Mr Khan said:
I would like to broker a discussion on the American right wing and its peculiar hostility towards intellectualism. While there is a certain emphasis on values that is necessary for the American left to function (namely the value of giving the disadvantaged a leg up rather than letting the market sort things out), i do feel that the left wing in America is far more amicable to science and the pursuit of knowledge as a moral good than the right, where the pursuit of knowledge is viewed with suspicion at best, despite the fact that the party leadership on the Right is all reasonably well-educated, they tend to propound education as elitist (Rick Santorum, who was once a lawyer meaning he went through college and law school, has implied that college education is elitist).
It seems like the Right, in its belief that government is bad, has absorbed the idea that people who know about government are bad, and would be less fit governors, with the growing myth that the self-made outsider is better than the experienced civil servant, which one sees with the Republican Party's brief flirtation with Herman Cain, a man with zero political experience (evidenced by his ill-conceived 9-9-9 plan), as being superior to Washington types.
You see it also in the rejection of fairly well-established scientific facts as well: being homosexual isn't a choice, human activity is causing climate change, and yes, humanity evolved from lower life forms. Money flowing from right-wing think tanks fund entire branches of psuedoscience to try to disprove these things, but what is more important is that the rank-and-file conservatives pick up the ideas that various branches of science are false and take them in as core conviction, and then look with suspicion on anyone who takes these facts for what they are: proven as far as empirical science is able.
The right embraces mythology more frequently than the left, which is evidenced by the number of falsehoods that are constantly spun out by the party compared to the falsehoods that were embraced by the left (9/11 truthers being a wacko movement that the left wing flirted with, but importantly a movement that was fairly conclusively silenced by science). At the same time as 9/11 truthing was defeated as evidence emerged, no amount of evidence can seem to shut up the Obama Birthers, or the 89% of Mississippi residents who think Obama isn't Christian, or hell, the large part of the Republican base that thinks Mitt Romney isn't Christian (of course, these are the kind of people that would likely say Rick Santorum isn't Christian either. He's "Catholic.") They know what they know, and no-one better qualified than them is going to interfere with their conviction using something as trivial as fact.
The last point i think is important, it's that Conviction > Objectivity on the right. You don't need to know anything about a given topic, you simply need to have faith, to have conviction, similar to George W. Bush who "knew" that going into Iraq was the right thing to do, or similar to Sarah Palin, who (it is increasingly clear from people who worked with the woman) knew dangerously little about anything and seemed to be damn proud of it, and when people point out that this is bad, as it is, she and her supporters accuse them of being elitist. Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann openly embraced revisionist history on a few points, and the Texas Board of Education tried to write out Thomas Jefferson for being too radical. Money shouldn't be going to public education anyway, as its dangerous letting the state teach our children (and treasonous to ever think of giving the people entrusted with that responsibility more money), because what is the value of our children knowing anything more than how to hold a job? While the American left may try to dilute reality in the drive for political correctness, they never veer away from objective fact, merely from subjective labeling of objective fact. For Republicans, meanwhile, it's cool to be dumb, and watching the current Republican Primaries is watching an intellectual race to the bottom. Perhaps next we'll see Romney, Gingrich, and Santorum on stage smacking themselves over the head with hammers, to prove that they can kill more brain-cells than the others and thus become less of a dangerous, pointy-headed intellectual.
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