When did being smart go out of fashion? When did it become OK to make fun of the people who knew things and praise the idiots? When did brawn win out over brains?
George W. Bush. Yes, I know, the folks on the left tend to blame poor old W for almost everything — two disastrous wars, a near-depression, an unregulated Wall Street run amok, an upper class made all the richer through three rounds of tax cuts that is currently whining because their tax cuts might not be as big as everyone else’s — but it is true that one of W’s secrets of success was the fact that he seemed like everyone else. He got things wrong, he mangled his words, he looked confused from time to time. He talked with his mouth full. He had a twangy, if somewhat unidentifiable, accent.
He didn’t seem to be smarter than us, and that made a lot of people vote for him. Oh, sure, Bill Clinton was pretty sharp, could speak off the cuff, could reel off facts and figures just as easily as he could devour a donut, but he seemed OK anyway. Al Gore, on the other hand… he seemed so, well… patrician. Upper crust. He had a suffix in his name — “Junior” — for crying out loud.
So smart was out. Dumb was in. And it seems to be staying that way. Americans, in record numbers, don’t believe in evolution, don’t believe that humans are affecting the earth’s climate, don’t believe that affordable health care is a Good Thing, don’t believe that politicians should know what they’re doing.
We’ll address that last point first. Americans don’t believe that politicians should know what they are doing. They believe that the people we elect to run the government should be just like us, should know next to nothing about the world around us, should know nothing about the law. And since we are, for the most part, a bunch of idiots, we Americans believe that the people we elect to run the government should also be a bunch of idiots.
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