I have written a lot recently of the troubling anti-intellectualism in American politics and society in general. There has been a veritable flood of books and other treatments of this widely recognized trend. While the present election is providing vivid examples of this sad reality, it is difficult to point this out credibly.The obstacle to credibly using the current presidential campaigns to highlight the scourge of anti-intellectual methods of political persuasion is the unavoidable perception of partisanship. While it is true that both sides in this presidential election are trafficking in demagoguery, one side has "jumped the shark" in this regard. Sadly, in an impotent effort to appear "fair" reporters and political analysts are pretending that this terrible insult to voters’ intelligence is a wholly bipartisan crime for which both parties are equally culpable.
The problem is that no one really believes this. That the McCain-Palin campaign has taken dishonesty, disingenuous spin, and distortion to new heights is an open secret. Does anybody really think saying that Obama "pals around" with terrorists is equivalent to linking McCain to the S&L crisis? Is Palin's unapologetic and demonstrably false claim to have opposed the "bridge to nowhere" no more dishonest than Obama's claim that McCain wants to give Oil companies big tax breaks? The former is flatly false, while the latter is at best a lie by omission (i.e. McCain wants all corporations to get big tax breaks). Do reporters (in full self defense mode) want Americans to believe that flat out lies about Obama are no worse than exaggerations about McCain?
An adjunct issue here is the incredible shrinking intellectual standards being applied to the Republican nominees, particularly Sarah Palin. Richard Cohen's latest op-ed explains this well. Otherwise respected conservative pundits and analysts are saying that Palin is doing a good job, that she is smart, and that she is qualified to be president. Interestingly, they admit that they are basing these claims on the way Palin "appears" to the mythical average voter, not on their own intellectual standards. They heap praise on Palin as if she were a consumer product that was being bought up like hotcakes despite its utter lack of substantive utility. Is she the "pet rock" of American politics? In other words, they have completely acquiesced to the lowest common denominator in evaluating political candidates. The quality and veracity of ideological and even factual claims, intellect, and resume are all scraped in favor of this connection with "Joe six-pack" and "hockey moms."
It would all be enough to cause real average voters to vomit if it were not for one slowly emerging trend, a trend that may help restore our collective faith in the wisdom of the common man. IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK!!!! You actually CAN under estimate the intelligence of American voters and the Republican presidential and vice presidential campaigns are proving it. Americans are not Pavlovian dogs who will fall in line simply by calling your opponents names or reducing complex realities like the war in Iraq to a choice between victory and defeat. You really cannot get American voters to believe you are a reformer simply by saying that you are. You cannot get American voters to assume you have a real record of reform without ever actually citing verifiable examples. Being a "maverick" is not actually a substantive qualification for any job.
Americans are not going to ignore the fact that our economy has been severely damaged by the mindless deregulatory mantra of fiscal conservatism. They are not going to believe that the Democrats prevented regulation of the financial industry while John McCain was fighting for more government regulation any more than they were ever going to blame a Democratic president (Clinton) for the 1994 shutdown of the government, no matter what Newt Gingrich and company said over and over. President Reagan made the same mistake in his government shutdown. Americans blamed Reagan, not the Democratic congress. It's simple really. The anti-government party will always be blamed if Americans perceive that a problem resulted from insufficient government regulation, while the pro-government party will always get the blame when problems are thought to result from meddlesome government regulations. No amount of out of context claims, quotes, or flat out lies will get past this "common sense" calculation on the part of American voters.
The idea that Democrats played against type and were the real culprits in this failure to regulate financial markets just doesn't pass the smell test. Americans know that liberals believe in regulating the market and conservatives do not. The rest is just out of context quotations and disingenuous spin.
Barring some October surprise, Americans are going to elect a liberal president and increase the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. While it is true that conservatism and liberalism can both be defended and advocated intelligently and reasonably, the conservative party's four decade old strategy of in-your-face anti-intellectual populism may have run it's course. I only hope that in the wake of their party's rebuke conservative intellectuals succeed in re-capturing their party from those who see smart people as "elitists" and "out of touch" with real (apparently dumb) conservatives.
Over the next four weeks the Republicans will be throwing everything including the cultural kitchen sink at Barack "Hussein" Obama, all of which will succeed only in masking the true size of the Democrats' electoral mandate. The more significant question is: will the Democrats use their success wisely and well? Stay tuned.