Thinking and democracy

Daniel Patrick Moynihan is my favorite intellectual American politician from my lifetime.

I knew that name from my early years of reading The Hindu.  Moynihan was the American ambassador to India.  But, that's all I knew about him at that age.

Moynihan was a senator when I came to the US in 1987.  As I started reading up anything and everything that had nothing to do with the formal graduate schooling, I came to know more about Moynihan.  He had a PhD.  He had taught at Harvard.  His controversial report on poverty in America. 

An intellectual like him had also managed to win elections?

George Will remarked that as a senator, Moynihan had written more books than most senators read--all of them together!  For those of us who had idealized an intellectual-statesman along the likes of the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius or Ashoka, it was always a thrill to see an intellectual like Moynihan in politics. 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was Vaclav Havel who grabbed my attention for that reason.  And then Mario Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency in Peru.  Manmohan Singh became India's prime minister.  It seemed like democracy worldwide was finally growing up beyond mere populism and slogans, and I was looking forward to enlightened intellectual debates in American politics.

It did not turn out that way.

The two terms of President W. Bush set the Republican Party on a clear path of anti-intellectualism.  In 2008, I blogged about the trend and quoted Professor Elvin Lim:

At the heart of democracy is the idea that citizens make civic decisions based on information. When presidents do not offer information, but instead offer only sound bites, platitudes, and vacuous slogans, citizens are ill-equipped to make those decisions. Even worse, they are persuaded to make decisions according to nonrelevant, tangential cues such as personality and partisan punch lines.

That was in 2008.

And then populism returned "bigly."

The Republican Party became virulently anti-intellectual.

Always aware that it is not what you say but it is about who said it but who you are when you say it, I quoted Paul Krugman in this post in 2017:

Republicans have changed in the age of Trump: what was already a strong strain of anti-intellectualism has become completely dominant. The notion that there was a golden age of conservative intellectuals is basically a myth. But there used to be at least some pretense of taking facts and hard thinking seriously. ... Now a powerful political movement basically wants to make America ignorant again.

The fanatical devotion to anti-intellectualism has propelled quite a few Republicans into the House and Senate.

In the Senate, where Moynihan pushed for legislation through his intellect, we now have the likes of Tommy Tuberville, whose only qualification was having been a NCAA football coach.  His Senate page refers to him as Coach Tommy Tuberville.  You don't contact the Senator; instead it is "Contact Coach."  You will draw a blank if you searched for his public service record in his bio!

Next month's runoff election in Georgia features a Republican who is famous among some for having been a star football player in the 1980s.  The following is a transcript of what he recently said at a campaign event:

“You ever watch a stupid movie late at night hoping it’s gonna get better, it don’t get better, but you keep watching anyway?”

“The other night I was watching this movie called Fright Night — or Freak Night or some kind of night — and it was about vampires. I don’t know if you know, vampires are some cool people, are they not? But I’m gonna tell you something that I found out: A werewolf can kill a vampire, did you know that? I never knew that, so I didn’t want to be a vampire anymore. I wanted to be a werewolf.”

Yes, that is what Herschel Walker said in a stump speech to become a part of the deliberative body that decides our collective fate.

I wish a reporter would ask Walker if he has even heard of a Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

I will wrap this up with an excerpt from Vaclav Havel:

The main task in the coming era is something else: a radical renewal of our sense of responsibility. Our conscience must catch up to our reason, otherwise we are lost. 

It is my profound belief that there is only one way to achieve this: we must divest ourselves of our egotistical anthroponcentrism, our habit of seeing ourselves as masters of the universe who can do whatever occurs to us. We must discover a new respect for what transcends us: for the universe, for the earth, for nature, for life, and for reality. Our respect for other people, for other nations and for other cultures, can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it, that we share in it and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being, where it is judged. ... 

Whether our world is to be saved from everything that threatens it today depends above all on whether human beings come to their senses, whether they understand the degree of their responsibility and discover a new relationship to the very miracle of being. The world is in the hands of us all. 

So, what are you going to do?