One of the most aggravating things to me in this world has to be the absolutely rampant anti-intellectualism that dominates so many conversations and debates, and its influence just seems to be expanding. Do you think there will ever actually be a time when this ends? I'd hope so once people become more educated and cultural changes eventually happen, but as of now it honestly infuriates me like few things ever have.
Populists are anti-intellectual because it is a prevailing opinion. That’s what populism means.
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But it’s not just some countries, it’s our entire corner of the world - for my purposes the more or less “western aligned” one.
I’m Norwegian and we’ve just almost definitely flipped conservative again after a remarkably efficient belly flop by “Labour”. They fucked up bad enough even local elections turned markedly conservative, in some cases ending basically 100 years of Labour tradition. Sweden is seeing a marked rise in the “immigrant bad” Sverigedemokraterna, which were pretty fringe until recently. Germany has the whole AfD thing going on. You already mentioned Poland and the UK. There’s also Hungary in the same vein. Slovakia just turned pro-Russia which is inherently hard to couple with intellect. All of this has been fairly noticeable over the past decade, and that’s just the Euro view. In the US they went from “your suit sucks” to “you weren’t born here” and then really jumped the shark.
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