Follow up on Deep Thoughts

Paul Campos explains why ignorance and stupidity have become a feature, not a bug, for conservatives, in a post titled The Cult of Stupidity. This is pretty much what I was trying to say in my previous post, but he spells out the details more clearly. I hope he won't mind quoting at length:

(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.

Note number 3 in particular. The point is, if you believe that, you can believe anything.