(Happy birthday SMP!)

The original of this article appeared in the Raleigh, NC News & Observer on Jan. 21, but is now in protected archives; a freely available version is at

http://chblue.com/Article.asp?ID=1166

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Is Dubya Really That Dumb?

Wednesday, January 24, 2001

By J. PEDER ZANE Raleigh News & Observer

Liberal pundits and their far more influential brethren, late-night comics, agree: Our new president is a nincompoop. Indeed, the content convergence between the op-ed page of The New York Times and the political skits on "Saturday Night Live," between The New Yorker's commentary and Jay Leno's monologues, is downright eerie.

All depict Dubya as a thumb-sucking frat boy who should never leave home without his drool bag.

Though these commentators may mistake their wit for insight, it is their lack of originality that is most impressive. After all, "stupid" and "intellectually lazy" are the same charges liberal opinion makers have stuck on almost every Republican president since World War II: Feckless Ike preferred putting to policy, Ford was a bumbling pretender, Reagan an amiable dunce.

Bush's father escaped such attacks because Vice President Dan Quayle seemed an easier target, while Nixon offered so many better lines of fire. (By contrast, the liberal media have portrayed the post war Democratic presidents -- Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton -- as intellectually gifted, if flawed, men.)

No doubt many liberals sincerely believe that Bush and his predecessors are as dumb as a bag of hammers. In fact, the disdain runs deeper.

A reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, David Early, expressed this broader contempt in a personal essay in which, according to The Associated Press, he "wondered how anyone he liked or admired could be a Republican." (The Mercury News yanked his piece because of concerns about fairness.)

What is of interest is not that liberals disagree with conservatives (and vice versa) -- God help us if that changes. It is the belief that vast swaths of the political spectrum are so bone-headed that they are unworthy of serious engagement. Though the nexus of culture, history, politics and policy that has fostered this strident partisanship is too complicated to do justice to here, we might shed some light on the situation by examining how changes in America's educational system have led many liberals to make intelligence their cudgel of choice.

Nicholas Lemann tracks these developments in "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy" (1999). Lemann, a staff writer for The New Yorker, traces the transformations wrought on America since World War II by the effort to expand educational opportunities through the use of standardized tests, especially the SATs.

Lemann's story begins in 1945, when most of the spots at America's elite universities were awarded to the sons of the WASP establishment -- quotas limited the number of Jews and Catholics admitted to these schools while economic and cultural factors prevented most working class people from even dreaming of a higher education.

However, the Great Depression convinced many influential Americans that their country and, specifically, their system for selecting tomorrow's leaders, was broken.

Under the leadership of Harvard's president, James Bryant Conant, and one of his deans, Henry Chauncey, who went on to head the Educational Testing Service, they worked "to dethrone this upper class and restore the United States to its true democratic nature" by creating a meritocracy. Admissions to the top schools, and hence, leadership positions in and out of government, would go to the best and the brightest regardless of their background.

Unfortunately, it is much harder to identify "the best" -- which involves unquantifiable capacities such as character, fortitude and leadership skills -- than it is to single out "the brightest" -- whose gifts might be measured through test scores and grades.

Undeterred, postwar America transformed itself by making intellectual aptitude, as measured by the SATs and other standardized tests, the key to opportunity. Lemann notes that this new system is far fairer than the old, but he also shows that it is easily manipulated. wealthy children with access to better schools and test preparation Courses can appear to have more aptitude than their poorer neighbors.

For our purposes, the key point is that the opinion leaders who Have come of age since the 1950s, and, make no mistake, they Are overwhelmingly liberal, have been able to convince themselves that their ascension is due to God-given gray matter.

They stand atop a merit-based world thanks to sheer talent. And, since cerebral megawattage is their skyrocket, they tend to see political And social issues not as contested matters open to an array of views but as intellectual problems that, like questions on the SATs, only admit right and wrong answers.

If you don't agree with them, you are wrong. If you are wrong, it is because you are stupid.

If only life were that simple. Smart people, of course, often reach opposite conclusions. Intelligence should not make us milquetoasts -- compromise works best as a last resort. But its very essence involves an appreciation that life is made richer by the diversity of thought and that society is made more civil to the extent that we respect those differences.

An article about our new president in last Sunday's New York Times Magazine recounted a recent meeting Bush held with a group of Democratic and Republican legislators. It reported: "There would be times, Bush repeatedly said, when they disagreed. 'But that's OK,' he kept saying."

That is one of the smartest things I've read in a long while.

© 2001 Scripps Howard News Service

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2001

Answers

CL,

Good read. On a related note: remember when the Unabomber was finally caught? The left noted with horror that he wasn't (as they'd hoped and expected) some fringe loonie from a militia group, but in fact, a guy with a PhD from an Ivy League university.

This puzzled them greatly, because it wasn't supposed to happen that way. :)

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2001

"If you don't agree with them, you are wrong. If you are wrong, it is because you are stupid."

Contrast this to the conservative formulation:

If you don't agree with them, you are immoral. If you are immoral, you are rejected of God and an abomination among men.

This whole piece is rather incredible, really. We are supposed to buy the idea that, among other things, the SAT (without reference to other factors) completely accounts for the politics of the late 20th century.

Take this for example:

"For our purposes, the key point is that the opinion leaders who Have come of age since the 1950s, and, make no mistake, they Are overwhelmingly liberal, have been able to convince themselves that their ascension is due to God-given gray matter."

By contrast, anyone who is familiar with American history of the early 20th century knows that, before the SAT was conceived, opinion leaders equally believed that their ascension was due to God-given superiority. However, the evidence they relied on wasn't a high SAT score, it was wealth. They staunchly believed God rewarded the worthy with prosperity, and since they had more wealth than anyone else, they were clearly better loved by God and therefore the most deserving. OTOH, the wretched poor were immoral low-lifes and scarcely human.

Aside from that, I fail to find any evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, to support the notion that conservative intellectuals are any less prone to denigrate their opponent's intelligence than liberal ones. Nor that working class liberals spend any time snickering up their sleeves at how dumb conservatives are.

J. Peder Zane should get out more. He sounds like a fairly recent graduate of college (who had a really impressive SAT score). This reads like the kind of essay he was recently turning in to his poly-sci prof and getting an A on. If Zane were above the age of 40 I would be truly shocked at his callowness.

-- Anonymous, January 25, 2001

Oh, come on.

Tell you what, READ, don't WATCH, the debates. Accurate transcripts only, not the cleaned up versions with the buggered up words corrected.

Or listen to the guy talk.

Or read something he has written in first draft - there are a couple of samples around.

Tell you what, when butchering the language, pitiful knowledge of grammer and the inability to keep from losing your train of thought are taken as signs of great intelligence, I'll bloody well give up on the US forever.

My sweet Lord, I do better on these throwaway posts than he can do in front of a camera after weeks of prep.

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2001

I refuse to respond on the basis I may incriminate myself.

But I will babble mindlessly along with this. One of the main factors (most important one by far) which influences why people vote is a thing called the Hayseed quotient. Reagan had it, Clinton had it, and Junior has it in spades. Ask around and you will know many voted for Junior based simply on the fact he is the way he is and not a polished beltway politician.

Now you knew all that but there it is for review.

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2001