Ordinary Americans might never have liked the educated or professional classes very much, but until recently they did not widely disdain their actual learning as a bad thing in itself. It might even be too kind to call this merely “anti-rational”; it is almost reverse evolution, away from tested knowledge and backward toward folk wisdom and myths passed by word of mouth—except with all of it now sent along at the speed of electrons. This plummeting literacy and growth of willful ignorance is part of a vicious circle of disengagement between citizens and public policy. People know little and
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