Does it really all come down to eggheads and rubes?
Is it really possible that the most anti-intellectual president since Warren Harding a hundred years ago has convinced 35 percent of American voters that an election he lost by a fairly wide margin was somehow stolen from him?
Believe it or not, the country is not evenly divided. But voter suppression and gerrymandering by Republicans make it seem that way. Add to that an archaic system that gives states with less than a million people the same number of senators as states with nearly 40 million and you have a real mess.
Although many on the right would love to deny it, an appeal to anti-intellectualism has always been part of the deal for conservatives. Back before the Civil War, there was even a right-wing party proudly calling itself the Know Nothings.
The weirdest part of it is that so many people are aggressively ignorant.
“You think because you can read that you’re better than me?”
Well, yeah.
We just finished four years of a presidential term in which there were legitimate questions — frequent ones — as to whether the man in the White House could actually read.
I can’t help but recall a Chris Rock joke about lack of respect for learning.
“So you’ve got a master’s degree. You think that makes you my master? You think you can kick my ass?”
Of course Trump ran against a woman who while she didn’t use the word “stupid” to describe his voters, she did even worse. She called them “deplorables.”
And he followed a president who said people of the conservative bend were clinging to religion and guns because the world was leaving them behind.
These people aren’t so ignorant — or even stupid — that they can’t manage to get to the polls and vote against people who disrespect them.
Sometime in the last 40 years or so, it became a big deal for some folks to vote for candidates they would feel comfortable drinking a beer with.
Who can forget Matt Kavanaugh making a big deal out of liking beer at his Senate confirmation hearing for a Supreme Court seat?
And nobody’s drinking a beer with Trump, who brags that he has never tasted alcohol.
In the end, it comes down to Republicans playing the theatrical game better. Gee Dubya Bush had an MBA from Harvard, but pretended to be unable to pronounce the word “nuclear.”
Because when it comes down to it, there are a lot more stupid people than there are Harvard MBAs.