David Brat, the anti-experts' expert
Last week college economics professor David Brat trounced House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary for Virginia's seventh congressional district. Prognosticators thought that Brat, a favorite of Tea Party supporters, was a long shot. How could he win? Hadn’t the Tea Party been on the wane? Now, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson warns, the Tea Party “should no longer be thought of as just a faction of the GOP. It’s calling the shots.”
What is clear is that Tea Party voters turn out in droves and care passionately about politics. Many of those Teapublicans are also fervent Christians of the evangelical stripe. As Pew reported several years ago they are “much more likely than registered voters as a whole to say that their religion is the most important factor in determining their opinions on these social issues. And they draw disproportionate support from the ranks of white evangelical Protestants.”
Many of these political purists thumb their noses at what passes for mainstream knowledge in science, history, psychology, economics, and more. I’m reminded of Don McLeroy, a dentist and chair of the Texas State Board of Education, who helped revamp public school standards along conservative, anti-intellectual lines. “I disagree with these experts,” he proclaimed at a 2009 meeting of the board. “Somebody has got to stand up to experts that are just . . . ” He dropped off, exasperated that so many Americans were being duped by nonsense masquerading as science.
