (though doesn’t always succeed) to teach people certain habits of mind, but someone without a college degree can have them. I certainly never assume that the un-degreed opinion on an area on which we have an equal lack of expert knowledge (oh, say building bridges) is any more suspect than my own (assuming that we’ve made equal efforts to understand whatever information is available to us).
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Exhibit 1: my many, many lefty friends (online and meatspace), all with college degrees, stating as if it were fact that anyone who voted for Bush in the last election was either stupid or corrupt.
Exhibit 2: Those same lefty friends arguing that working class (i.e., not degreed intellectuals) people who voted for Republicans were “voting against their own econcomic interest,” because they are too stupid to vote in their own interests (that is, misled by the Republicans, that is, too stupid to recognize when they’re being misled). Aside-it never seems to occur to my lefty friends that since they vote against their economic interests (being mostly middle- and upper-income folks who’d pay less taxes under a Republican government), it is a tad hypocritical to bemoan when other people fail to vote in *their* economic interests. I mean, if lefties can vote for reasons other than economics, like social justice and equal rights regardless of gender and sexual preference, then righties can vote for non-economic reasons like protecting the fetus and keeping Christmas displays in the courthouse without being stupid or corrupt.
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