A reader writes about Speaker of the House Ryan:
This kind of thinking is exactly what’s wrong with us as a nation today. The whole idea that there are no experts, and my ignorant, stupid opinion is as good as any expert’s opinion on any subject. Yeah, let’s get rid of those elites like Albert Einstein, the experts at NASA that put us on moon, the experts at CDC and NIH and myriad medical research institutions who have saved our collective bacon from everything from polio to heart attacks to cancer to Hanta virus. Elites like Nikola Tesla, Luther Burbank, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, Alfred Nobel, Louis Pasteur, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Elon Musk, Dean Kamen, etc. etc. etc. without whom we’d still be plowing fields by hand and sending communication via horseback couriers, etc. Ryan’s not jus intellectually lazy. He’s an idiot.
Or he’s playing to his audience. I think the Trump constituency tends to be made up of those who feel disenfranchised, but not for good reasons: misogynists, supremacists. And others who, while not of any particularly repulsive group, find themselves in a position inferior to where they were perhaps two decades ago, and resent it. The entire GOP constituency is, apparently, not far different, given Trump’s primary triumphs. Rep. Ryan no doubt has some understanding of this and is attempting to be inclusive of these people by suggesting the experts are really not any better than themselves.
However, dealing in what amounts to falsehoods is quite dubious; and, of course, if he actually believes this (and I could build a case that this behavior is congruent with someone who places ideology before reality – and a politician is certainly a likely suspect to make that intellectual error), then we’re back to being just bloody lazy. Or an idiot. It can be difficult to distinguish between the two. I wish Ryan was a real leader: who gives people what they need, not what they want.
