Dumbed-Down America

October 18 | Posted by mrossol | American Thought, Democrat Party, The Left

On our way to …?
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The Weekly Standard’s Andrew Ferguson, writing Oct. 6, on an article about Donald Trump in Vanity Fair by that magazine’s editor, Graydon Carter: One of the weirder aspects of anti-Trump mania is its sniffy tone. And it’s especially weird coming from card-carrying liberal Democrats. For two generations our culture and its institutions have been living under a liberal ascendancy. The country’s elites—the Bigs of the news media and Hollywood and the non-profit world and the arts and the academy—have signed on to a catechism of personal liberation, particularly sexual liberation, and a kind of radical individual autonomy that even lets you choose whether you’re a boy or a girl. We are taught to be “nonjudgmental” in matters of lifestyle and to accept a pristine relativism in metaphysics and morality. . . .

Carter’s piece raises one further question, coming as it does from a credentialed member of the country’s cultural elite. He calls the Trump ascendancy the “final stage of a dumbed down America.” Who could disagree? Trump’s rise, boosted by the forty percent of our fellow citizens who see him as a plausible president, is indeed evidence of a serious, system-wide failure. Dumbing down is a good name for it.

The question is, Who did the dumbing down? Our public schools? Our universities? Our entertainment media— television, movies, popular music? The press? Glossy magazines like Vanity Fair?

Surely all of them share in the blame. And all of them, from the schools to movie studios, rest snugly (I almost wrote “smugly”) in the control of liberal Democrats, and have done so for fifty years or more. If we’re getting dumber, we know whom to thank. How odd is their sniffy contempt for Donald Trump, the purest flowering of the culture they’ve created.

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