Peter Beinart at the Daily Beast discusses the specter of anti-intellectualism that has pervaded  politics over the last several decades.

            
"For more than a half-century, anti-intellectualism has had a pretty good run in presidential politics. In fact, Republicans would never have gotten where they are without it. In the 1950s, when the modern conservative movement was born, the right had a problem: It was seen as elitist, a hangover from the depression years, when Thomas Nast-style plutocrats opposed social security, labor unions and federal aid to the poor. Conservatives needed a way to turn the tables, to show that liberals--those self-proclaimed tribunes of the common man--were the real elitists. That's where anti-intellectualism came in. If FDR had practiced class warfare, the Cold War right turned to brain warfare instead. William F. Buckley, founder of the right's flagship publication, National Review, began going around saying that "I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University."

Buckley's quote shows up every other day on cable or the web and no one ever confronts the idiot quoting it with the fact that Buckley would never have conversations with, or drinks with or dinner with the first four hundred people listed in a telephone directory.  I always see Rodney in the Wizard of Id running into the throne room screaming: THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING, THE PEASANTS ARE REVOLTING. And the King responds: "We already know that. Why do you think we never invite them to social events." The Republicans have always despised the rabble. Keep them at the lowest wages, the lowest benefits and fire them if production goes down.

What the Republicans have always cherished are representatives of the rabble.  The Joe the Plumblers who worry about paying taxes on $250,000 when they never have grossed over $40,000.00 in any taxable year. Or they worry about paying a 'death tax' when their chances of dying with over 2 million dollars in the bank are nil.  Mentally disabled rabble they can use to win the class war.

Historically, this anti-intellectual fervor is not new.  Can you imagine signing up for the "No-Nothing Party?"

But Beinart's real point is scarier.  He is not writing about propaganda.  He is writing about idiots in the White House and other sites of real political power in this country.

"In the early 1950s, Richard Nixon slyly fused anti-intellectualism and anti-communism, calling Democratic Presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson a "Ph.D. graduate of the College of Cowardly Communist Containment." And in his 1968 presidential bid, Alabama Governor George Wallace condemned "pointy-headed professors" who were imposing their liberal ideas on the segregated South. But it was under Ronald Reagan that the anti-intellectual era in American politics truly began. Reagan harbored strong ideological convictions, but an astonishing unawareness of basic facts. At one meeting in 1983, he amazed a group of congressmen by denying that America had bombers and subs that carried nuclear weapons. (In fact, bombers and submarines constituted two-thirds of America's nuclear triad). His advisors proved so unable to get him to read his briefing materials that some of them began conveying the information in cartoon form."

I will never forget some idiot on C-Span earlier this year attempting to sell his pro-Reagan book. He recalled sitting in on a cabinet meeting while members were arguing against one another.  It was getting loud.  And the writer is attempting to show the great character that is Reagan held his peace during the argument, staring at his jelly bean bowl.

If this is not a scene from "Being There", I do not know what is.  Reagan did not interrupt because he could not interrupt.  He had no idea what was going on and would have had nothing to add to the discussion.

Some stand-up opened up his act by stating that Reagan had as much to do with the Reagan Administration as a hood ornament has to do with a Mac Truck.
   
"In this way, as in so many others, George W. Bush followed the Reagan script. In the 2000 campaign, he famously flubbed a quiz on world leaders and talked defiantly about "Grecians" and "nucular weapons." He said he knew he was going to win when he read a New Yorker profile in which Al Gore cited the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty."

And boy how w followed that script.  Does not like to read long briefings, acts on his 'gut' (I have long felt we are in Iraq because of some bad Tacos) and never looks back.

Beinart is optimistic that maybe the Best and The Brightest is the main theme for this New Administration. And even though he has quit smoking, this new President is never going to get caught staring at a jelly bean jar while others set policy.