Bush and friends' stoopid populism

By Nathan Littlefield

George W. Bush, DC '68, went to Phillips Andover Academy and, like his father and his father before him, moved on to Yale. He later attended Harvard Business School. However, Bush would rather voters didn't think of him as an Ivy Leaguer. His autobiography, A Charge to Keep, barely mentions his education; he dispenses with the two years he spent at Cambridge in under three pages. He tells audiences that he feels little connection to the intellectual establishment represented by such institutions.

Like his potential rival, Al Gore has attempted to distance himself from academia. The vice president attended prestigious St. Albans Episcopal and went on to Harvard and Vanderbilt. While Gore does not seem to consider his education to be as great a liability as Bush does, his criticism of Democratic opponent Bill Bradley betrays a similar disdain for it. Responding to Bradley's explanatory campaign style and analytical demeanor, he quipped, "The presidency is not an academic exercise." Why do these two obviously intelligent candidates downplay their education and scorn intellectualism?

For Bush, this tendency is partially a matter of personal identity. No criticism stings him more than the suggestion that he owes his success to his father's legacy—and having grown up in Texas, he never felt entirely at home on the campuses of New England anyway. He also wants to shake his old image as a party boy and academic underachiever. However, none of these motivations account for the governor's frequent insistence on his detachment from the academy. As for Gore, his remarks, entirely unrelated to discomfort or identity, cut to the core of both men's motivations: the populist politics of anti-intellectualism.

Justified or not, the American popular mind equates intellectualism with elitism. Candidates' acceptance of this equation has pushed political discourse away from any sort of substantive meaning. In preparation for the upcoming New Hampshire primary, three of the four frontrunners have saturated New England airwaves with simplistic ads touting character and nebulous goals. Bush has morals and Jesus, McCain has courage, and Gore has experience. Only Bradley assumes that voters have the patience and mental stamina to swallow public policy—his short spots provide the only real substance in the current crop of televised campaigns.

Political ads have long been notorious for empty boasting, but never in recent memory have presidential candidates been so reluctant to appear intelligent. This new populism has grown up in response to a number of events in American society. Bill Clinton's frequent, opportunistic shifts to the center, for example, have identified him with articulate media manipulation and Machiavellian guile, which, in turn, has led to a political atmosphere distrustful of conspicuous intelligence.

More important have been the simultaneous coarsening of social discourse and the increase in high culture's opacity. Consider pop culture's most self-consciously vulgar products: professional wrestling and Jerry Springer. This "culture" industry seems bent on proving beyond a doubt H.L. Mencken's assertion that "no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public." Conversely, high culture has baffled casual viewers for years. Ask the average person about Damien Hirst's The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Lying, a sculpture consisting of a tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde, and the most likely response would probably be indignant confusion: "That's art?" As intellectuals look disdainfully on the products of popular culture and the rest of society concludes that literature, art, and serious music are inscrutable and pretentious, the gulf between high and low widens. Consequently, their mutual animosity grows.

Perceiving this conflict, candidates for public office pragmatically identify themselves with the larger faction, the anti-intellectual majority. In their race to change their images from savvy and educated politicians to the Gallup Poll's picture of Everyman, Bush, McCain, and Gore cheat the voting public. Pandering to religion and morality while neglecting policy, they foster political disinterest and ignorance. If a voter hears Bush's half-minute spiel about the image of the presidency 20 times a week, he or she has no reason to expect anything but the same tripe in extended form at a debate or convention. The same goes for Gore and McCain. When politicians show no interest in providing voters with information on real issues, voters stop listening. Therein lies the new populism's true danger.

Nathan Littlefield is a freshman in Ezra Stiles.

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