More Money than Brains: Why Schools Suck, College is Crap, & Idiots Think They’re Right

by Penny, Laura

  Idiocracy is isolationist and interventionist. It demands that the government leave the people alone but it also asks it to punish the enemies who scare or offend them, such as Muslims, illegal immigrants, and gays. Idiocracy insists that economic choices should be private and individual. But it also allows private values, such as fundamentalist Christianity, to fill the space where a public ethic, a set of shared priorities, should be. It is idiocracy that ultimately binds the fiscally conservative and socially conservative wings of the right. Issues such as gay rights and abortion, the red meat of the so-con agenda, turn private, you-and-your-lover/doctor issues into public boondoggles. To put this another way, idiocratic politics demands that bureaucrats stay out of banks and boardrooms but invites them to crawl into our beds and classrooms.

  Idiocracy is not confined to the right. The right hates the mainstream media and considers journalists another vile, verbose elite. But the mainstream media are also predominantly anti-public, more interested in pursuing private angles – what’s in this for you? – or the personal lives of public figures. The coverage of political candidates as celebrities, the attention devoted to their families, hobbies, church attendance, tastes, and style, is not new but it has undoubtedly increased, and it is also idiocratic.

  The anti-intellectual faction in politics has been emboldened by idiocracy. There is a lot of overlap between anti-government sentiment and anti-nerd invective. Anti-intellectualism has also become a more vocal and shameless part of political life thanks to technological advances and cultural shifts.

  Television has played a part in this. While it does allow more people to see the candidates in action, it also shapes their campaigns, whittling them down to a series of skirmishes, scandals, ads, and sound bites. The Internet’s effects are equally ambiguous – half awesome, half awful. The Web allows people access to an unprecedented amount of information about the candidates, but a lot of that info is bad. Gossip and fear-mongering circulate freely between the two screen worlds as the mainstream media investigate Internet controversies from heavy-on-the-caps chain emails, dignifying rumours that Obama is a “sekrit Muslin” or the Anti-Christ by trying to debunk them.

  The Clinton camp, the McCain campaign, and anti-Obama reactionaries have all alleged that the media were in the tank for Obama from day one, that the press handed him his victory on a bed of valentines. And while I recall much gushing about Michelle’s outfits, Obama’s dandling skills, and various moving speeches, I also remember pundits repeatedly saying that he was just too stereotypically intellectual to win. Talking heads on both sides of the aisle made frequent use of the term professorial. It wasn’t a compliment. For the Republicans, this term was a slur, a way of saying that Obama was condescending, dull, long-winded, and too busy thinking to act. For the Democrats, professorial was a constant concern, arousing fear that their candidate would seem too abstract and aloof and calmly and rationally explain himself right out of the race.

  The American public has been flip-flopping about smart leaders for years. As Richard Hofstader argues in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, nerd-bashing fluctuates, comes and goes in cycles. Hofstader begins his analysis with the 1952 election, when Eisenhower trounced the “egghead” Adlai Stevenson. Hofstader quotes a speech Eisenhower delivered in 1954, in which he offered the following definition of an intellectual: “a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows.” This sounds a lot like a Reagan joke or the campaigns Hillary Clinton and McCain ran against Obama.

  Hofstader’s description of the caricature of the intellectual is also all too familiar. He writes:

  Intellectuals, it may be held, are pretentious, conceited, effeminate and snobbish; and very likely immoral, dangerous, and subversive. The plain sense of the common man, especially if tested by success in some demanding line of practical work, is an altogether adequate substitute for, if not actually much superior to, formal knowledge and expertise acquired in the schools.10

  Recognize this pitch? It’s the Reagan and Dubya sell, even though they were hardly rugged, self-made men. This was also the argument against candidates such as Gore, Kerry, and Obama. The right lambasted Gore for claiming that he “invented the Internet” and cast him as a green con man profiting from another elitist lie: global warming. The Swift Boaters torpedoed Kerry’s service record and post-Vietnam protests, bending the facts to fit their wimpy weasel story about the Democratic candidate. The right made fun of “John François Kerry” for speaking French. They made fun of Obama for not serving in the military, and for speaking well.

  Again, this is not new. Richard Nixon’s anti-intellectualism was evident in his appeals to the Silent Majority and his fulminations against those no-goodnik college war protestors. Both are still favourite gambits of the Fox News/Reform Party faithful. Nixon’s VP, Spiro Agnew, also did a brisk trade in anti-intellectual apothegms, like this doozy from a 1969 speech: “A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”11 Effete? Impudent? Spiro’s own vocabulatin’ sounds pretty snobby compared to contemporary Republican discourse, just as Nixon’s policies seem downright liberal compared to Reagan’s or Dubya’s.

  The Nixon tapes are heavy on two antis that ride shotgun with anti-intellectualism – anti-Semitism and anti-gay invective. Kenneth J. Hughes, the tapes editor at the University of Virginia’s Presidential Recordings Program, describes Nixon as a conspiracy theorist with three nemeses: “Jews, intellectuals, and Ivy Leaguers.”12 This paranoia and resentment, among other unsavoury qualities, drove Nixon to his downfall.

  It also looked like shit on TV. This is one of the reasons why Reagan was such a vast improvement. He was able to reissue and repackage Nixonian anti-intellectualism with sunny smiles and catchy quips and optimistic bombast about America. Reagan, like Nixon, made his bones during the red scare. Also like Nixon, he made political hay out of college anti-war protests, inveighing against the decency and morality deficit in California’s university system and the threat posed by “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates.” Reagan also said that universities should not be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity,” which became policy when he became governor; he slashed the university system’s budget and killed free tuition in California.13

  Reagan’s victory in 1980 marked the beginning of an ideological shift, a turning against government and nerds. He borrowed a lot from the anti-government themes that are part of America’s founding documents, but he also main-streamed and normalized notions that loitered on the John Bircher fringes of the right wing. William F. Buckley used to say that it was important for the conservative movement to police itself, to keep the kooks out in the interest of preserving its political legitimacy. But Reagan was not so discerning, and his successors proved even less picky.

  Reagan helped the right position itself as the party of ideas, outflanking the brains on their own turf. Speaking to the Conservative Political Action Committee in 1985, he said:

  The truth is, conservative thought is no longer over here on the right; it’s the mainstream now…. The other side is virtually bankrupt of ideas. It has nothing more to say, nothing to add to the debate. It has spent its intellectual capital, such as it was…. We in this room are not simply profiting from their bankruptcy; we are where we are because we’re winning the contest of ideas. In fact, in the past decade, all of a sudden, quietly, mysteriously, the Republican Party has become the party of ideas.14

  Reagan was able to give greed some much-needed gravitas, to compare the excesses of coked-out stockbrokers to the freedoms extolled by the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their Classical antecedents. The Reaganites presented their America as not merely exceptional but downright world-historical, Hegel directed by John Huston guided by Jesus, starring a twinkly-eyed amalgam of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.

  Approving wallets in the business community and their think tanks did indeed manage to yank the idea mantle away from
nerds and heap fresh calumny on those in the learned professions. Ha ha, we have the money and the brains! And what nerds know just isn’t so.

  Republican Party ideas – strong defence, deregulation, tax cuts, trees causing pollution – were admittedly new after years of Democratic notions such as the New Deal and the Great Society. Now, nearly thirty years later, we can see the damage done by the ideas Reagan popularized with a grin: billions wasted on defence spending, soaring budget deficits, increased concentration of wealth, market instability, tattered public infrastructure, and brazen contempt for governance.

  As his biographers have noted, Reagan developed most of his ideas before he came to power. This helped give him that air of glorious certitude that idiocrats mistake for moral conviction. That helped, but his ideas were also successful because they were so simple and there were so few of them. Conservative commentator and former Reagan speech-writer George F. Will explained: “The key is to understand the economy of leadership: you should have ideas, and they should be clear, but most of all they should be few – three at the most. Re-arm the country, cut the weight of government and win the cold war.”15

  The Reagan revolution, and Dubya’s remake of it, did not curtail the bossy sweep of government or reduce spending. Quite the opposite. But Reagan’s success certainly did shrink the language of leadership. It has ground down the sound bites, has truncated and circumscribed political discourse. Now it is very difficult to suggest complex solutions to complex problems without sandblasting policy proposals down to quippy inspirational Reaganisms.

  The quote from Chuck Todd that opened this chapter suggests that even lead political correspondents from “liberal” media bastions such as NBC cannot bear too much information. A president who knows too much, who waxes wonky, risks putting his audience to sleep. American leaders, even the eloquent ones, must limit themselves to the kind of one-liners that look great superimposed upon a graphic of a flag and an eagle, just like the Great Communicator did.

  The biggest cheers at the moribund 2008 Republican convention were for footage of the painted visage of Ronaldus Magnus that was spliced into nearly every video. Reagan presented himself as a crusader for truth, but he never met a fact he couldn’t wave away with a myth or an anecdote or a misremembered scene from a movie. When someone called him on one of his many big baloneys – that the British hanged people for murder for simply owning guns – Reagan laughed it off and repeated it in a New York Times interview years later. As one of his aides said, “Well, it’s a good story, though. It made the point, didn’t it?”16

  Reagan’s successors have tried to replicate his pseudo-populism with varying results. George H. W. Bush didn’t do a very good job of concealing his patrician preppiness or his long tenure in Washington, but he still impugned his rival Michael Dukakis for being too Harvard. He also warned that Bill Clinton and his Oxford chums favoured “the false certitude of social engineering fashioned by a new economic elite of the so-called best and brightest. The best and the brightest are right out here in Middle America where you know what’s going on.”17

  Clinton was able to get away with having a brain because his intellect was sheathed in reassuring Big Mac–munching bubbatude. He might have been a Rhodes Scholar, but he had a Reaganish ability to play himself in town halls and on MTV and talk shows. He was also the first president who seemed to be a product of the 1960s rather than the reactionary backlash against it. But the 1960s also had an anti-intellectual streak, which has lingered in the touchy-feeliness of the liberal boomers and Clinton’s emoting on their behalf.

  Boomers like Clinton talk a good game about social justice and congratulate themselves for changing the world in the magical 1960s. However, when they became the establishment, they did a swell job of serving and joining Team Money. Boomers had the good fortune to grow up during the greatest economic expansion in North American history, but they have ensured that generations X and Y will never, ever suffer the same corrupting affluence. Clinton managed to balance the budget, which is more than you can say for the economic wizards of the right, but he also left some ticking fiscal bombs behind. He passed disastrous fiscal deregulation such as the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Bliley act to placate the obstinate Newt Gingrichians in Congress. He let Greenspan run buck-wild. The problem with this kind of Third Way centrism, with saying shit like “the era of big government is over,” is that it concedes the centre to the hard right and makes responsible governance look like some lefty fringe notion.

  Boomer emoting such as Clinton’s “I feel your pain” is anti-intellectual, just like Reagan’s quips and Dubya’s appeals to patriotism. Some boomers still cling to a hippyish Rousseau-for-Dummies belief in the natural goodness of people and the deleterious effects of the system. But they are the system, and have been for several decades. The notion that every child is special and that school systems should build every precious snowflake’s self-esteem is a good example of squishy, sentimental liberal anti-intellectualism at work. And this feel-good rhetoric is consistently belied by self-centred boomer behaviour like voting for tax cuts that beggar the schools.

  There are also some paranoiacs on the far left whose fantasies are just as baroque and implausible as the fascist takeover fables of the hard right. I’m thinking here of those who believe that 9/11 was an inside job, a conspiracy theory shared by some leftists and libertarians. But 9/11 truthers vastly overestimate the Bush administration’s competence; they’re simply pushing a lefty version of the nerds-control-everything myth.

  No one party or creed has the monopoly on conspiracy theories or idiocratic ideas. But I don’t want to be totally equivocal about this, either. False equivocation – the insistence that every issue has two equal and opposite sides – is what allows tea-party loons and town hall yellers to pass as one side of a health-care debate, a debate they are heckling and obstructing. The anti-intellectualism of the left is not as fervent, or as well-financed, as the anti-nerd invective of reactionaries out to slay liberal dragons like the New Deal and the Sixties.

  Clinton’s win just the beginning of a new battle. Private investment funded busy muckrakers who dug up his dirt and flung it all over the hill. The result? A ridiculous, costly desecration of the public sphere. A bunch of peckerwood prudes, most half as smart and some twice as slutty and sneaky, hoisted Clinton on his own petard: the hedonism that helped “humanize” his brains. Monicagate was an anti-governance triumph, private values walloping the holy heck out of public concerns, and a perfect example of idiocracy in action.

  Dubya was a consummate idiocrat. His scorn for the scholarly is well-established, so I shall confine myself to just one example of it. He loved to talk about his gentleman’s C’s, particularly when he found himself in the company of nerds. As he famously said in his 2001 commencement address at Yale, “To those of you who received honours, awards, and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be President of the United States.”18 He also used this joke to kid members of his own administration, which fairly bristled with doctorates. In 2007 he told reporters at a press conference, “I like to remind people that, like when I’m with Condi I say, she’s the Ph.D. and I’m the C-student, and just look at who’s the President and who’s the advisor. (Laughter)”19

  Some see this gag as folksy self-deprecation, but Bush is not mocking himself. He’s making fun of nerds. This is not humility but bombast. Even though he was surrounded by a phalanx of Ph.D.’s such as Dr. Dick and Dr. Condi and Dr. Wolfowitz, Bush aggrandized himself and his base by denigrating expertise in general. What this joke really says, to bum a phrase from The Simpsons‘ Ralph Wiggum, is “I beat the smart kids, I beat the smart kids.”

  The 2008 campaign was a veritable orgy of nerd-bashing. Throughout the primaries Hillary Clinton tried desperately to smear Obama with his smarts and use his eloquence as evidence that he had nothing else to offer. What match are pretty words for experience and deeds? Once the presidential contest got underway, Republican and Democratic
mouthpieces started lobbing E-bombs at each other. Who was the real elitist? The rich guy or the smart guy? The guy with too many fancy houses or the one with too much fancy talk?

  The McCain campaign repeatedly maligned Obama for latte-sipping snobbery, arugula-eating arrogance, and pusillanimous Poindexterity. A Fox News correspondent sneered at a photo of Obama riding his bike: “Where is he going … to get a pocket protector for his nerd pencils. What is that?”20 The deficits Obama’s critics listed were revealing. He had never been the CEO of anything, nor had he toiled in some branch of the military-industrial complex. One snide release from the Mitt Romney camp said that he had never run so much as a corner store.

  For an opportunistic Reagan robot like Romney, making piles of money is synonymous with leadership. Laying off thousands of workers, as Romney did when he was with Bain Capital, is real-world experience. Helping laid-off workers retrain and find new jobs, as Obama did when he was a community organizer, is not.

  Republicans spent their whole convention taking shots at Obama’s work as a community organizer. This was code for “black radical who will redistribute your income to inner-city welfare queens.” It was a strategic blunder; when you insult community organizers, they organize their communities. Tellingly, hardly any of the marquee speakers at the RNC bothered to mock Obama’s academic career. Teaching constitutional law was beneath contempt, unworthy of a snarky snicker.

  The McCain campaign team made their commitment to pseudo-populism very clear when they unveiled his running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin. Alaska has fewer citizens than many American cities and it is a negative-tax state, floating on a sea of oil revenues and federal funding. Like most red states and benighted backwater burgs, it continues to exist thanks to the taxpayer largesse of those shiftless blue states and cities full of snobs and sodomites. You’d never know that to hear Palin flap her glossy yap, though.