Check the nose
The US has always had a massive anti-intellectual streak, but as with everything else, Republicans have been energetically making it worse since McCarthy, or the New Deal, or Coolidge.
Some argue that this worldview has become even more prevalent in the era of Trump, who while campaigning for the presidency appeared to dismiss the expertise often found at institutions of higher education.
“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain, and I’ve said a lot of things,” Trump said in March 2016 on MSNBC, when asked who he consults on foreign policy issues. “My primary consultant is myself, and I have a good instinct for this stuff.”
He doesn’t though.
That certainly seemed to be the case Thursday when Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, lit into the academics — particularly Karlan, while talking to Trump supporters watching Fox News.
If you went to work today to manicure nails, to manicure lawn, if you went to work with a jackhammer, or a welding machine, or mechanics’ tools, or a carpentry belt, that woman yesterday looks her nose down on you, she thinks you are less than her!
She thinks you’re less than her, and I’ve had it. Who the hell are you, lady, to look down at half of the country?
Right. It’s all about “looking down your nose” and nothing whatever to do with good wages, unions, health insurance, decent housing, good schools, public transportation, abundant parks and libraries. It’s all style and zero substance. Trump can steal billions from us while kicking people off food stamps and out of health insurance, and it’s all dandy because he pretends not to look down his nose at working stiffs. (The reality? Of course he looks down his nose at them. He has a solid gold living room and they don’t; you do the math.)
It’s not a “welding machine” you ignorant piece of shit…
…and yeah, I do look down on them. I am a welder and know well that the vast majority of my coworkers know nothing and never bother thinking at all. They were too fucking lazy to get a college degree and wallow in their filthy rural dwellings.
That’s the common story – those of us with education look down on those without. Well, I’ve got news for you. I live in that world, and I can tell you that most of the people around here that have less education look down on the people with more. They feel we are lazy slough offs that have never done anything of value, never contributed anything worthwhile, and we are stupid. Stupid, yes, that’s what they believe. And many of them will actively tell us this, then complain that we are looking down on them.
At my school, we have many meetings in which we bemoan how the academic ed faculty is looking down on the skilled and technical faculty, most of who have Associate’s degrees. This is, by the way, the academic ed faculty moaning about this. The truth is that no one in our academic ed faculty regards any of the skilled and technical faculty as beneath us; we respect their expertise and recognize that they are training students to fill needed jobs in the workforce and make decent livings; for many of those students, they may be lifting their family out of poverty. We applaud that, and value our fellow faculty members.
The skilled and technical faculty, however, look down their noses at us. And never hesitate to let us know what a waste of space, time, and money we are. I actually had one of them (one I had always considered a friend before) tell me one day that his department was actually doing important things. Not, I suppose, like a Ph.D. female Environmental Scientist who is trying to ruin their students with book learning.
I am tired of the “looking down on them” trope; I have found very few places where it’s really true. Most of the academics I know actually denigrate themselves while building up the working class as the only valuable members of society.
@iknklast: Your description reminds me of a fantasy novel I read years ago. There was a magically gifted people that was kept as an underclass by means of a sort of mythos that described them as sinful to such a degree that they needed to be held as property of the nonmagical majority. The enslaved believed fervently in the dogma, so they resisted any attempt to oppose their own oppression, and in fact worked to capture and enslave others like themselves. Of course, the society only prospered because of those with magical power.
tl;dr: Guilt and self-loathing can be used to induce a slave mentality. We see it in religion all the time.