Years ago, just before the 2000 presidential election, a Southern Republican activist told me that he would be voting for George W. Bush even though he knew that Bush lacked much in the way of intellectual capacity. “Intellect can be dangerous in a leader,” he told me.
I was reminded of this right wing reaction against intelligence when I read the New York Times yesterday, which reported on the anti-intellectual attitudes of the new government of French President Nicholas Sarkozy. Finance Minister Christine Lagarde told the National Assembly of the Sarkozy’s policy when it comes to intellect: “France is a country that thinks. There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking already.”
Enough thinking? We hear in the United States know the terrible consequences of having national leadership that emphasizes hunches and faith-based initiatives over disciplined thinking. George W. Bush is an excellent example of what happens to a person when they decide that they’ve had enough with thinking.
America will be rid of the Bush presidency in a year and a half, but what then? Frighteningly, President Bush’s prospective Republican successors seem to embrace the rejection of thinking that Bush and Sarkozy have in common.
Consider Fred Thompson, a Bush supporter who seems to think that Nicholas Sarkozy’s right wing campaign against thinking makes him a model President. Recently, Fred Thompson wrote,
“Maybe it’s time to rethink the “boycott France†movement that got so much attention a few years ago. Americans once toasted General Lafayette, and his son George Washington Lafayette. I think this would be a good time to toast Monsieur Sarkozy.”
Fred Thompson seems to believe that France’s skepticism over the lack of proof for a need to start a war in Iraq was good reason for a boycott against the country. Now that France has a new government that is asking its citizens to stop thinking, Fred Thompson is in love with the French, and asks us to buy French products in order to support the anti-thinking crowd in Paris.
“A French president who openly admires America is an embarrassment to those who view us as the country bumpkin cousins of the sophisticated Europeans,” Fred Thompson sneers. Yes, I admit, it is embarrassing for me to watch the French abandon the aspirations to intellectual sophistication in order to pursue the anti-intellectual bumpkin politics of the American Republican Party.
Our libraries are not too full of books. We do not think too much. Intellect is not a threat. It is our most valuable resource. In 2008, we need a President who understands that.
(New York Times, July 22, 2007; National Review Online, May 10, 2007)
