# What has the Trump-for-President social experiment taught us?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-has-the-trump-for-president-social-experiment-taught-us/762212>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [August 9, 2016, 1:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-has-the-trump-for-president-social-experiment-taught-us/762212 "2016-08-09T01:29:01Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 4

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**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\
**Post date:** [August 10, 2016, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-has-the-trump-for-president-social-experiment-taught-us/762212/61 "2016-08-10T15:30:32Z")

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> [@Chihuahua](#):
>
> Keep in mind that Trump is not an anomaly. Trump is the perfect Republican Frankenstein. He is the fulfillment of Republican policies that extend back to the Bush administration and before. (And like Doctor Frankenstein, the real problem is that the Republicans cannot control the monster they have created.)
> 
> The Republican party has very consciously and systematically promoted anti-intellectualism in this country to a terrifying degree. People like Bachmann and Palin were not just stupid themselves, but they publicly attacked the value of intelligence and education. That is to say, the Republican party routinely assaults the idea that education and science are valuable tools in governance and problem-solving.
> 
> They have actively fed this narrative to the uneducated working class: This notion that religion and good ol’fashioned common sense can provide simple and obvious solutions to complex problems, while reason and expert analysis cannot. This is nonsense, but people believe it nonetheless… and it has done immeasurable harm to our nation and contributed a great deal to where we are today.

I think you have three somewhat separate but overlapping phenomena going on, not a simple repudiation of science and education.

On one hand, you have the pandering of the party to business interests that see things like AGW as a business threat, so they go against it, despite all legitimate scientific thought indicating that it’s a real thing.

The other one is more a matter of cultivating an aggressively populist mentality among voters that’s anti-elite/anti-intellectual. They’ve sort of basically told the Republican rank-and-file that their notions about things are valid, and that they don’t need any egghead professors or their like telling them what to do or how things should be done, and that their views on things are just as valid. So you get dumbasses posting the same stupid things on Facebook everytime there’s a snowstorm about “What about global warming now?”, and the Republican party telling this dude that his ignorant skepticism is perfectly valid.

On the gripping hand, the swallowing of the Christian Right agenda hook, line and sinker means that they have to pay a pretty fair amount of at least lip service to those beliefs, and combined with the prior two points, you get a party that basically turns a blind eye to science and rational thought when it comes to party platforms and ignorant, lunatic candidates.

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