We all know some wanted the Bell Curve to be definitive proof that the White Guys had it All: Intelligence, Looks, Perfect Blond locks of hair that can Move in the Wind (the last detail more important than you'll ever know...).
But one very crazy irony of being a right wing bigot, is that maybe, deep inside, you do not like smartness.
No snobby, arrogant North East Liberal for you, hell no!
And they can take their uppity Negroes straight to their cold uppity town with them!
You know the drill...
So... I guess they'll try to engineer their master race without a single intelligent being in it.
Palin and McCain were really a small, disturbing inkling into the future...
Crude jokes are my way of dealing with this absurdity. But Krugman just discovered the political consequence of this trend.
Seriously though, most understood where it was all going when Gore conceded to the Bush Dynasty.
You’re So Vain
Jonathan Chait and Robert Waldmann, in slightly different ways, highlight a crucial dynamic in American political debate: the extent to which public figures are punished for actually knowing what they’re talking about.
It goes like this: Person A says “Black is white” — perhaps out of ignorance, although more often out of a deliberate effort to obfuscate. Person B says, “No, black isn’t white — here are the facts.”
And Person B is considered to have lost the exchange — you see, he came across as arrogant and condescending.
I had, I have to admit, hoped that the nation’s experience with George W. Bush — who got within hanging-chad distance of the White House precisely because Al Gore was punished for actually knowing stuff — would have cured our discourse of this malady. But no. Why not?
Chait professes himself puzzled by the right’s intellectual insecurity. Me, not so much. Here’s how I see it: in our current political culture, the background noise is overwhelmingly one of conservative platitudes. People who have strong feelings about politics but are intellectually incurious tend to pick up those platitudes, and repeat them in the belief that this makes them sound smart. (Ezra Klein once described Dick Armey thus: “He’s like a stupid person’s idea of what a thoughtful person sounds like.”)
Inevitably, then, such people react with rage when they’re shown up on their facts or basic logic — it’s an attack on their sense of self-worth.
The truly sad thing, though, is the way much news reporting goes along with the condescension meme. That’s Waldmann’s point. You really, really might have expected that the Bush experience would give reporters pause — that they might at least ask themselves, “Isn’t it my job to ask whether a politician is right, as opposed to how he comes across?”
But NOOOO! [/Belushi]
From the pages of the New York Times.
Oh No! Another uppity Liberal Media....
