Paul Krugman on GOP Investment in Ignorance: Whys and Wherefores

Paul Krugman explains (very well) why one major American political party, the Republicans, have "made a hard right turn against education," and are seeking to undermine a longstanding American ideal of seeing education provided for all citizens: it's, quite simply, in the best interests of the GOP to keep people under-educated.  And ignorant.  

As Krugman notes, there's strong evidence that obtaining a higher education makes people less inclined to knee-jerk political decision-making of the kind that the modern "conservative" movement as represented by the GOP favors.  If nothing else, in their college education, they learn a wide range of facts, and facts have a way of being pesky little problems for ideologues whose goal is for us to gloss over the factual for ideological truthiness spoon-fed to us by ill-educated and ill-bred media talking heads.  Krugman writes,

It’s not hard to see what’s driving Mr. Santorum’s wing of the party. His specific claim that college attendance undermines faith is, it turns out, false. But he’s right to feel that our higher education system isn’t friendly ground for current conservative ideology. And it’s not just liberal-arts professors: among scientists, self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans nine to one. 

I guess Mr. Santorum would see this as evidence of a liberal conspiracy. Others might suggest that scientists find it hard to support a party in which denial of climate change has become a political litmus test, and denial of the theory of evolution is well on its way to similar status.

Among scientists, self-identified Democrats outnumber self-identified Republicans nine to one: that's a telling statistic, and a damning one for Republicans, it seems to me.  Neoconservatives are wont to attack liberal arts professors in colleges and universities for their supposed liberal "bias" and their liberal ideological taints.

But scientists?!  Who deal in facts?  Who do everything possible to remove bias and ideology from the picture as they engage in research, since their goal is to describe how things are, and not how they should be.  

That such a huge percentage of scientists reject Republican ideology seems significant to me.  And this has implications for the ongoing debates about abortion and contraception that continue to roil the American political sector, often due to a sheer lack of fundamental, basic, accurate information about human reproduction and gestation on the part of many in the religious and political right.  

As Krugman notes, in attacking education and the right of all citizens to a sound education, the "conservative" party is behaving in anything but a conservative way.  It has become, instead, a party of radical revisionism undermining core values that have long been central to how we do our cultural business in the United States.

The graphic is from the Despite Dyslexia blog site.