President Trump Is What Happens After Republicans Spend Decades Rebranding Knowledge as Elitism...

[DonViejo]

President Trump Is What Happens After Republicans Spend Decades Rebranding Knowledge as Elitism and Ignorance as Bliss

‘I don’t think I have to prepare very much’ for the upcoming meeting with Kim Jong Un, Trump says. Here’s how we ended up with president who’s all gut, no knowledge.

MICHAEL TOMASKY
06.08.18 5:12 AM ET

Thursday morning, after hearing that Donald Trump got huffy with Justin Trudeau over Canada “burning down” the White House in the War of 1812, I sent a tweet nothing that in fact we, the United States, invaded Canada during that war; we even burned down government buildings in Toronto (then called York). As usual, what Trump said to Trudeau was not only not the truth, but turned reality inside out and ran it through the pulverizer.

Link to tweet

One of my regular correspondents replied that Trump may have been confused by “this,” followed by the trailer for Canadian Bacon, the 1995 John Candy movie in which an unpopular president starts a war with Canada to raise his approval numbers.

I started laughing, but stopped when it hit me that with Trump, anything’s possible. Check that—it’s not possible that he read a history book. It also seems unlikely that he would have watched a serious movie that tried hard to get things right, such as Lincoln, which would bore him to tears within a half an hour. On the other hand, that episode of All in the Family where Archie tells Meathead the “truth” about the causes of the Depression—now that’s more like it for Trump source material.

Conservative readers are saying right now, “there you go again, you snooty liberals, you and your book-learnin’.” All right, sure. There’s no doubt that it’s a liberal reflex to sometimes make fun of conservatives for not knowing things. And yeah, some liberals do that in a superior and supercilious tone.

But what’s happened in this country over the last, oh, 40 years or so is that in our political discourse, it has become far, far worse to make fun of someone for not knowing some basic historical fact than it is to not know the fact. And that is absurd.

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[hlthe2b]

1. I have been WAITING on someone to write about this! SO damned true.

[empedocles]

2. So good

Thank u.

[hatrack]

3. In a nutshell . . . .

This country has been waltzing along a plush carpet of ignorance, celebrity gossip, woo and Bible-beating bullshit for a good forty years now, and the only thing that changes is that every year that carpet gets a bit thicker and stinkier.

Not thick enough to bridge the abyss we're trying to cross, eyes down on our phones and humming "When You Wish Upon A Star".

[NRaleighLiberal]

4. Exactly.

[Orsino]

5. Sure, but mainly it's the result of their anything-the-rich-want platform.

He was only a candidate because the GOP didn't insist on getting his tax returns.

[RockaFowler]

6. So true

And now you have morons like Adam Putnam in Florida calling anyone who goes to college a Liberal Elite

I hate watching these ads daily, but it's a pattern for these do-nothings. Call us Liberal Elites for learning and stuff.

[Mc Mike]

7. A couple of DU post-ers used the quote about anti-intellectualism from Isaac Asimov;

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov, Column in Newsweek (21 January 1980)

[3catchaos]

8. So true.

We're paying a steep price for the prevailing attitude of anti-intellectualism.