Smarter

Paul Campos at LGM:

But I do want to flag here the faux populist egalitarianism of the sneer that the “gentry liberals of the academy . . . see themselves as smarter” than ordinary Americans.

Academics see themselves as smarter than ordinary Americans because they are smarter than ordinary Americans. Yes, there are multiple types of intelligence, some people who are analytically brilliant are emotional morons etc etc. But this sort of bad faith anti-intellectualism is the kind of thing that helped get an aggressively ignorant imbecile like Trump elected president, among other bad effects.

LeBron James, or for that matter any Division III college basketball player, doesn’t have to pretend to believe that he’s no better at basketball than ordinary Americans. It would be nice if the same privilege could be extended to brain toilers, both inside and outside the academy.