Despite efforts by tea baggers like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell to discredit intellectuals, I am writing today to emphasize that it is OK to be smart.
Just like it is OK to say that Usain Bolt is fast, or that Andre the Giant was strong, it is ok to say that one person is smarter than another.
It is important that we understand this now because anti-intellectualism is a dangerous and powerful weapon in the hands of the power hungry.
Pretty much everybody agrees that people are different. Some are better looking, some are better athletes, some better talkers, some better builders, and some are better thinkers.
When the authors of the Declaration of Independence wrote:
...that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
They were not saying that one person cannot be faster, or stronger, or a better dancer, or a better singer, than every other person. They were saying that we were created with equal rights. We then do the best we can with the gifts with which we were born.
Some people are better at reading and writing and arithmetic. Just like being fast or strong, this is a gift to be used for the betterment of life for the smarter or faster or stronger person.
Just like we are proud of our athletes, and of performers, we should be proud of our intellectuals.
The anti-intellectualism of the tea baggers, of the Fascists in Europe and the USSR, and of the revolutionaries in China, who vilified and prosecuted their intellectuals, who banished them to Gulags and to Re-education camps, is all the same. It is all based on the same kernel of distrust, the same prejudice against ideas that do not support our personal world view.
When Bill Clinton said that the new GOP was choosing "Ideology over evidence," he was saying less about the Democratic and Republican parties than he was saying that evidence based reality is losing ground when faced with the so called tea party ideology.
Anti-intellectualism is a tool used to fabricate the idea that intellectuals are different from everyone else. It is a tool to create a group to blame, to create a target, to distract people from the causes of their personal hardship. Anti-intellectualism is hate speech.