The GOP War on College

The Comical Of Higher Edification has a moderately decent feature article, "above the fold," on the history of right-wing opposition to learning here. It's not behind a paywall but you will need to sign in.

It always fascinates me that right-wing types believe you can run a complicated modern country without the kinds of clever folks that earn advanced degrees. Where do they think all the computers and robots that do our work and make our houses and cars run, all the advanced medical care that keeps us well, and all the advanced weaponry that protects us against authoritarian states like Russia, China, and Iran, where do they thing it all comes from? 

Trump voters? Q-Anon? Don't make me laugh.

If you subtracted the combined output of clever people with advanced degrees from the economy, there wouldn't be very much left.

And of course, we have working examples of this. The new Trump-era book "The Divider" by Glaser and Baker, the husband/wife NYT best seller team, is useful here, recounting the absolutely mind-fucking thoughtless chaos inside the Trump White House, as Trump picked staffers and appointees for their loyalty and their "...from Central Casting" good looks, not their qualifications.

Of course, it burns right-wingers to the core that, once begun, higher education tends to produce liberal thinkers. 

Well, duh. The whole premise of scientific education is to learn to think without bias. That's the purpose of scientific logic, the use to which we put the theory of probability, and the rationale behind the need for statistical significance before publishing the results of a study.

But right-wing thinking seems full of thoughtless bias. Against people of color, against ideas, against sexual freedom, against different cultures. It's a morass of thoughtless nonsense.

It may be time to paraphrase the old RAF engineer's adage, "If flying were hard, the engineers would have to do it." 

If right-wing thinking were hard, people with college degrees would have to do it. But they can't do it, or won't, because it's not actually hard, just wrong. 

We should call it wrong-wing thinking.