The US is becoming less religious, and it is the least religious it has ever been. People aren't increasingly idolizing stupidity or loving the rich, or Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders wouldn't have done as well as they did (both used anti-elite messaging). In fact, the on-going presidential election is proof that the rich are falling from grace. Occupy Wall Street, anti-"1%" sentiment, and a Democratic Socialist almost becoming the President are all indications that neoliberalism is dying in the US.
I'd argue that, to capture the attention of hundreds of millions of people around the world using so little money, someone would have to be pretty smart.
I think Trump supporters would say that there are simple truth about the universe that faux sophisticated liberals don't grasp or weight equally with less important things.
I believe that orthodoxies of the past half century have been a failure. If average wealth has not risen for decades, a fact, then there is something wrong with your model. Notice the slogan is not Make America Great. It is Make America Great Again.
That admission of failure is fascinating and completely ignored.
You're saying Donald Trump's support is evidence against those things? It seems like exactly the opposite to me, on all counts.
Most of US culture has absolutely zero interest in clever people unless they're also making money and/or running a business. There is no situation where IQ and abstract intellectual output are valued purely for their own sake and not for their financial productivity - not even academia.
Which means the real problem is the way that "business" has become the de facto state religion - in the sense of being the ultimate moral arbiter of personal value and the one true absolute definition of how "good" people are recognised.
Hard work and money. Or money at least.
Trump's success is based on a weird identification - the belief that Trump represents the interests of the 99% because he's a non-intellectual plain speaker who says what he means and means what he says using language that everyone can understand.
That makes him "one of us" to many people, even though of course he's nothing of the sort.
O_o
Trump's constant refrain is "I'm so good at business. I have so much money". And Occupy Wall Street and the anti-1%'ers have changed what fundamental aspects of US society, exactly? Sanders is something less mainstream, but he was always trailing the 'business-as-usual' candidate.
Also, speaking from an outsider's perspective, it seems to me that the US was less religious just before the 9/11 attacks than it is now.
You can't define "anti-intellectualism" as "people who disagree with me" (even if you're right).
Well, it would be helpful if you could explain rather than just complain.
The Trump phenomenon is baffling to many of us outside of the US. I can obviously grasp some of the key reasons – anti-establishment feeling, for example – but equally I'm confused by other aspects.
Average living standards are falling despite the general impression given by politicians and journalists. This is also true in Europe.
The West isn't doing as well as advertised and this traces back to the early 70s. Attrition has been going on for decades.
If you find this incomprehensible then you've got to understand if you are in SV or a major city that you're in the Core of the system, it is the Peripheral that first runs into difficulties when a down cycle appears.
Take countries such as Venezuela, South Africa. These are places on the edge of our economic system and they are blowing up. It is easy to ignore this because they were always, from our perspective, borked. In fact they used to be doing much better in the past.
The key point to grok is that many of our 'stats' about the world are incorrect. Interest rates are not really at zero percent. The economic system is fracturing and traditional models/tools don't work anymore. This is what it looks like when a complex system is in danger of falling to pieces. Larry Summers is borrowing from the same technological stagnation playbook as Peter Thiel. Oil prices halve without meaningful changes in economic growth. Hmmmm. Maybe something is up.
tldr; This is <del>Bat</del> Bear Country!