Why do you feel there is a mistrust for intelligence in this country?

[Poiuyt]

With GW Bush being elected twice and the popularity of politicians like Sarah Palin, it seems like being intelligent is not only considered not necessary to lead our country, but also considered a personality flaw. Why is there suspicion and even disdain for intelligence?

[EV_Ares]

1. That is easy, look at who the teabaggers are, look at who supported GWB, look at who

supports Palin, listens to Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity & Palin. You have your christian right & of course right-wing. Not your most intelligent group of Americans & all of them are suspicious of intelligence, science, universities because none or most of them are able to comprehend any of it. There is a dumbing down of our country.

[Drale]

2. Because people of intelligence are different

and people with low IQ's don't like things that are different.

[SharonAnn]

52. And educated people, too. Worst are intelligent, educated people.

[northoftheborder]

3. I haven't a clue. Makes me so discouraged to know this.

[nadinbrzezinski]

4. It is long but two books highly recommended

The Age of American Unreason by Jacoby

http://www.amazon.com/Age-American-Unreason-Susan-Jacoby/dp/0375423745

And Hoffstader's

Anti Intellectualism in American Life

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170

Truth is that it is part of the american psyche, that mistrust for them book learnin' and 'xperts... and did not start today. Been around for a long time. Like all the way to the Colonial period.

[provis99]

5. so why did Obama win, then? Why did Clinton win?

Both of them seem to be exceptionally smart.

[jmowreader]

7. I know why

Obama and Clinton have one thing in common: they ran for president after a Bush was in office. They won not because they were smart but because they Were Not Republicans.

[customerserviceguy]

45. That didn't work so well for Kerry

But, your theory is right two out of three times.

[remember2000forever]

11. Boy Am I gonna be flaimed..(is that what you call it on DU?)

Because, as Hillary said: and I'm paraphrasing:
" The Sky Opened Up, And Obama's Here To Save Us" We didn't like those sentiments back then. Well, how's it working out now? Boy am I am trouble. (Cringe)

[Mojeoux]

16. Huh? This is not a "FLAME"

I just don't understand you. Was Hillary mocking Obama's intellectual background? She's a highly educated woman as well. I don't get yer drift.

[remember2000forever]

33. I Guess that I am disappointed in him,

I expected more than the conciliatory "give backs " to the Republicans. When I said Hillary said those things I really think she knew, being more experienced, that all he promised was not possible.
BYW... I voted for Obama in the primaries.

[marmar]

20. And Hillary would have been soooo different.......

[Poiuyt]

14. I think Clinton won because he was perceived as being a good ol boy

It's true, he was a Rhodes Scholar, but I don't think he was thought of as being an intellect.

Obama is, of course, quite intelligent, but I feel like he's afraid to use his intelligence and instead tries to appease the Republican idiots. That's a broad overstatement, but that's the impression I have.

John Kerry was criticized for being a New England intellectual elite as I recall.

[pitohui]

44. the economy stupid

if you don't know why obama won, why clinton won, why carter won... you need to check your own pulse and IQ

for an intelligent caring man to win there has to be HUGE overriding considerations

most times, for most of human history, obama, clinton, and carter don't win, evil wins, you pick out less than three decades out of six thousand years of human history and pretend that it means that people are intelligent and like intelligent people? sheesh...

[Cirque du So-What]

6. To quote Cotton Mather:

'the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee'

As you can see, the anti-intellectual streak runs deep in this country...for diverse reasons:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism

[Mojeoux]

19. Ths is classic Cirque, like eating the apple of the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden.

Somehow Christianity always implies that SEX was the secret knowledge. Thet reasoned that was why women HAD to suffer so much in childbirth. (Damn ol' Eve)
They only started giving women pain meds in labor in the super Catholic parts of Ireland in the 70's!

[jody]

8. Is it "mistrust for intelligence" or "mistrust for lack thereof"? I know elected officials from

both parties with IQs near average so IQ is not restricted to any political party.

Just because an elected official has an opinion different from yours or mine on an issue that is neither scientific nor mathematical means simply that we disagree and there's no way to resolve such issues if they are divisive and polarizing.

Life is full of such disagreements. :shrug:

[Curmudgeoness]

9. Them thar no-it-alls make me feel stoopid. nt

[RKP5637]

10. The ignorant only trust ignorance and that requires little brain-power effort. Also, despite

all of the rhetoric to the contrary, for a long time America was not considered the smartest bunch of tools in the tool shed. We had a good run of it after WWII, not much competition, and with the proudness of ignorance today we are regressing fast. China and India are going to surpass the US and there's not enough interest in American to do much about it ... because so many are proud of ignorance.

[Arugula Latte]

12. A key factor is religion.

Seems like post WWII Europe embraced reason and knowledge while rejecting religion and unfortunately millions of Americans still think the sky god made the Earth in six days and put all life forms on Earth as they are now and a guy who was born from a virgin who had been knocked up by the sky god is going to come back any day now, and on and on ...

[RagAss]

13. America in the Age of the Cretin

[Beartracks]

15. Freethinkers are notorious for upsetting apple carts.

Education and intelligence generate critical thinking and analysis, creative solutions, an increased ability to see through bullshit... A concerted effort among apple cart owners to couple intelligence with rabble-rousing can eventually produce a cumulative perception among many people that intelligence is over-rated, bad, even dangerous. And thus, the apple cart owners can keep more and more apples.

Or something like that.

-------------

[EFerrari]

17. Because it's easier to manipulate ignorant people who can't think for themselves. n/t

[dimbear]

36. That's the gist of it. There's a long long history of clever sharpsters

cheating rubes not only in America but in the European folk tradition. Yankee peddlers, carpetbaggers, con men...the list goes on.

And with Bernie Madoff and the like still in the world, who's to say it's wrong?

[OKNancy]

18. Probably because they feel inadequate and they are distrustful. Some with good

reason because many intelligent people make the mistake of being hateful or snobbish to those less blessed.
They ridicule their choice of entertainment, the foods they like, the places they enjoy eating, their attire and where they shop.

Of course most here equate intelligence with being liberal. I actually do too. However, I do believe in that old adage...

A conservative loves the individual and hates the masses; the liberal loves the masses and hates the individual.

Of course rational thought sometimes doesn't help when trying to explain why Palin is a dumbass to someone who loves her.
But I hope all here will remember that when talking to or interacting with anti-intellectauls, don't come of like a haughty snob.

Many DUers come off that way when they write here. I wonder if they do in real life too.

[patrice]

39. good advice. We often just prove their prejudices about us correct.

[Davis_X_Machina]

21. It is endemic in democracies...

...the more universal the franchise, the stronger the mistrust.

As Mr. Dooley put it: "In a democracy, ivry man is as good as another, and ofthen a great deal better.'

[timtom]

22. It has always been thus...

all through history (at least, Western history.Can't speak for Asia...)

[Bluenorthwest]

23. In what way is Palin popular?

Seriously. Prove to me she is actually popular. She does not move units, she does not get ratings, she does not fill halls. She's had one election outside Alaska, and she not only lost, but she was more mocked and derided than any candidate for such an office in the history of mockery.
So sell me. You say she's popular, and that proves something. You don't even have to prove she's thought of as a politician. I do not think she is, but just show me a metric in any market that would make her qualify for popular. 300 Million Americans.

[justiceischeap]

24. Because the Republican party did a really good job of painting intelligence as 'elitist'

Just look at the Kerry campaign to see what I mean. If you really think about it, the (R)s in the past were the ones who ran the banks, the corporations and the Dems were the hard working man. Somewhere after Vietnam and the Civil Rights era, the Republican party started reinventing itself. It probably solidified with Reagan--an actor, then was taken to extremes with Bush--an underachieving but politically savvy savant. Say what you will about Bush's intelligence but the guy grew up in politics and he knew how to play the game.

[LawnLover]

31. The Founding Fathers were extremely intelligent "elitists" who

believed they were more mentally equipped to make decisions about the formation of this country. And they were.

I'm sure there's been some resentment from the very beginning.

[Odin2005]

25. Authoritarian Religion and it's associated reactionary pseudo-populism.

Smart, educated people are viewed suspiciously as anti-God, anti-America, anti-Morality, and arrogant. In many circles there is a conspiracy theory involving "Cultural Marxism", academics supposedly encouraging socially-liberal policies in order to destroy society and impose Communism. :crazy:

[ipaint]

26. The educated classes and their institutions- unions, universities, churches and politicians

abandoned the poor, working poor and working class for 3 decades now.

Chris Hedges explains it-

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/LiberalCl&showFullAbstract=1

and Joe Bageant has written extensively on it-

http://www.joebageant.com/

The educated liberal class won't fight and the lower classes get the message.

[leftstreet]

32. +1

[patrice]

41. +++++1

[WildEyedLiberal]

48. + 1 billion

Some of the snotty elitist responses to this thread just reinforce your point.

[cynatnite]

27. Because we read too much...

That's the argument my RW mother made to me. If I didn't read so much, I wouldn't disagree with her all the time. LOL

[david13]

28. It's an old american tradition. Read the book "Anti Intellectualism

in American Life", about 1963 by Richard Hofstadler.
He traces it back to the beginning, and it may have come over from Europe, I don't know.
I think the other thing is the word intelligence, as in military intelligence, and central intelligence agency.
Misnomers.
It's really misinformation and propaganda.
Look at "Homeland Security". Homeland? Where did they come up with that preposterous word? A hillbilly convention?
Can you think of anything more hokey or homely sounding? I can't.
And security. From what? Gamma rays from outer space? There is no such thing as security.
dc

[ipaint]

29. Because educated people can be really stupid.

"Either we begin to militantly stand against the coal, oil and natural gas industry or we do not. Either we defy pre-emptive war and occupation or we do not. Either we demand that the criminal class on Wall Street be held accountable for the theft of billions of dollars from small shareholders whose savings for retirement or college were wiped out or we do not. Either we defend basic civil liberties, including habeas corpus and the prosecution of torturers or we do not. Either we turn on liberal institutions, including the Democratic Party, which collaborate with these corporations or we do not. Either we accept that the age of political compromise is dead, that the corporate systems of power are instruments of death that can be fought only by physical acts of resistance or we do not. If the liberal class remains gullible and weak, if it continues to speak to itself and others in meaningless platitudes, it will remain as responsible for our enslavement as those it pompously denounces."

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/where_liberals_go_to_feel_good_20110124/


The pomposity in this thread is nauseating.

[WildEyedLiberal]

49. Could not agree more

The left in Amerca, frustrated with its inability to actually effect meaningful political change, satisfies itself with circle-jerking praise-a-thons congratulating itself for its superiority, which only serves to further marginalize it, and so the cycle continues. And how many who post in this thread are too consumed with their own myopic self-aggrandizement to see it? They're more worried about being "better" than the ignorant teeming masses than they are about actually building a majority (which would, by definition, include some of those mouth-breathing idiot "others") to actually accomplish anything they claim to care about. It's disgusting.

[LawnLover]

30. Because people are fucking stupid. nt.

[Taitertots]

34. Smart people will tell you when you are wrong

Even worse than that, they have evidence that proves it. Smart people enjoy this because it furthers their personal development. Stupid people hate this because it makes them aware of how stupid they are and undermines their self esteem.

Have you ever shown an intelligent person that they were wrong? They will thank you if your evidence supports your conclusion.

[frebrd]

35. Intelligence is antithetical......

to religious fundamentalism.

[RandomThoughts]

37. Great question.

The first answer I thought of was culture celebration of lack of thought.

However back in grade school, I learned that people don't like to think they are not as smart as someone else. So for humility and kindness, hiding smarts, or not using it for some self feeling of superior was the best idea. Because smarts do not define superiority in any way, and it can make someone feel bad, unless it is to help someone, there are concepts that many people don't need to learn, but that assumes that they are taken care of somewhere in society. And I noticed the people that should be doing that were using those things just for their own advantage.

However, once it became necessary to change the world, beer and travel money, have I mentioned that I am due beer and travel money? Then it was necessary to think on how that could be done.

However I didn't figure out a method for that correction, so I post music and tv clips here.

[janet118]

38. From Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas?

The Republicans today are the party of anti-intellectualism, of rough frontier contempt for sophisticated ideas and pantywaist book-learning. Harvard Hates America, screamed an early backlash classic, and today's GOP hates Harvard right back. Today's Republicans are doing what the Whigs did in the 1840s: putting on backwoods accents, telling the world about their log-cabin upbringings, and raging against the over-educated elites. (Even George W. Bush, Yale '68, has complained about how Easterners regard his Texas cronies "with just the utmost disdain.") The symbols of aristocracy have to be trashed so that the real lives of the aristocracy might be made ever more comfortable.

Much has been invested in this war against intellectuals: in addition to all the familiar best-selling denunciations of life on campus, conservatives have built counter-institutions and alternative professional associations from which they denounce the claims of traditional academia; they have set up think tanks that support writers strictly for partisan reasons; they publish pseudo-scholarly magazines that openly do away with the tradition of peer review.

All this has not come without a certain amount of pain for old-fashioned Republicans who, like so many of our Kansas Mods, are often highly educated suburban professionals and no strangers to intellectual achievement. Expertise is something such people deplore only when it is wielded by government bureaucrats or interfering liberals. But having spent decades unleashing the ferocious language of anti-intellectualism on federal commissions that, say, want to study the effects of their businesses on the groundwater, these Republicans are now chagrined to find the same language turned on them for, say, believing in the theory of evolution. Here, too, the old-fashioned Republicans are reaping the whirlwind, trapped by the success of their own strategies.

[Hannah Bell]

40. Because "intelligence" or the pretense of it has been used to push people down &

disparage them.

Kind of like your post, though I'm sure it's not intentional (sincerely). A number of underlying assumptions in it.

[unkachuck]

42. much of what passes....

....for 'intelligence' in this country is just bullshit....I'm not saying dumb is desirable but I am suggesting people may not know whom to trust after they've been burned a number of times....

....'intelligence' brought us the current economic meltdown and crisis....'intelligence' hasn't been creating too many jobs lately either....'intelligence' is still finding new ways to slaughter people by the millions....

....for many people 'intelligence' is suspect and code for 'trust me'....

[bhikkhu]

53. Wealth, greed and power are not equivalent to intelligence

though the people wielding those three are happy enough to have people think so.

[pitohui]

43. because most people are stupid

the average/mean intelligence level is an IQ of 100, now think abt all the folk you know w. an IQ of 100..they're fucking stupid and you don't choose to socialize with them unless they're family or there is some other reason you're forced to associate w. morons..you select who you associate w. and then kid yourself that most people have a brain because most people you choose to associate with have a brain...classic selection bias

we may call ourselves homo sapiens, the wise man, but the truth is that the average natural intelligence of the human race is just not that high, the majority of folks are stupid and that is what destroys us

and stupid people are dangerous, because most stupid people don't have a creative imagination, which allows them to experience empathy -- hence why the "average" person is so cruel

it takes intelligence to be kind which is why kindness is relatively rare

[customerserviceguy]

46. I think this goes back to the 1960's

It was Kennedy's 'best and brightest' who got us tangled up in Vietnam. It was when science and technology was starting to be questioned as being the solution to all the problems of mankind, to a cause of a growing number of them.

George Wallace got a lot of mileage in 1968 going after what he called "pointy-headed intellectuals". There was a growing disdain for people who were telling other people how to live from an ivory tower.

[nadinbrzezinski]

50. It goes back to the colonial period

I recommended a couple books up thread on this.

And somebody else posted a quote from Cotton Matther that is just a classic. It comes and goes in waves.

[patrice]

47. For the same reasons that there is mistrust for the non-intelligent. The demands each makes upon

the other are not easy to meet, the challenges of adapting to one another are more than most people want to meet.

Almost no one on either side has/takes the time to commit to the long work of actually communicating honestly with one another.

[JVS]

51. It's not as though America's intelligentsia has been doing regular people any favors.

Education in this country is one just one more tool that the privileged use against the deprived.