Braininess Is Now the Brand
Peter Beinart notes:
“Bush’s and DeLay’s attacks reflected a shift in the
culture of the GOP. As late as 1994, according to the Pew Research Center,
voters who had graduated college were 15 points more likely to identify as
Republicans than Democrats, and voters with graduate degrees were almost evenly
split between the two parties. By 2017, college graduates’ partisan leanings
had flipped: They now favored Democrats by 15 points. Among Americans with
graduate degrees, the shift has been even starker. The Democratic advantage,
which stood at two points in 1994, had grown to 32 points by 2017.
As a result, the educational composition of the two
parties has diverged. From 1997 to 2017, the share of registered Republican
voters who finished college stayed the same. Among Democrats, it rose by 15
points. This shift has influenced the way the two parties see education itself.
In 2010, Democrats were seven points more likely than Republicans to say that
colleges and universities have a positive effect on America. By 2017, they were
36 points more likely.”
The way Americans regard sports heroes versus intellectuals speaks volumes by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
“Anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, even flat-earthers are on the rise. Part of the reason for this is the promotion of fuzzy thinking as a positive political statement. All those people who were told in school that their opinions lack any meaningful support and are filled with logical fallacies can now band together in shared ignorance masquerading as conservative ethos. They get to thumb their noses at the “elite” thinkers….
We should have a healthy attitude of skepticism regarding experts because they have not always been proven right. But skepticism isn’t the same as believing nutty conspiracy theories. Skepticism means requiring evidence through scientific method (something that ushered in the Enlightenment). Instead, we even have what psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which people of low knowledge have the illusion that their opinions are superior to those of experts. They like to tout their innate “common sense”, which throughout history has been proven to be the worst kind of sense. Worse, because they eschew logic, politicians have targeted them with a constant barrage of emotional gobbledygook reasoning to pump up their egos without challenging their minds. They are led around by the nose, voting how they are told but thinking they are independent.”