More Money Than Brains (17 page)

Heal thyself, idiocratic politicos. If the private sector is so fantastic, so much better at everything than the government, then
go join it
. Leave the work of governing to people who actually believe that governments can work. Quit besmirching your precious free-market principles, feeding your own photo-op families filthy federal funding. If the milk of the state be poison, detach thine own gums from the chapped taxpayer teat.

Nobody likes paying taxes. Nobody likes government waste. It’s dead easy to campaign against those things, to promise that you will keep providing the services people like, plus wars, minus anyone having to pay for anything. Here’s a telling moment from a 2008 campaign-trail stop in Aspen, Colorado: a
Washington Post
reporter noted that “McCain drew a smattering of laughter when he said ‘I have to be against tax increases, as you know.’ “
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It was funny because it was true, one of those moments of McCain candour. No Republican or Conservative can propose tax increases of any sort, since that would contradict their fundamental message: that government itself is a waste.

If liberals float tax increases, they must couch them, as Obama and Bill Clinton did, as taxes on the very wealthiest, taxes that will not impose further burdens on the beleaguered middle class. But these promises are belied by the fact that
Democrats – and Liberals – also need to endear themselves to wealthy campaign contributors and lobbies. And no matter how modest the proposed tax increase, right-wingers accuse them of communism, any tax being a precipitous slippery slope to Soviet Russia, to punishing success. How dare the libs imperil North America’s most precious national resources, our super-rich?

The relentless focus on the economy and tax cuts, seeing the government as a private wealth manager rather than the public infrastructure that ensures people are free to create wealth, is the most obviously idiocratic strain in political life. Radical idiocrats go even further, arguing that the government is nothing but a parasite battening on the free market’s lifeblood. Such arguments ignore the contributions the public sector makes to private industry. I’m not even talking about the obvious corporate welfare or bailout packages. Good luck making or selling anything, or employing anyone, without roads and cops and a legal system, without the kind offices of schools and hospitals. There are more high-end spas and better snacks in socialist Sweden than in the libertarian paradise of Somalia.

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:

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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:

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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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