usmbguest5318
Gold Member
Quoting an email from Irina Viktorovna Kaverzina to one of her family members, the most recent Dept. of Justice indictment of 13 Russian individuals, like Helios and Apollo's beams, strips away the penumbra under which wallowed the wantonly moribund fatuity of Americans who've hewn to Trumpian and right wing ideology, most notably among them Donald Trump and his spokespersons. Reading the indictment observes that Kaverzina wrote, “I created all these pictures and posts, and the Americans believed that it was written by their people.” In consideration of the pictures, posts and rally events Russians deployed to deceive American right wing nitwitted, that statement is punctuates even Kaverzina's incredulity at American partisans' willingness to cleave to the most preposterous of notions.
Of course, it's no wonder that Russians chose to advance Trump's candidacy. They saw as did many others that healthy skepticism of accepted knowledge has morphed into prideful, self-satisfied ignorance and active hostility to the very idea of sagacity, wisdom and experience. Across American society, Trumpkins resent intellectual authority, resisting and disregarding it at every opportunity and with near universal conviction that every opinion ostensibly holds equal weight. This leveling of viewpoints, accelerated by digital technologies and platforms, has further lowered the barriers to participation and opened the floodgates for those deucedly bereft of proper education and experientially obtained professional portfolio.
Not only was it clear to them that Clinton was far less susceptible to their wiles and entreaties, but also, from the feedback the Russian government almost certainly received from multiple Russians who'd interacted with Trump, there were multiple credible sources in the U.S. that had for years attested to Trump's intractable mental midgetry. Quite simply the Russians knew damn well those observers/sources and their remarks were thoroughly credible. They knew too that there were and remain among the Conservative electorate tens of millions of poorly educated dunces who aren't given to cogent thought, be that due to indolence or ineptitude. They knew too that Trump is just like them but for the fact that he happens to be wealthy.
The thing is that it didn't have to be that way. The occasion of anti-intellectualism within the GOP has long been lamented by Liberals and Conservatives.
Anti-intellectualism -- defined as "resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life" -- in America, of course, has deep roots in American history, traversing the domains of religion, politics, business, and education. Beginning in the 1720s, the Great Awakening swept across colonial America, encompassing Christian revivalist and evangelical movements that rejected clerical learning and cerebral, doctrinal worship in favor of ecstatic emotion, inner spiritual conviction, and mass conversion. Though founded and first led by patrician intellectuals, the nation had ,by the early 19th century, sidelined its them, giving primacy instead to a Jacksonian popular democracy that valorized coarseness and so-called common sense over cultivation and formal training. This cult of character and direct, practical experience extended to the realm of business, where the uneducated, self-made man became a shared ideal. Similarly egalitarian in ideology, American public education was perennially bemoaned for its makeshift conditions, poor regard and remuneration for teachers, and pedagogical appeal to the lowest common denominator.
The forces of anti-intellectualism gained new valences in response to the massive changes of the 20th century. Finding itself on the defensive, the religious right grew militantly fundamentalist, initiating now-familiar culture wars over issues such as evolution (most famously around the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925). In the realm of government affairs, experts became increasingly indispensable during the New Deal era and the Second World War, leading to the backlashes of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration and McCarthyism, at which point, the anti-intellectualism of midcentury America marked a frustrated response to the incontrovertible salience and utility of expertise: “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.” In a period of greater complexity and geopolitical involvement, the ordinary citizen faced a heightened sense of disorientation and helplessness. The expert thus became suspicious to those seeking clear culprits and simple, concrete remedies for the ruptures and predicaments of modernity.
The distressing sociopolitical conditions of the 1950s brokered entree into common currency the term “anti-intellectualism.” During that decade, the erudite and eloquent Adlai Stevenson suffered two decisive presidential losses to Army general Dwight D. Eisenhower, and business interests henceforth superseded New Deal policies. Furthermore, amidst the Second Red Scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy targeted intellectuals, and the launch of Sputnik sparked a national conversation on the deficiencies of American education. Against this backdrop, anti-intellectualism became a new force in American life, and therefrom to overwhelming proportions,” notwithstanding its lull when John F. Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower, briefly tracing erudition's pendulum swing from the oafish, inarticulate Republicans to more literate and sophisticated Democrats in national office.
Today, we find ourselves facing the hobgoblin of contemporary anti-intellectualism: the emergence of a substantial, well-funded coterie of anti-intellectual publicists who, thanks to the largesse of conservative foundations and corporate sponsors, have set themselves up in plush bunkers outside the infrastructure of the university and from there they have taken the lead in lobbing shells into the better academic neighborhoods in furtherance of mandarin aspirations couched in a defense of hackneyed so-called "transcendent truths."
Anti-intellectualism thus became an essential component of Conservative politics because of the important place it holds in the pseudo-populist strategy upon which Republican political ascendancy rests. This strategy, which has targeted two key voter groups, white, ethnic (often Catholic) northern voters and working-class white southerners, has succeeded in portraying the Democratic party as a new establishment intent on imposing on the citizenry an alien racial and cultural agenda. Over the course of the last thirty years, as Thomas Edsall has shown, the GOP has been "increasingly able to define the Democratic party, its intellectual allies, and the bureaucracy that enforced redistributive laws, as a new left elite."
It's the same rhetoric Wallace used in 1968. Exploiting the issues of race and taxes, Republicans offered themselves as guardians of the working man against the intrusions of "big government," and at the core of Republican populist strategy sits a commitment to resist the forcing of racial, cultural and social liberalism on recalcitrant white, working and middle-class constituencies. Anti-intellectualism thus is now a central feature of the rhetoric of Republican pseudo-populism.
It's clear now that Russians, since the Cold War, watched this evolution, and when Trump came along and showed promise they "got while the gettin' was good," and here we are with a self-possessed, doltish, turpitudinous jackass in the WH.
Of course, it's no wonder that Russians chose to advance Trump's candidacy. They saw as did many others that healthy skepticism of accepted knowledge has morphed into prideful, self-satisfied ignorance and active hostility to the very idea of sagacity, wisdom and experience. Across American society, Trumpkins resent intellectual authority, resisting and disregarding it at every opportunity and with near universal conviction that every opinion ostensibly holds equal weight. This leveling of viewpoints, accelerated by digital technologies and platforms, has further lowered the barriers to participation and opened the floodgates for those deucedly bereft of proper education and experientially obtained professional portfolio.
Not only was it clear to them that Clinton was far less susceptible to their wiles and entreaties, but also, from the feedback the Russian government almost certainly received from multiple Russians who'd interacted with Trump, there were multiple credible sources in the U.S. that had for years attested to Trump's intractable mental midgetry. Quite simply the Russians knew damn well those observers/sources and their remarks were thoroughly credible. They knew too that there were and remain among the Conservative electorate tens of millions of poorly educated dunces who aren't given to cogent thought, be that due to indolence or ineptitude. They knew too that Trump is just like them but for the fact that he happens to be wealthy.
The thing is that it didn't have to be that way. The occasion of anti-intellectualism within the GOP has long been lamented by Liberals and Conservatives.
- Why Republicans Despise Experts
- Why Republicans Love Dumb Presidents
- The GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge
- The Conservative Intellectual Crisis
- The roots of Donald Trump’s anti-intellectualism
- How Conservatism Lost Its Mind
- The Dearth of Expertise
Anti-intellectualism -- defined as "resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition constantly to minimize the value of that life" -- in America, of course, has deep roots in American history, traversing the domains of religion, politics, business, and education. Beginning in the 1720s, the Great Awakening swept across colonial America, encompassing Christian revivalist and evangelical movements that rejected clerical learning and cerebral, doctrinal worship in favor of ecstatic emotion, inner spiritual conviction, and mass conversion. Though founded and first led by patrician intellectuals, the nation had ,by the early 19th century, sidelined its them, giving primacy instead to a Jacksonian popular democracy that valorized coarseness and so-called common sense over cultivation and formal training. This cult of character and direct, practical experience extended to the realm of business, where the uneducated, self-made man became a shared ideal. Similarly egalitarian in ideology, American public education was perennially bemoaned for its makeshift conditions, poor regard and remuneration for teachers, and pedagogical appeal to the lowest common denominator.
The forces of anti-intellectualism gained new valences in response to the massive changes of the 20th century. Finding itself on the defensive, the religious right grew militantly fundamentalist, initiating now-familiar culture wars over issues such as evolution (most famously around the Scopes “Monkey” Trial of 1925). In the realm of government affairs, experts became increasingly indispensable during the New Deal era and the Second World War, leading to the backlashes of the Eisenhower-Nixon administration and McCarthyism, at which point, the anti-intellectualism of midcentury America marked a frustrated response to the incontrovertible salience and utility of expertise: “Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he is fiercely resented because he is needed too much.” In a period of greater complexity and geopolitical involvement, the ordinary citizen faced a heightened sense of disorientation and helplessness. The expert thus became suspicious to those seeking clear culprits and simple, concrete remedies for the ruptures and predicaments of modernity.
The distressing sociopolitical conditions of the 1950s brokered entree into common currency the term “anti-intellectualism.” During that decade, the erudite and eloquent Adlai Stevenson suffered two decisive presidential losses to Army general Dwight D. Eisenhower, and business interests henceforth superseded New Deal policies. Furthermore, amidst the Second Red Scare, Senator Joseph McCarthy targeted intellectuals, and the launch of Sputnik sparked a national conversation on the deficiencies of American education. Against this backdrop, anti-intellectualism became a new force in American life, and therefrom to overwhelming proportions,” notwithstanding its lull when John F. Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower, briefly tracing erudition's pendulum swing from the oafish, inarticulate Republicans to more literate and sophisticated Democrats in national office.
Today, we find ourselves facing the hobgoblin of contemporary anti-intellectualism: the emergence of a substantial, well-funded coterie of anti-intellectual publicists who, thanks to the largesse of conservative foundations and corporate sponsors, have set themselves up in plush bunkers outside the infrastructure of the university and from there they have taken the lead in lobbing shells into the better academic neighborhoods in furtherance of mandarin aspirations couched in a defense of hackneyed so-called "transcendent truths."
Anti-intellectualism thus became an essential component of Conservative politics because of the important place it holds in the pseudo-populist strategy upon which Republican political ascendancy rests. This strategy, which has targeted two key voter groups, white, ethnic (often Catholic) northern voters and working-class white southerners, has succeeded in portraying the Democratic party as a new establishment intent on imposing on the citizenry an alien racial and cultural agenda. Over the course of the last thirty years, as Thomas Edsall has shown, the GOP has been "increasingly able to define the Democratic party, its intellectual allies, and the bureaucracy that enforced redistributive laws, as a new left elite."
It's the same rhetoric Wallace used in 1968. Exploiting the issues of race and taxes, Republicans offered themselves as guardians of the working man against the intrusions of "big government," and at the core of Republican populist strategy sits a commitment to resist the forcing of racial, cultural and social liberalism on recalcitrant white, working and middle-class constituencies. Anti-intellectualism thus is now a central feature of the rhetoric of Republican pseudo-populism.
It's clear now that Russians, since the Cold War, watched this evolution, and when Trump came along and showed promise they "got while the gettin' was good," and here we are with a self-possessed, doltish, turpitudinous jackass in the WH.
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