This has probably been posted before but it really helps me understand how republicans have become [View all]

so stupid. I am always posting links about the studies that show how conservatives and racists have lower IQ's but it seems like the GOP has used it and encouraged it. There is much more at the link and I have picked out various paragraphs

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-burnett/the-birth-of-the-stupid-p_b_10127988.html

Of course, “stupid” is subjective. But by most standards, Republicans fit the bill. In September, Public Policy Polling found that “66% of [Donald] Trump’s supporters believe that Obama is a Muslim... 61% think Obama was not born in the United States.” The same poll found that 54 percent of all Republicans believed the President to be a Muslim. (In September Donald Trump suggested Obama is a Muslim.)

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It wasn’t always like this. Fifty years ago, Republicans seemed wrongheaded but intelligent. What has happened to the Grand Old Party? Its transition to the stupid party had four stages:


1. Republicans adopted an anti-intellectual strategy. Political historians have noted the long-term political consequences of Richard Nixon’s southern strategy which peeled Southern white voters — particularly evangelical Christians — away from the Democratic Party. What hasn’t received as much attention is the fact that southern evangelicals are not intellectual:..................................

In September, writing in the Daily Beast Ana Marie Cox observed, “Trump and [Ben] Carson are winning a huge slice of the GOP base because of [their] prideful ignorance, which to voters signifies not just a rejection of the establishment or elites but a release from the hard work of having to think.”

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2. Republicans accepted racism. When the GOP adopted the southern strategy, they tacitly accepted racism. With Trump this racism has come out in the open.

Writing in Psychology Today, David Niose linked anti-intellectualism and racism:

Critically thinking individuals recognize racism as wrong and undesirable, even if they aren’t yet able to eliminate every morsel of bias from their own psyches or from social institutions. An anti-intellectual society, however, will have large swaths of people who are motivated by fear, susceptible to tribalism and simplistic explanations, incapable of emotional maturity, and prone to violent solutions.

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Since 1874 an elephant has been the Republican symbol. A better symbol for the current Republican Party would be the mushroom: voters who are kept in the dark and fed bullshit.