Our intellectual culture mocked and denigrated people in part for properly understanding the governing dynamics of the world we inhabit. That’s not to say that many comments I’ve heard in cotton fields don’t deserve denigration. Many of them do. But neither “side” is playing w/ a full deck. Ivy League Education + TED Talks + NYT + New Yorker does not yield anything close to “working knowledge of the world.” Conversely, good working knowledge of the world gained through trial and error does not excuse racism and homophobia.
There is no innate truth to the liberal elite echo chamber in which we live. It’s just a bunch of smart people saying the same thing. Some of the things are true. But a lot them just aren’t. So rather than hitting refresh on Huffpo / Vox / NYT / Slate to make sense of the election why not go check out the National Review or the Weekly Standard? There is no rule that you have to agree w/ what you read. If you can’t figure out why a person would think that “universal healthcare” is a bad idea without attributing malicious intent to them, then you have some work to do. If you have never heard a compelling argument for why Keynesian Economics is similar in validity to rain dances, then buy a book about the Austrian school of Economics. While you may not change your mind, hopefully you’ll realize that these issues are more complicated than “people who think those things are dumb and evil.”
