The GOP's Continued Celebration of Ignaorance

It is almost laughable how Republicans - some dumb as bricks themselves - are attacking Kamala Harris as being dumb or a "DEI hire"  (the GOP's current substitute for the n-word) when the Republican Party now celebrates ignorance and attacks those with good academic degrees - or worse yet Ivy League degrees - as "elites" and the enemies of MAGA world.  The Republican Party that once valued education, science, and knowledge is dead and gone.  What makes the current GOP worship of ignorance even more farcical is the lengths that its own members with Ivy League degrees go in order to pretend they are good old boys and girls -think JD Vance - who has changed his name twice - Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley, and Ted Cruz to name a few.   With an ever more competitive world and with rival nations fostering education of their population, the Republicans seemingly are in a race to dumb down the nation.  Then, of course, there is Trump who claims he is "smart" and a "stable genius" even as he speaks at an elementary school level.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the hypocrisy of this worship of ignorance:

Donald Trump loves to show off how smart he is. “I’m, like, a smart person,” he boasted on one occasion. “I went to an Ivy League college, I was a nice student,” he said on another. “I’m a very intelligent person.” And perhaps most memorably, “I’m a very stable genius.”

But the dopey language he chooses, along with his disheveled, unpresidented grammar — both intentional and inadvertent — belie those assertions. It’s impossible to forget that this is the same guy who spells little “liddle’,” capitalizes at random and blunders out the occasional “covfefe.”

Trump is shrewd enough to know that Americans don’t like a guy who acts smart. So if his fumbles are strategic, it’s not entirely dumb. On the left, people think emphasizing intellect and elite schools betrays unfair advantage in a multiple-intelligences, equitable-outcome world. On the right, your average MAGA Joe bristles at anyone who comes across as a coastal elite or too smart for his own good.

In its recent populist incarnation, Republicans downplay any whiff of intellectualism by avoiding big words in favor of Kid Rock fandom and trucker hat slogans. In MAGA world, glorified ignorance actually serves as a qualification for higher office (see: Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene), empowering more effective rage against “the liberal elite” and “the ruling class.”

This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position . . . . In order to stay in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers.

Remember, Ron DeSantis once eagerly joined one of Yale’s secret societies and told classmates he’d dreamed of attending Harvard Law. He founded a tutoring firm offering “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.”

But once in office, he made a show of distancing himself from his academic credentials.

His Ivy League brethren, Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law) and Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), take similar pains to wash off the taint of East Coast academia with good-ol’-boy cred.

This is in sharp contrast to the intellectual pretensions of earlier Republican leaders, who would highlight, say, the “historian” Newt Gingrich’s Ph.D.

The latest standard-bearer for regular-folk Republicans is a down-home J.D., now JD — no periods, dude — who went to Yale Law School only with the help of student loans and side jobs. What’s more, JD Vance first got a humbler degree at Ohio State through the G.I. Bill. At the Republican National Convention, Yale barely came up.

And in one of her very first moves as an aspiring second lady, Usha Vance, who attended Yale as both an undergrad and a law student, made clear she would like to be referred to as Mrs. Vance, rather than Ms. The implication being: dutiful wife first, fancy Ivy League lawyer second.

The Vance who emerged as a MAGA politician is one who, after reaping the benefits and connections of an elite graduate education, turned around and gave a speech in 2021 called “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

“How ridiculous is it that we tell our young people to go to college, to get brainwashed?” he asked the crowd, going on to quote Nixon: “The professors are the enemy.” For Vance, the biggest takeaway from his Ivy League education is the monumental chip on his shoulder.

Politicians have long achieved high office based on ambition, hubris, cunning and a certain degree of ruthlessness more so than on account of their intellect. Nor does an Ivy League degree equate with excellence.

But it’s nonetheless dispiriting to see a major political party give lowbrow boors pride of place over the high-minded. It also puts Republicans in an awkward position vis-à-vis their new national opponent. Should Republicans frame Kamala Harris as some kind of lightweight bungling her words and laughing her way weirdly to the Oval Office, it risks not only playing into racist and sexist stereotypes, it will also further cement the flagrant hypocrisy of their own party.

After all, the Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.