A fantastic essay by Rick Perlstein, on the cult of “smart” in America and how it distorted the ideals of our democracy. “Even as we moderns spend enormous amounts of our conscious energy making evaluations about who is sophisticated and who is simple, who is well-bred and who is arriviste, and who is smart and who is dumb, these are entirely irrelevant to the only question that ends up mattering: who is decent and who is cruel.”

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