Karen,
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Why doesn’t anyone talk about how college educated people tend to lean towards Obama? You know, people who read and don’t just let the media tell them what to think. Intelligent people.
Obama is intelligent and it would be so nice to have someone intelligent as President for a change.
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I don’t want to be rude, but perhaps my experience here — albeit limited and anecdotal — is relevant.
I grew up in southeastern Oklahoma among fundamentalist Baptists, Church of Christ partisans, and Pentecostals — the very essence of redneck fundamentalism that I somehow suspect you consider to be far beneath your level of educated eminence. Then I went to Princeton as a classics major and graduated cum laude.
I can tell you, with absolute confidence, that I saw at least as much intellectual all-we-like-sheep syndrome among the Princeton undergraduates as I saw among the redneck fundamentalists. Personally I tended to prefer the rednecks. They were narrow-minded, but so were the self-impressed Princeton crew…they just chose different things to be narrow-minded about. And at least when hanging out with the narrow-minded rednecks I didn’t have to listen to them natter on and on incessantly about how open-minded they were.
Wisdom is a very different thing from intelligence, and it is not possible to acquire wisdom without humility. If you have intelligence but you don’t have humility, then your intelligence just makes it easier for you to come up with rationalizations for why you’re right about everything and the people who disagree with you are morons, rather than persons who might have something to teach you. But an American liberal-arts education, while it certain challenges students who are Republicans, doesn’t encourage liberal undergraduates to develop humility; instead it flatters the preening self-conceit that comes naturally to adolescents, especially adolescents who got accepted to prestigious schools. There are many sub-cultures in America that indulge in mindless group-think, but none take a backset to the liberal-arts Left, and the liberal-arts Left’s self-congratulation on its own intelligence adds a special piquant flair all its own.
And I say this, by the way, as a Libertarian who holds the Republican Party and the political Religious Right in contempt, and who absolutely agrees with what seems to be your estimate of the Shrub’s I.Q.
Cheers,
KP
