Republicans Cultivate Anti-Intellectualism

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Updated December 18:

In the comments section, Uncle Milton disagrees with me when I say that the Republican Party has been cultivating anti-intellectualism for a long time now. He goes on to list a number of bright Republican politicians, but concedes Gerald Ford was a dunce.

They truth is this. The Republicans have been cultivating anti-intellectualism and just being shit-ignorant in general for a long time now.

In part this has roots in pro-business culture. For a long time in the US, the business and money crowd was aggressively anti-education and anti-intellectual.

I've worked around rich people a lot so I know it still exists. For many years as I was growing up, I could not count the businessmen who delighted in telling me that they either hadn't spent a day in college or didn't have a degree. The idea was that you didn't need a degree to make money, and college just got in the way of making a buck.

One great thing about MBA-addiction is that we seem to have done away with that silliness once and for all. Now, for an entry-level position at many corporations and other institutions, a BA or BS from an accredited university is required. Increasingly, a degree is indeed required in order to make decent money.

I've also spent a lot of my life around some real intellectuals, including the poetry crowd, the artist and art crowd, the writer crowd and the Hollywood crowd. A lot collected books and art, listened to opera, went to art movies, the theater, seminars and dance performances, and could bend your ear about all sorts of highbrow stuff. As a general rule, while these folks were not poor, they were not rich by any stretch.

The truth is that the Republican Party cultivates nothing less than hatred for educated people, intellectualism, knowledge, culture and brains. They hate college professors, they hate intellectuals, they hate Hollywood.

Of course many Republican politicians, thinkers, authors and voters are very smart. Sure they have advanced degrees, law degrees and medical degrees. Sure they write books and whatnot.

But the message and tone of the party is deep contempt and hatred for education, college degrees, advanced degrees, intellectuals, eggheads, all of that.

Ronald Reagan was a fucking dumbass and a hardcore anti-intellectual. He was not smart enough to be either governor or President. I don't care what his IQ was.

A friend of my father's met him once at a party in Los Angeles when Reagan was head of the Screen Actors Guild, and said he was really friendly but not that smart. A friend of my grandmother's dated him in Iowa and said the exact same thing about him. That's what everyone said about him. She dumped him because he was too dumb for her.

It was under Reagan that anti-intellectualism was cultivated to an extreme degree. With every stupid, idiotic, dumb-fuck thing this moron said, the Republicans just cheered more and more. It was like the more stupid shit he said, the more delirious they were. They weren't ashamed at all. They were rolling in the mud.

They were finally sticking it to the ivory tower eggheads, the weenie desegregationist judges, Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativism" (a clever dig at academia) and Wallace's "pointy-headed liberals who can't even park their bicycles straight" (same thing). It was like a revenge party of stupid, and it carried on for most of a decade.

Gerald Ford is a very intelligent man with a very high IQ.

Richard Nixon was a very smart guy.

George Bush Sr. is not only extremely smart, but he is also a real intellectual.

George W. Bush is intelligent. I read a 5-6 page interview with him in a major news magazine once and I came away thinking, "All this time I thought this guy was dumb, but he's actually a bright fellow." But he is not a deep thinker, nor is he intellectual at all, and furthermore, he is unbelievably shit-ignorant.

He continues the aggressive cultivation of ignorance started with Reagan.

Sarah Palin, an intelligent woman who is also appallingly ignorant for the job she is running for, continues in Reagan's footsteps.

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