There is a dangerous virus sweeping America. Its prey: elites. Its perpetrators: commentators and showman and women on the political right, including Glenn Beck, Laura Ingram, Anne Coulter, Shawn Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Micheal Savage, Jay Severen and to a lesser extent Bill O’Reilly.
Their thesis: that if you are educated, especially having been educated or employed in the northeastern part of the United States, or California, you are dangerous to America.
Why are you dangerous? Because you are highly educated, perhaps worse, an intellectual, meaning that you are comfortable and skilled debating and defending your beliefs in the world of ideas and persuasion. To these political commentators this means you’re not “an ordinary person, not one of us”. Your concerns are not those shared by others because you are rich, the unenviable effect of your being highly educated. Hence, by definition, you do not, cannot and should not represent or speak for anyone in America because you are not representative of our country’s people.
What is the counter to this argument, that you cannot represent Americans or speak for society because you are not really “of our country?”
The alternative view is that politics should be a clash over ideas, and those with the most compelling arguments should win. Persuation by the use of factual, empirical evidence or logical deductive or inductive reasoning is the essence of what educated people do in their work.
People who first use their mind over their emotion recognize the difference is between supporting conclusions with facts and evidence that are not generally in dispute among reasonable people, versus opinions, which are always open to debate and argumentation. Knowing the difference between what is a fact, which cannot be reasonably debated, and an opinion, which should always be challenged as a matter of fair play, is what people who use their brain first are supposed to know and do.
No better topic demonstrates this difference between arguments tied to emotions versus fact than the issue of President Obama’s birth certificate. It has been factually, indisputably established that President Obama was born in the U.S. since he released his birth certificate in 2006.
Yet, charlatans, phonies, and the rationally blind, yet emotionally combustible pontificators will freely ignore the facts, when inconsistent with their wants and the conclusions they’ve set out to reach. Who must defend against this ramp emotionalism and demagoguery in our society? The elites, our educated leaders, who got to where they are by having to defend their thoughts and reasoning during their education and in their careers, careers that require deciphering the difference between fact and opinion and then defending a coherent argument or having that arguments reasoning be pierced or blown-up as inconsistent, or not based on facts. Whether in the fields of journalism, law, medicine, science, education or business, reason rules- or should rule.
Hence, in political discourse when one says something that is factually incorrect, the collective of educated people must call this person out on their shameful appeal to emotion over reason.
Yet, when Donald Trump was exposed as a circus clown, and self-promoting charlatan for demanding Barak Obama to give more proof of what he had already proven, his birth in America, he did not apologize or fade away in shame. Instead he actually went on the attack against President Obama’s intellect. President Obama, who graduated with the highest academic honors possible from Harvard Law School, Magna Cum Laude, Editor of the Law Review, the most prestigious position at Harvard Law School, which is the most prestigious law school in the United States of America. Before that he was at Ivy League Colombia University, having entered there from also highly respected Occidental College. This level of education does not make President Obama “right” on any issue. It just gives us a better chance that we will not argue in a way that does not make rational sense just to score political points. He won’t be Donald Trump.
To be educated does not mean that you are correct, only that you won’t argue for certain prepositions that are not realistically possible. Your education limits or should limit your arguments to what you can factually defend.
To question President Obama’s intelligence, not his political choices as Donald Trump did, is beyond the realm of reasonable debate. No person who is intelligent and responsible would ever do so, especially with the history of racism in America, where it is generally understood that some people still hold the outdated and dismissed notion that black people, by definition, cannot be smart.
Would David Brooks, George Will, William Kristol or Charles Krauthammer, or for that matter even local Worcester Telegram and Gazette editorial writer Christ Sinacola, ever question where President Obama was born or his intelligence? Of course not. To do so would remove the core of factual belief we all agree upon before starting our debate about right and wrong. For them, facts demonstrated by the other side are to be conceded as true in debate. The inferences or conclusions to be drawn from these facts are what are open for interpretation and debate.
If we allow publically recognized people and organizations to shamelessly speak to the emotive, irrational crowds of people that will always exist in every society, only for their own faux glory, wealth, and celebrity, we will be left with “the maddening crowd,” those who refuse to see what is clearly in front of them. This anti-elite, anti- intellectualism is what leads to demagogues- both the mild version like Lou Dobbs and the world’s worst case- Adolf Hitler. It is not far from these people to the conspiracy theorists who question whether Osama Bin Laden is really dead, or whether the US or Isreal destroyed the World Trade Center towers as a ploy.
If we don’t value facts and education we will be left with many people continuing to believe that Barak Obama is a Muslim; President Obama is going to take away American’s guns and put their owners in re-education camps; aliens from outer space (not other countries) landed as Rosewell, New Mexico and the government covered it up; U.S. government scientist created AIDS as a weapon to wipe out black people; President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, rather than a single gunman (80% of Americans believe this). And lastly, Barak Obama is a socialist, even though when given the chance he did not nationalize the banks to save them (like they did in England) and he has not moved to claim government control of the “means of production” even of healthcare, which will remain as private under his plan as it is today. The President instead had the government buy shares of private companies to save them from bankruptcy and sell those shares back to the private sector as soon as financially feasible and economically reasonable. This is not socialism.
It is only with self-regulation and by peer pressure that can we separate the charlatans from the serious, the unworthy from the constructive. We on the right or left of the political spectrum must truly “police” our own, calling commentators who generally agree with us bombastic and irrelevant and their arguments of thus limited value, when their vocalization is beyond the pale of reasoned and reasonable debate. Do the names Keith Oberman or Ed Shultz ring a bell?
Benjamin Franklin said to us Americans over 200 years ago- “We have given you a democratic-republic… if you can keep it.” This, my fellow Americans, is up to us. Charlatans don’t help.
This is Randy Feldman on WCRN’s Midday Report.
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