Last evening I dropped in on my son and found that he was hosting a party. It seems that my son is friends with a lot of fashion models....Well, "a lot" is probably the wrong term; there were seven that I met. Not big name ones, per se, but working ones nonetheless.
In chatting with his modeling friends I discovered that modeling in the fashion industry is a work situation in which the workers, the models, regardless of where they are from, compete with peers all over the world to get jobs. A designer wants models for a runway event or print engagement and the models who end up being chosen may be from a dozen different countries. American, French, Spanish, Italian, Ethiopian, South African, Mexican, Argentine, etc.models all competing to get the same job.
I thought that was interesting because I have seen folks on here griping about the challenges of competing with foreign labor. I think the complaints are nothing more than the bitching and moaning of people who just aren't willing to do what they need to do to competitively offer labor that buyers want to purchase.
Then, quite by chance, I come upon a small bevy of women who are very much regular women -- aside from being really good looking -- and who to get a job compete against foreign workers from around the world and on the most personal level possible, and they're thriving and making good livings. Do they get every modeling assignment they try for? No, but they keep at it and they get enough to make a decent living (the range is rather large, but the girls at the party ranged from ~$110K/year to $300K/year). Frankly, that's not bad money for being 18 to 20-something.
In order to compete with the world, you have to be better than the others, or at least on par.
The funny thing is the right seem to want to dumb down education, rather than beef it up. It's strange, when has less skills been more desirable? It hasn't, it's just the US seems to want to go after lower paid jobs that can make one person richer, and the rest poorer, rather than trying for hi tech jobs where people are better off. It's strange, China is pushing to make their young highly educated, to get better jobs, and the US is going in the opposite direction...
No one wants to "dumb down" education, except maybe those who put teacher union demands ahead of student needs, or prioritize social engineering ahead of teaching the basics, etc.
Actually there are plenty of people who want to dumb down education, the religious, those who want to own factories producing cheap shit with low paid workers that makes the rich person a lot of profit, like in China....
Among conservatives, the dumbing down transcends specific policies. It's an accursed movement. Even conservatives know that to be the case. Writing for the American Conservative, Daniel McCarthy notes:
In the years after Reagan but before the solidification of the talk radio/Fox/anti-Clinton right, there was much talk of a “conservative crack-up,” and the Pat Buchanan movement tried to carve out an identity that was conservative but not just part of the by-then-standard GOP formula:
Buchanan is remembered as a populist, which he was, but as David Brooks observed in a 1996 Weekly Standard piece (“Buchananism: An Intellectual Cause”), his movement was also rife with Ph.D.s and exhibited undeniable signs of intellectual vitality — a world removed from Sarah Palin and the Randian cliches of the Tea Party.
Television and radio, though, had a homogenizing effect on the right, and the tension between class (with a high tone) and ideology (rabble rousing) worked itself out, with the millionaires learning how to sound angry and enjoy it, and the grassroots getting trained to accept anger as a substitute for policy results. The populist New Right and Buchananite right lost their manpower to Roger Ailes, while the elite right gave up the fight for realism and broadmindedness.
[The
New Yorker's John] Cassidy is wrong to say of movement conservatism, “The tensions between its social and economic wings robbed it of any internal cohesion.” The wings of the GOP coalition over the last half-century have not primarily been separated by “issues” social or economic; they were separated by class markers and style. The ideological differences were secondary to those. But
now there’s a politically and economically successful, if brain dead, fusion of the classes. The rich sound like the poor, and the poor angrily demand policies that favor the rich. The only problem for the GOP is that external conditions — the real-world economy and the distaste younger people have for the Baby Boomers’ version of the Republican Party (and their version of Christianity) — are
eventually going to overpower this mercenary fusionism.
McCarthy is not alone. Acclaimed conservative
David Brooks in 2008 remarked:
Modern conservatism began as a movement of dissident intellectuals. Richard Weaver wrote a book called, “Ideas Have Consequences.” Russell Kirk placed Edmund Burke in an American context. William F. Buckley famously said he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. But he didn’t believe those were the only two options. His entire life was a celebration of urbane values, sophistication and the rigorous and constant application of intellect.
Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counter establishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind. But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts. This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.
Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts. What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.
Republicans have alienated the highly educated regions — Silicon Valley, northern Virginia, the suburbs outside of New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Raleigh-Durham. The West Coast and the Northeast are mostly gone. The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.
Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.
Brooks' points, are I think, well-taken. Republican politicians these days largely engage in crude intellectual-bashing and a plurality, maybe even majority, of them embrace ridiculous unscientific ideas, such as denial of evolution in favor of extreme forms of creationism. Curiously aspects of conservatism -- including free market economics -- which traditionally had limited appeal to intellectuals, have now found favor in learned American circles where it's understood that for better or worse, the U.S. comparative advantage, thus its economic position, is most facilely maximized by free trade.
More recently,
Kevin Williamson, in a lamentation about the literacy crisis in America -- something I'd never have thought exists, but my experiences on here have convinced me otherwise -- explains how Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy (thus subsequent win), and that of others like him, is only possible in a society that doesn’t read or think much.
Trump is something that could not happen in a nation that could read. This is the full-flower of post-literate politics. There are still individual Americans who can read, a fact for which writers should say daily prayers of gratitude. There are even communities of sort, and not only ladies’ pinot parties loosely organized around ’50 Shades of Grey. Conservatives are great readers, which is why the overwhelmingly left-leaning world of New York City publishing constantly is looking forward to the next offering from Mark Levin or Bill O’Reilly, whose works produce literary profit sufficient to subsidize the careers of any number of poets and high-minded novelists. But we are not a nation that reads, or a nation that shares a living tradition of serious contemporary literature, fiction or nonfiction.
The American Founders could have a conversation among themselves because they had in the main all consumed the same library of Greek and Roman classics, British and Continental literature ranging from fiction to political economy, legal literature, and the like. This did not ensure agreement or like-mindedness…What it ensured was literate and enlightened argument.
What Williamson gripes about is, at its heart, anti-intellectualism, and anti-intellectualism is overwhelmingly a Republican problem. Dim voters exist on both sides of the political aisle, of course. Americans may too perhaps be more doltish than in the past, but Trump’s platitudinous "Make America Great" slogan won over far more Republicans than Democrats. He’s
their problem, and he exists only because a sufficient number of conservatives want him to. A left-wing analogue of Trump was and is impossible in the Democratic Party. One observes that, like Trump, Bernie Sanders bucked the establishment quite similarly, but his political philosophy was consistent and clear, whereas Trump offered nothing in the way of substantive content.
Mind you, it’s not that conservatives don’t read; it’s that they only read or listen to people like Mark Levin, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, who are conservative entrepreneurs profiting from blinkered rage, ireful petulance that fed Trump’s campaign and succors even now his idless presidency and boundless ego. Those characters don’t propound a serious or coherent worldview for one simple reason: they don’t have one. They’re entertainers chasing ratings. These forces and farces impelled the Tea Party movement; they define the Republican Party now, and there’s simply no functional equivalent on the left.
I’m deeply sympathetic to Williamson’s argument, but one can’t lament the death of intelligent discourse in this country without conceding that one party -- and the media-industrial complex supporting it -- is more responsible than the other. The GOP is the party of Fox News and talk radio now,
not the National Review, and that’s the problem.
In conclusion, you are correct. It's not deliberately a policy thing. It's not because the smart conservatives aren't the ones surrounding Trump. They're not the ones making policy. No, the dumbing down is the result of policy so profoundly stupid that the country has no alternative but that of rearing an entire generation of even more deucedly moronic, feeble-minded, sub-literate mental midgets than are the clods making the rules.
