Republicans Descend Into Anti-Intellectualism

Modern "conservatism" means swallowing loads of information that isn't true.

“The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant,” Ronald Reagan quipped in his famous 1964 “A Time for Choosing” speech, “it's just that they know so much that isn't so.”

Reagan’s gentle jibe came just days before the candidate he supported, Barry Goldwater, got his posterior handed to him in the presidential election. But while Republicans lost that battle, they eventually won the war. Reagan’s speech posited conservatism as the ideology for smart people who understood free markets, individual liberty, and military strength. Thus, an army of young pointy-headed, bow-tie-wearing Milton Friedman acolytes was born.

But to be a conservative these days, one must not only know so much that isn’t so, one must constantly berate those who call out such misinformation and disinformation on the right. Swimming in GOP waters today means cozying up to self-interested scammers of all varieties who pitch nonsense to make Republicans believe they are constantly being victimized.

The most prevalent scammer, of course, is the once-and-future Republican president, Donald Trump, who has ridden a tsunami of misinformation into a second nonconsecutive term. In order to fully be immersed in the Trump world, one must believe, for instance, that he won the presidential election in 2020 and that Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to overturn the results of the election. (If this was actually the case, why would President Joe Biden sign a bill making it clear the VP can’t pick and choose what delegates to accept, when Kamala Harris could have guaranteed his own victory under the Trump standard?)

To be a Trumper in good standing, one must believe the president-elect was subjected to “political” prosecutions for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. At the same time, Trump has been promising to prosecute his political enemies when he returns to office. You have to believe anyone who runs against Trump and who has a skin tone darker than Chappell Roan is ineligible to be president because of their foreign ancestors. You must believe the target country bears the cost of tariffs and won’t jack up the price of groceries and other goods here in America.

All are total nonsense, and all are crucial to remaining in good standing among today’s “conservatives.”

And that doesn’t even touch on all of Trump’s grade-school shibboleths he has forced down Republicans’ throats. They have to cheer his puerile jibes, caustic trolling, and nonsensical rambling. Even Ivy League-educated senators have adopted Trump’s ignorant habit of referring to the Democratic Party as the “Democrat Party.” His social media posts are riddled with misspellings, poor punctuation, and needless capitalization. Trump speaks and writes worse English than many of the immigrants he’s trying to throw out of the country.

Even attempts to be circumspect about problems with both political parties can get out of hand. “From ‘boys can become girls’ to ‘vaccines cause autism,’ two political parties are at war with science,” Republican media personality Erick Erickson recently posted on X (formerly Twitter.) “Pick which nuts you prefer.”

If you, like nearly 70 percent of Americans, believe that participation in sports should match the gender of one’s birth, then fine. It’s silly to argue that transgender women don’t have a natural physical advantage. But to be active in the conservative ecosystem, you have to believe that suddenly, morgues have become stuffed with women killed on volleyball courts by biological men slamming volleyballs into their heads.

Of course, of the two choices Erickson offered, only one will actually kill people - and lots of them. Vaccine hesitancy supported by people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. - now a nominee to run Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services - undoubtedly led to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of people during the Covid pandemic. If schools are forced to drop their vaccination mandates, America will no doubt see the return of measles, polio, and other deadly diseases science long ago eradicated.

What’s particularly galling about vaccine denialism on the right (according to a Politico poll last year, about half of Republicans believed the Covid vaccines to be unsafe) is that there’s nothing to be gained from convincing people to remain unvaccinated. For the people spreading vaccine lies, the only benefit is maintaining their status as an online edge lord, pretending they are one of the cognoscenti that understand issues more than both physicians and the corrupt “big pharma” industry.

In retrospect, the birth of the anti-intellectual strain within the Republican Party is easy to spot. Sarah Palin’s ascension to vice presidential nominee in 2008 began to push out all the Paul Ryan-like nerds in the party. Soon, unserious candidates like Herman Cain, Todd Akin (who espoused the biologically nonsensical theory that women couldn’t be impregnated if they were victims of “legitimate rape” and self-declared non-witch Christine O’Donnell were dotting the GOP landscape. And then, in 2016, Trump happened, and suddenly, Republican senators were freed to tell their constituents that the coronavirus could be killed by gargling mouthwash.

Perhaps the move to political and personal stupidity was simply the Republican way of dealing with the perceived anxieties of the world. In her book “Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them,” author Jennifer Wright notes that of the tens of thousands of lobotomies performed between the 1930s and 1960s, most were done voluntarily. At the time, lobotomies were seen as a “miracle cure” to solve all sorts of emotional problems. In 1937, one of the pioneers of the process, Dr. Walter Jackson Freeman II, authored a New York Times article declaring lobotomies to be “Surgery Used on the Soul Sick.”

So now Republicans as a party have decided to self-lobotomize to create their utopian reality devoid of meddlesome opposition. Granted, there is ample meretricious behavior on the left, such as when a president vows not to pardon his felon son and then does just that. But in most cases, the bad-faith progressive actors have always behaved this way. A number of Republicans, such as a certain vice president-elect who once called his future running mate “America’s Hitler,” have emerged as entirely different people, as if they have had their frontal cortex severed.

English philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill allegedly once jibed that conservatives were the "stupid party." For much of the past century, the opposite has been confirmed. But eventually, time will prove that all political voices are prescient. And Mill needed only 150 years to be proven correct.

ALSO:

As I do every year, I joined the Will’s Band of the Week podcast to count down my favorite albums of the year. If you want to listen in, go here.

Or, if you just want the list, here it is:

1. Laura Marling - Patterns in Repeat

2. MJ Lenderman - Manning Fireworks

3. Bad Nerves - Still Nervous

4. Being Dead - EELS

5. Waxahatchee - Tigers Blood

6. King Hannah - Big Swimmer

7. The Dare - What's Wrong with New York?

8. Fake Fruit - Mucho Mistrust

9. Camera Obscura - Look to the East, Look to the West

10. Ginger Root - SHINBANGUMI

Here’s a song from the Waxahatchee album, which is a quiet, pastoral gem:

ALSO:

Since my last newsletter, I’ve written a few pieces for National Review, including a recent column about how we don’t need a new constitutional convention:

Article V of the Constitution requires Congress to call forth a new convention as soon as two-thirds of the states (currently 34) request it. This convention would propose new constitutional amendments, which “shall be valid to all intents and purposes” of the Constitution as long as they are ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states.

The “Article V Convention” enthusiasts say they could create a process that allows the delegates to consider only one limited question. Republicans, for instance, think they could use the process to consider a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution.

While Article V is notable for the process it creates, it is more remarkable for what it leaves out. There is nothing in the provision that dictates what topics could be considered or who the people considering them would be. There is no process for limiting the scope of the amendments or deciding who would be attending the proceedings on behalf of the states. Does each state get one vote, or do the larger states get more votes? Who decides?

And once the vandals have broken into the Constitution, they will have full access to the document’s internal wiring. Or, as the late Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, “Congress might try to limit the agenda to one amendment or to one issue, but there is no way to assure that the Convention would obey.”

I also wrote about Luigi Mangione and how we are now living in the era of theatrical villains, almost as if we are inside a comic book:

In New York — often cheekily referred to as Gotham — the comic-book world and the real world are merging. When 50-year-old health-insurance executive Brian Thompson was gunned down in Manhattan last week, it wasn’t by a vagrant short on medication or by a street criminal looking for cash. The suspect is an Ivy League–educated rich kid with a histrionic streak who left written messages on the bullets and dropped a backpack full of Monopoly cash as he fled. All that was missing was a purple suit adorned with question marks.

The crime Luigi Mangione is accused of stands out because he wasn’t committing violence to rob a bank or to get personal revenge (we think). He likely killed a man in cold blood as an act of showmanship, of toying with law enforcement. It’s straight out of the Joker’s antihero playbook, in which he earns the respect of like-minded citizens as he unleashes chaos.

(Also, if a scriptwriter for a comic-book movie turned in a draft in which the main character was named “Luigi Mangione,” the producers would likely throw it back at them and say, “a little too on the nose, kid.”)

You can peruse all my stuff here.

ALSO:

We are still charging ahead with our “review every season of Saturday Night Live” podcast, and this week we dropped the Season 38 (2012-13) episode. Would you believe the show actually gets better after all-time great Kristen Wiig leaves the show? Learn all about it by listening here.

FINALLY:

The fun at the end of the year doesn’t stop with making your own music lists, it really begins with perusing everyone else’s favorite music of the year. Here’s “Le Silence” from French band Juniore, which might be the hookiest song of the year: