MAGA equates to dumb AF: New research on Trump voters: They're not the sharpest tools in the box

[DFW]

4. This reminds me of a quote I read in a novel over 40 years ago.

A Japanese master of an intricate board game, dying of stomach cancer, calls each of his pupils in for one last individual lecture. He has a warning for one of his most brilliant students, explaining to him that his brilliance will not always serve him as an asset if he doesn't acknowledge the vast majority of people out there who cannot match his intellect:

"Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. See how, in the arts, Kabuki wanes and withers while popular novels of violence and mindless action swamp the mind of the mass reader. And even in that timid genre, no author dares to produce a genuinely superior man as his hero, for in his rage of shame the mass man will send his yojimbo, the critic, to defend him. The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”

This was written ten years or less after Nixon tried to put the unqualified G. Harrold Carswell onto the Supreme Court. When Carswell's mediocre record was cited as a negative, a Republican Senator defended the nomination, saying specifically that the mediocre people of America deserved representation on the Court. He said that all nine justices couldn't all be brilliant jurists--and then went on to cite three distinguished Jewish justices, as if he hadn't already made his point! I'm sure this was still fresh in the author's mind.