[Vision2020] How these gibbering numbskulls came to dominate Washington

[Chasuk]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/oct/28/us-education-election-obama-bush-mccain?refer=cnn.com

How was it allowed to happen? How did politics in the US come to be
dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance? Was it charity
that has permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two
terms as president? How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such
gibbering numbskulls get to where they are? How could Republican
rallies in 2008 be drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that
Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?

Like most people on my side of the Atlantic, I have for many years
been mystified by American politics. The US has the world's best
universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates
discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on
the application of knowledge. Yet, uniquely among the developed
nations (with the possible exception of Australia), learning is a
grave political disadvantage.

There have been exceptions over the past century - Franklin Roosevelt,
JF Kennedy and Bill Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the
common touch and survived - but Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John
Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as members of a
cerebral elite (as if this were not a qualification for the
presidency). Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of
intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter
during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter - stumbling a little,
using long words - carefully enumerated the benefits of national
health insurance. Reagan smiled and said: "There you go again." His
own health programme would have appalled most Americans, had he
explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a
formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents
look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this. The founding fathers of the republic -
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams,
Alexander Hamilton and others - were among the greatest thinkers of
their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the
project they launched degenerate into George W Bush and Sarah Palin?

On one level, this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected
by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is
notorious for its failures. In the most powerful nation on earth, one
adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26%
accept that evolution takes place by means of natural selection;
two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map;
two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government;
the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the
29 countries of the OECD. But this merely extends the mystery: how did
so many US citizens become so stupid, and so suspicious of
intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason
provides the fullest explanation I have read so far. She shows that
the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking
tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: religion - in particular
fundamentalist religion - makes you stupid. The US is the only rich
country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there was once a certain logic to its
anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after the publication
of The Origin of Species, for instance, Americans had good reason to
reject the theory of natural selection and to treat public
intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was
mixed up in the US with the brutal philosophy - now known as social
Darwinism - of the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine,
promoted in the popular press with the help of funding from Andrew
Carnegie, John D Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that
millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by
evolution. By preventing unfit people being weeded out, government
intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were
both justifiable and necessary.

Darwinism, in other words, became indistinguishable from the most
bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded
with revulsion. It is profoundly ironic that the doctrine rejected a
century ago by such prominent fundamentalists as William Jennings
Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right.
Modern fundamentalists reject the science of Darwinian evolution and
accept the pseudoscience of social Darwinism.

But there were other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual
isolation of the fundamentalists. The US is peculiar in devolving the
control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern
states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of
planters, and a great educational gulf opened up. "In the south",
Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade
was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the
social order."

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest denomination in the
US, was to slavery and segregation what the Dutch Reformed Church was
to apartheid in South Africa. It has done more than any other force to
keep the south stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off
desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools
and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to a
higher degree without any exposure to secular teaching. Southern
Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well.
A survey by researchers at the University of Texas in 1998 found that
one in four of the state's state school biology teachers believed
humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American fetishisation of
self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal
teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence
that good education, provided by the state, is unnecessary: all that
is required to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This
might have served people well when genuine self-education movements,
like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of
the 20th century, were in vogue. In the age of infotainment, it is a
recipe for confusion.

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason
intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism has been
equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with
communism a long time ago has been used to create an impression in the
public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Almost every day
men such as Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal
elites" destroying America.

The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the
election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite - like the
neocons (some of them former communists) surrounding Bush - has
managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary
Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to
challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite has been successfully
branded as elitism.

Obama has a lot to offer the US, but none of this will stop if he
wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed
or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political
opportunities for people, like Bush and Palin, who flaunt their
ignorance.