{"id":31927,"date":"2018-03-31T09:50:39","date_gmt":"2018-03-31T16:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=31927"},"modified":"2018-03-31T09:50:39","modified_gmt":"2018-03-31T16:50:39","slug":"everyday-erinyes-117","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/31\/everyday-erinyes-117\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyday Erinyes #117"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto<\/strong><\/span>, Megaera<\/strong><\/span>, and Tisiphone<\/strong><\/span>. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”<\/p>\n

When I read articles reporting incidents of Trump voters – Republicans – doing something not very bright, and then read the comments, I often see riffs on the idea “Donald Trump says he loves the uneducated.” But, you know, that’s not exactly what he said. He said, “I love the poorly<\/strong> educated.” I understood that to mean, in essence, that not knowing anything is not quite good enough for Trump. He loves people who know things that aren’t true.\"\"<\/p>\n

But it’s also true that Democrats tend to have more education that Republicans, even without regard to the quality. Let’s take this statistic<\/a>: today, roughly 54% of college graduates identify Democratic or leaning to the Democrats, whereas only 39% identify Republican or leaning Republican.<\/p>\n

It wasn’t always like this. As recently as 1994, the numbers went exactly the other way. (Hence my insistence on the distinction between “un-” and “poorly.” What were those colleges teaching, “The Works and Philosopy of Ayn Rand”?)<\/p>\n

But that isn’t all. That was people with four-year degrees. When it comes to people with degrees above the four-year level, today, 63% are or lean Democratic, with only 31% going to the dark side. But back in the mid-1990’s, the split was more like 45% Republican, 47% Democratic. All these figures are from Pew Research Center.<\/p>\n

The Republican advantage among people with a high school diploma or less is even more stark if one looks just at white<\/span><\/strong> people (no surprise, of course). There the divide today is roughly 47% Republican to 45% Democratic. That too is a shift from the 1990’s, when the numbers were not quite the other way.<\/p>\n

This of course is no surprise to anyone who as lived as long as most of us here. Republicans have been bashing both education and intelligence verbally since, to my personal recollection, 1952, when Nixon called Stevenson an “egghead.” And I was only 7. That remark may have slipped by some, because it was also applicable to the fact that Adlai was balding. But it didn’t slip by my family. We knew it was anti-intellectual.<\/p>\n

Then there was William F Buckley in 1963 claiming that he\"\"<\/p>\n

should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reagan and Bush the younger also said some too-stupid-to-be-believed things. And we have for some tome seen that the hostility is not just to people who have good educations, but to the colleges and universities themselves. In 2017, Pew found that<\/p>\n

a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (58 percent) now say that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up from 45 percent last year.\"\"<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is the road to Betsy DeVos. The only surprise should be that it didn’t happen faster. In a way, it’s too bad it didn’t. We might have taken better counter-measures sooner if it had.<\/p>\n

And we also have here a true example of Republican hypocrisy. I have contended, and stand by, the fact that some of what looks like hypocrisy in Republicans isn’t – it’s just that they are going by a different moral standard from ours (in my opinion a decidedly IM<\/strong>moral standard, but they apply it consistently.) But I really cannot call this anything but hypocrisy:<\/p>\n

As a rule, in every Congress including this majority-Republican body, nearly every member has a four-year degree, and the number of House and Senate legislators who possess postgraduate educations is far higher than in the general population. If nothing else that proves the elite GOP lawmakers actually do value education, at least when they\u2019re thinking about themselves and their children. It\u2019s only their voters they want to keep disinterested in learning, convinced that knowing less is somehow better.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alecto<\/strong><\/span>, Megaera<\/strong><\/span>, Tisiphone<\/strong><\/span> – you come to us from the cradle of learning on the non-Abrahamic side of our culture. But on the Abrahamic side, our heritage is also pride in that we are “People of the Book.” I’m not sure how – but I hope you can help us recover our pride in knowledge and learning, as well as intelligence.<\/p>\n

The Furies and I will be back.<\/p>\n

Cross posted to Care2 HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":18437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31927"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31927\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}