The most depressing spectacle on the political landscape right now (besides a potential second term for Barack Obama) is the party of Lincoln entertaining the presidential ambitions of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann"”women with better hairdos than heads. One needn't be a GOP-hater like Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd to be dismayed by the growing anti-intellectualism of the party. Even David Brooks, a conservative commentator, has observed that Republican disdain for liberal intellectuals has morphed into a disdain for all intellectuals.
But modern intellectuals, having abandoned honest inquiry for unabashed activism, must themselves bear some blame for the backlash.
The GOP's descent into mindlessness began when the gaffe-prone Dan Quayle prodded a sixth-grader to misspell "potatoe."? The more the media lampooned Quayle, the more Republicans circled the wagons around him. Since then, Republican intellectual defensiveness has hardened into intellectual goofiness. No longer is stupidity a disqualification, even for the highest office in the land. Palin, in fact, has turned her lack of intellectual talent into her biggest asset, like Snooki on "Jersey Shore."?
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