The cult of stupidity

My friend Steve suggests that Sarah Palin’s big mistake was being born about 15 years too early:

If she emerged now, with her age 44 looks and what initially seemed like plain-spoken real American folk wisdom, she’d be on the fast track to the White House. Rich Lowry’s starbursts would be even brighter.

In 2008, the idea that being a complete know-nothing was bad in national politics still had some sway. It was declining rapidly but it was there. Palin fell from prominence by showing that she was dumb. You probably can’t do that now.

Fortunately as Alaska’s single rep she could only do so much damage. As the continuation of a trend though, where you end up with a Congress of Palins, Walkers, Cawthorns, Tubervilles, Boeberts, Gosars, and Taylor Greenes, it’s quite bad.

I think this is right, although it doesn’t mention the particularly salient fact that Palin played Joan the Baptist to the Lord and Personal Savior of the American worshipers of stupidity for its own sake, Donald J. Trump, very stable genius, and Ivy League graduate (not a lot of people know that).

Why are rank ignorance and stupidity, whether real or feigned, not merely not disqualifying characteristics for contemporary right wing American political leaders, but actual requirements for those who aspire to become King of the Idiots, aka the head of today’s Republican party?

Some closely inter-related reasons include:

(1) Hatred of intellectuals in general, and academics in particular. Anti-intellectualism in American life is as old as the Republic, but has certainly gotten more overtly intense in the Trump era. In fact in mainstream American cultural discourse, let alone on the explicit right wing, the very word “intellectual” is more than faintly ridiculous and disreputable, to the point where it’s almost a requirement that it be preceded by the modifier “so-called.”

(2) Citations to “common sense,” as an antidote to the absurd things intellectuals believe. Bari Weiss’s SubStack is called Common Sense, which is an example of how anybody who cites common sense as a core principle of intellectual life is either a grifter, or a fool, or more likely both.

(3) Dogmatic belief in some sort of fundamentalist religion, usually evangelical Protestantism, but sometimes the most reactionary forms of Catholicism. Religious fundamentalism is incompatible with intellectual life, which more than any other single reason accounts for why the base of the Republican party is as a matter of first principles opposed to any form of genuine critical inquiry.

(4) Class resentment. This is a complex factor, but graduating from college, and most especially an elite college, is still an important marker of upper middle or upper class status, which means that for many people, especially white working and middle class religious fundamentalists, the primary formal institutions of intellectual life in America elicit deep feelings of class envy and anger. (This factor leads to the amusing contortions of so many upper class Republican politicians to present themselves as Plain Country Folk to the voters, in a desperate attempt to get those voters to forget that these politicians are in fact first and foremost themselves upper class defenders of the plutocracy.)

(5) The rise of internet autodidacts, who have done their own research, and don’t need communist sympathizers with fancy degrees who buy $30 per pound exotic cheeses at Whole Foods to explain things to people who are dead set on making up their own minds, after they look at the evidence themselves, instead of depending on some so-called “experts” to tell them what to believe.

Anyway the Palin campaign in the fall of 2008 — 14 years ago! — turns out to have been its own rough beast, slouching toward a world of proudly aggressive stupidity, amplified endlessly by the “uncensored” — meaning completely unedited — world of social media and its manipulators, who now plague us on any and every subject under the Sun.