The GOP’s demonic alliance: How the religious right & big business are dumbing down America

It's a tradition as old as the nation itself: The right rejects intellectualism in favor of a perverse religiosity

Conor Lynch

Topics: Elections 2016, Religion, The Christian Right, Christianity, America, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, News, Politics News

Mike Huckabee, David Koch, Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/Charlie Neibergall/Mark Lennihan/J. Scott Applewhite/Photo montage by Salon)

Though presidential hopeful Ted Cruz was apparently a top student at Harvard Law, he has always been quick to distance himself from the organization, especially since the despised Barack Obama went to the same school less then a decade earlier. Back in 2013, at a conference sponsored by the Koch brothers, he said that “[Obama] would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.”
His reasoning:

“There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

This claim was discredited by Harvard Law, but it certainly cannot come as a surprise that Cruz wants to distance himself from an academic organization that is generally thought of as liberal. His voter base, after all, is not a particularly highbrow community.
With the Republican primaries ramping up, there will surely be a great deal of anti-intellectual musing coming from each candidate. There will be talk of how those elitist “harvard faculty” members are disconnected from the common people up in their ivory tower, and how they just don’t understand the real America. Mike Huckabee, who is expected to run for president, summarized this view on “The Daily Show” earlier this year: “Theres a real disconnect between people that live in the bubbles of New York, Washington, and Hollywood, versus the people who live in the land of the bubba’s…theres a big difference between people who are well educated and people who are smart.”
It is a view that has been espoused many times before here in America, similarly provided once by the crooked Tammany Hall politician George W. Plunkitt in response to calls for reform: “Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot. They couldn’t make a bigger mistake… I guess [colleges will] have to exist as long as there’s bookworms…but they don’t count in politics.”

http://www.salon.com/2015/04/27/the_gops_demonic_alliance_how_the_religious_right_big_business_are_dumbing_down_america/