Why Have Republicans Dumbed Down So Many?

 ANSWERING the KENNEDYS CALL

What is the reason Republicans have become the party of anti-intellectuals? The danger is that it may drown out any intelligent discourse about the most important issues of our day. It's driving at least one of our political parties into insanely ridiculous positions.

Huffington Post

I wrote in 2015 about the issues Republicans discussed in their primary debates. It also explains why Donald Trump took over the party. And nothing has changed in 2024.

We saw in the 2015 CNN Republican candidate debate the results of what 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.

What is the reason Republicans have become the party of anti-intellectuals—some even want to abolish the Department of Education, and otherwise defund public education?

Journalist Chris Hedges once said in a PBS interview 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".

But the anti-intellectual, anti-science bias goes much deeper. It is in fact an almost totally American phenomenon that Republicans have taken advantage of to ‘dumb down’ the electorate to levels that would believe whatever an aging, increasingly incoherent Donald Trump says.

Why would anyone not want to support public education, when it educates more than 80 percent of American 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."

Republican candidates are still 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.

Pundits give other reasons for such a dumbing down of a segment of the electorate--such as social media and television replacing literacy, or education that no longer teaches math and science or even history.

Maybe that has enabled the Donald Trumps of the world to shout louder. The danger is that it may drown out any intelligent discourse about the most important issues of our day. It has driven one of our political parties into no longer believing in Democracy.

Harlan Green © 2024

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

The Divided States of America

Financial FAQs

It is now becoming obvious that we are not a United States of America. There are many states that restrict voting rights, abortion rights, immigration, even the collective bargaining rights of workers that are no longer able to negotiate for their own living wages.

This is when the media is lamenting the possible breakup of the European Union with Great Britain’s Brexit vote to depart from the EU. But the US is breaking up in far more serious ways, even without the influx of millions of Muslim refugees that Europe has to deal with and is causing its drift to xenophobia and the fear of foreigners.

The US in many ways is still fighting the Civil War of 150 years ago, with the defacto apartheid of poor vs. wealthy neighborhoods, and the police killing of blacks at traffic stops. A recent study by the New York based Center For Policing Equity showed that African Americans are more than 3 times as likely to be beaten, bitten by police dogs, pepper sprayed, Tasered, or shot, according to the New York Times.

There are now 26 right-to-work states that either don’t allow workers to join unions, or pay dues, or bargain collectively for their wages, even when their workplace may be under a union contract. This has resulted in those states having the greatest income inequality and lowest wage-earners.

Graph: Wikipedia

There are a very similar number that restrict abortions—even in the case of rape for women—and restrict voting rights when the Voting Rights Act was gutted by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote in 2015.

And it is many of those same states that don’t allow convicted felons that have served their time from voting—as many as 30 percent of voter-age African Americans in southern states, thanks to the War on Drugs, according to Michael Moore’s movie, Where To Invade Next. GW Bush probably only won Florida because some 80,000 ex-felons were stricken from the voting roles—mostly in Democratic-leaning counties.

This is why African-Americans now comprise 50 percent of our 2.3 million prison population when they are 12 percent of our population. It provides the cheap labor that prison factories have used to generate products for most large corporations plus the military—another form of slave labor.

Florida leads the pack in the number of citizens excluded. According to Desmond Meade of the nonprofit Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, "Over 1 million people in Florida right now are disenfranchised. Nearly 1 in 3 of them are African American men.” If these people were able to vote, Meade continues, "Florida would no longer be a swing state."

But according to the Brennan Center for Justice, 48 states (exceptions: Maine and Vermont) prohibit current prisoners with felony convictions from voting and 29 of them also bar those on probation or parole. All told, felony disenfranchisement prevents more than from voting. And of the four states that permanently bar voting by former felons—Kentucky, Florida, Iowa, and Virginia—the latter three are battleground states.

Then there are the gun laws. Only 6 states restrict or outright ban the sale of military-style assault weapons, when more than 30,000 gun deaths are recorded every year, and Orlando-style massacres occur because of unlimited magazine sizes of those same assault weapons.

What is behind the defacto civil war still raging? Many economists says it’s the globalization and export of good jobs to developing countries with cheaper wages that have hurt those blue collar workers in the poorer states.  But too many blame immigrants, or nonwhites, or anyone not belonging to their tribe. But we also have to look at the monopoly power of corporations that have pushed such free trade treaties, suppressing their employees’ wages while paying their executives record incomes.

In fact, these states have in many ways already withdrawn from the United States of America in trumpeting state and local rights over inalienable rights. It is just a modern incarnation of our ongoing Civil War.

Harlan Green © 2016

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

Attacks on Women’s Contraception Harms Our Economic Health

Popular Economics Weekly

Republicans, whether knowingly or unknowingly, not only court political disaster when they attack women’s contraception, but risk economic disaster as well, since without readily available contraception—from the pill onward—women would not have been able to contribute to economic growth as they have today and boost family incomes, when males’ head of households incomes began a steady decline in the 1970s.

This is a well-known fact, yet Republicans led by the religious extremists in their party, don’t want to realize that without women’s work outside of the family—which was severely restricted before birth control and family planning became possible in the 1970s—our economy would be in much more dire straits than it is today.

In effect, Republicans really are saying they want to take away a woman’s ability to earn her own living, necessary in this modern age with divorce so prevalent, and family incomes declining. Women constituted 47 percent of the American workforce, will remain 30 years at work, and the typical American family today is the dual-earner family, says a 2000 academic paper, entitled Professional Women, The Continuing Struggle for Acceptance and Equality. Women’s work numbers are even higher today after the worst recession since the Great Depression.

The paper’s research said employed women, regardless of marital status, reported greater happiness than the nonemployed women, and are less depressed. In fact, women who participate in multiple roles (such as mother and working professional), actually experience lower levels of stress-related mental and physical problems and feel generally better than their cohorts who engage in few roles. So women’s work also strengthens families, contrary to right wing dogma that says she must remain in the kitchen to support ‘family values’.

It wasn’t always so. Rising household incomes after WWII had helped to establish our middle class. But a combination of circumstances beginning in the 1970s, including the growing power of Big Business to weaken labor laws that took away the earning power of men, caused household incomes to begin a steady decline. In fact, incomes could no longer even keep up with inflation, as detailed in Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner Take All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer--and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

The widespread availability of contraceptives and birth control in the 1970s that enabled intelligent family planning and women’s wholesale entry into the workforce, is documented with countless research, such as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz.

Wikipedia also cites women’s history from home base to workforce. “The fourth phase, known as The Quiet Revolution, began in the late 1970s and continues on today. Beginning in the 1970s women began to flood colleges and grad schools. They began to enter profession like medicine, law, dental and business. More women were going to college and expected to be employed at the age of 35, as opposed to past generations that only worked intermittently due to marriage and childbirth.”

Wikipedia continues: “The reasons for this big jump in the 1970s has been attributed by some scholars to widespread access to the birth control pill. While "the pill" was medically available in the 1960s, numerous laws restricted access to it. See, e.g., Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (overturning a Connecticut statute barring access to contraceptives) and Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (establishing the right of unmarried people to access contraception).”

It should also be obvious that women’s health is crucial to a family’s physical (as well as economic) health. So attacks on women’s availability of contraceptives is a direct threat to the family’s health and well-being. These attacks take many forms, including forced vaginal ultrasound before an abortion is allowed in Texas, as well as nationally with the Blunt U.S. Senate amendment (that was barely defeated) that allowed employers to ban insurance coverage for contraceptives based on moral grounds—theirs, not a woman’s.

Dr. Hal C Lawrence III, as cited in the New York Times, the executive vice president of the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, opposed the Blunt amendment and affirmed the values of contraception, saying, “it improves and saves babies lives, improves maternal health and can be life-saving for women with serious medical problems.”

Senator Barbara Boxer has called it a “systematic war against women” in Senate hearings on the Blunt amendment. But it is in reality a war against women in the workplace, where women have in fact not yet achieved income equality with men.

As cited in a 2010 Center For American Progess editorial, without contraception, women cannot plan their pregnancies, and that need is more important than ever. By the end of 2009, men had lost 7 out of 10 jobs in the Great Recession. Some two million working wives had an unemployed husband, making women’s income even more critical to a family’s economic well-being.

Need we say more? The Republican’s attack on women’s contraceptive rights is therefore not only an attempt to put her back in the 1950s kitchen, but an attack on America’s overall economic health.

Harlan Green © 2012