“But the Trumpist effort to destroy Harvard and other elite universities — for that is clearly their intention — will do vast damage to our nation’s future.” Paul Krugman
The dumbing down of the Republican party has a history long before I began to write about it in The Huffington Post. The attempt to dumb down Harvard University that Paul Krugman is talking about, by wanting to control even its curriculum and course content, is the latest attempt to bring down our educational system to the Republican Party’s dismal intellectual level.
When one political party needs ignorance to keep its followers in compliance, believing whatever the party hacks want its followers to believe, its messages will be based on conspiracy theories, rumors, or made up fictions, as Trump does with his accusations that Harvard has anti-Semitic policies.
His habitual lying hides the unpleasant truth that he just wants to pick the wallets of his followers. It’s why the poorest Americans live in Republican-controlled red states.
I first witnessed it in 2015 during the CNN Republican candidate debate that seemed to be a prolonged campaign to discount almost all scientific facts, as well as intelligent discussion of the most important issues of the day.
Especially scary was Donald Trump saying if we build up our military enough, we won't have to negotiate with anybody. Or Marco Rubio, the seemingly most moderate Republican, endorsing a 1,900 mile fence along our entire border with Mexico (or double fence, says Dr. Ben Carson) over mountains and rivers, or Carli Fiorina saying that Planned Parenthood was aborting live babies to harvest their organs.
But the anti-intellectual, anti-science bias goes much further and deeper. It is in fact an almost totally American phenomenon that Republicans have taken advantage of in an attempt to dumb down the electorate to levels that would even deny evolution.
Why would anyone not want to support public education, when it educates more than 80 percent of our students? The result is that higher education is also falling behind.
According to the National Research Council, only 28 percent of high school science teachers consistently follow the National Research Council guidelines on teaching evolution, and 13 percent of those teachers explicitly advocate creationism or "intelligent design," said Psychology Today in a very damning 2014 article entitled, Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of America:
"After leading the world for decades in 25-34 year olds with university degrees, the U.S. is now in 12th place," said Psychology Today. "The World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. at 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly 50 percent of all graduate students in the sciences in the U.S. are foreigners, most of whom are returning to their home countries"
What else was debated in 2015, before Trump won his first term in the White House? Republican candidates were echoing the Republican platform that advocated the deportation of all illegal aliens, would abolish or cripple whole government agencies (including the Environmental Protection Agency), shut down the federal government over Planned Parenthood funding, and maintain that a fertilized egg is a viable human being that can't be aborted.
I reported then (in 2015) journalist Chris Hedges said in a PBS interview that President Clinton in co opting moderate Republican positions, such as deregulation of the financial industry, putting 100,000 more cops on the street, and 'reforming' welfare, had driven the Republican Party to "insanity".
That’s as good a description of what Trump’s MAGA Republicans are attempting to do again. Isn’t it the perfect definition of insanity—doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results?
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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