Smart Youth Voters Shunned GOP in the Midterms
Applebaum reacted to Christine O’Donnell’s advertised boast – “I didn’t go to Yale” – that Republicans “need to stop celebrating stupidity”. Goldberg’s response was, basically, that Republicans do not dislike elitism if it means academic excellence and hard work, but only the political program of leftist elites. Even on its own terms, Goldberg’s response addressed only one half of the problem. For the question is not only whether Republicans dislike academic excellence and hard work; it is also whether intelligent people who study hard dislike Republicans.
Why America's Top Students Are Tuning out the GOP
Today’s top students are motivated less by enthusiasm for Democrats and much more by revulsion from Republicans. It’s not the students who have changed so much. It’s the Republicans.
And here is where Applebaum’s point gains its force.
Under Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, Republicans championed science and knowledge. But over the past 30 years, national Republicans have formed an intensifying alliance with religious conservatives more skeptical of science and knowledge. I don’t know whether discarding evolution goes against common sense; but I’m pretty sure it goes against most Ivy League-educated senses.
Why the GOP Needs the Academic Elite
I believe future Republican administrations would also try to draw on [elite] talent to formulate policy. However, the well is drying up. So few of the experts in any given field will in the future be Republican. That is an enormous problem. The intellectual resources directed at finding conservative answers to today’s problems are weakened year by year. If not quite critical yet, thanks to the efforts of an older generation of Republicans, the ramifications of this trend might be dramatic.
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12 comments:
Applebaum makes the common mistake of equating highly-educated intellect with highly-intelligent intellect. They don't necessarily go hand in hand.
I have more education than I ever imagined I would begin and a heck of a lot more than I ever imagined I would finish (maybe "survive" is a better verb). I get by okay in life and my education experience of having to work hard at a challenge, on a schedule, to meet a standard was certainly more useful in helping me "get by okay in life" than any (waning to almost gone now) mastery of higher math and physics.
I have a cadre of friends down here on the "other" Eastern Shore (VA) who did not attend college. I know more about mathematical forumlae and laws of physics and their authors than any of my friends. But my friends know how to fix electrical circuits that I wouldn't dare touch. They know how to balance a load on an extended crane boom that I would cause to topple. They earn far less than me yet they have no debt. They can recite poetry and have read the classics. By Applebaum's standard, and by a lot of people's standards, I am far and away their intellectual superiors. But I can tell you without a moment's hesitation, and with genuine sincerity, that they are far and away smarter than I am. Way smarter.
I mentioned before here, I believe, a common saying down here among the unwashed masses. When I mention going back up to DC for work, I frequently get the response, dripping with disingenuity: "Yep, goin' back up where all the smart people are."
I'm all for education and have benefitted greatly from ample access to it. But I don't know that I can say I am any more intelligent than if I had spent an equal amount of time continually succeeding or failing on my ability to figure out problems they don't teach in classrooms. There's a reason most of the great mechanical inventions of our lifetime were made by farmers. Their classroom required A-level performance every day. And when there wasn't a textbook answer to the problem they were facing, they had to do extra-credit work and innovate a solution.
I tell my friend, Eddie, that there is only one thing I've seen that he clearly doesn't know as well as I do. The meaning of the word "impossible." I'd like to not know that word as well, but according to Applebaum, I'm apparently too intelligent.
I have absolutely no clue why that posted 7 times. See how smart I am?
Funny, it appears that today's li'l college leftists go to great lengths to avoid actual science classes. Let the Dems have the sociology and womyn's studies grads, we'll take the engineers and accountants.
Mr. Mudge's got a good point about the big tent of intellect and various kinds that live under it. Shouldn't the GOP want both kinds?
Students at top universities just can’t stomach the anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-civil rights, anti-religious-tolerance attitude of the current GOP.
"If as a young man, you are not liberal, you have no heart. If as an older man, you are not conservative, you have no brain."
Mo Howard
Don't worry about it, the smarter ones will come around.
Dick Morris does have some interesting statistics on this very subject. It seems Obama's efforts (Jon Steward etc.) paid off in that voters under 30 who decided in the last week before the election broke for the Dems two to one. This demographic may more aptly be described as the young, the dumb, and the disengaged.
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