There's this notion called the "Politics of Aspiration," that's best explained by example:

The poor or middle-class person will vote against their best interests (in other words, voting against someone who says, "I'll provide low-cost health care" and "I'll raise the minimum wage" and the rest of the left's checklist), and instead vote for the guy who says, "I'm going to cut taxes on the rich." They vote this way because they've convinced themselves that they, too, will be rich (someday), and by G-d, when they're rich, they don't want to pay all of those taxes!

The point that's missed is simply that the rich have no intention of letting the lower-classes join in the fun.

A corollary to this might be expressed as "I'm just a dumb regular guy from the Heartland, so I'm not going to vote for that slick Big City guy who uses big words because he wants to show how smart he is." So, instead, he votes for the guy who puts on a facade of "regular-guy-ness," even though that so-called "regular guy" hasn't actually had to work a day in his life. In the last Presidential election, both candidates were multimillionaires, and for one to pretend that he's anything other than Upper Class is purely disingenous.

For reasons that I really don't understand, there's a notion in this country that somehow, smart people are not to be trusted. This attitude is certainly promulgated by right-wing talk radio and the mouth-breathers who listen to that shit clearly need their heads examined (with a Louisville Slugger, in some cases).

Think about it: by definition, 50% of the public is below average. However, because your instructors didn't want it to appear that too many people were failing their classes, they graded on a curve, and a lot of people who failed ended up with Ds and Cs. So, by this logic, it seems to me that it's more like 80% of the public are below average. And sometimes I think these below-average people revel in it.

And, yeah, all of this worries me, because history shows that when some person or group wishes to take over, they single out the intellectuals (a group that includes scientists and engineers) for ridicule and blame for all that's keeping the rabble down. And of course this blame is completely misplaced and utterly false, but the uneducated buy it without questioning it. And we all know how this story ends.

-a

(and yes, I'm a registered Democrat, and I will NEVER vote for a Republican until the GOP disavows the religious right. The whole "values voter" canard angers me. On the one hand, the GOP is (according to them, anyway) the "Party Of Small Government": "Keep the government off the backs of the people!" "The less regulation, the better!" But on the other hand, the "values voters" are demanding that the government regulate who we can marry, who we can sleep with, what movies we can see, what books we can read, what's on the radio, what's in museums, what's taught in schools, etc. The disconnect is astonishing.)