Is being an intellectual or reader anathema to American voters?

Is being an intellectual or reader anathema to American voters?

2000
For those who are either too young to remember or not politically engaged, when Al Gore was running in 2000, everyone was saying that he was too intelligent or learned to be president. It prompted Dennis Miller to joke (at the time) something like, "hey, Al, I read Proust in high school, too. But I had the decency to do it in the bathroom so everyone would just think I was jerking off."
Gore lost that election. To G. W. Bush.

2004
When John Kerry was running for president, he boasted that he could recite The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by memory. He never did it, but it's not far-fetched so as to be unbelievable. That boast caused a ripple in the literary world that was short-lived.
Kerry lost that election. To G. W. Bush.

Is branding yourself as a learned bibliophile political poison?

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Pence was at a play recently.

Also people will make fun of you absolutely anywhere other than /r/books if you call yourself a bibliophile.

We are in a mode of production that doesn't exactly produce consciousnesses who value 'book-learning'.

You don't need to be well-read to consume and produce.

Hillary Clinton is not an intellectual,

If you feel the need to label and identify yourself as a 'bibliophile', then you deserve all the ridicule you get

>he boasted that he could recite The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by memory

this is such a jerkoff thing to do

/r/books reading comprehension at its best.

A musical. lol

Hey, if you appreciate culture, and you're not a pretentious pseud, you're an intellectual to me.

Most Americans say they would not elect an atheist president.

I think that answers your question >:-)

Hamilton isn't good though.

>21st century atheism=concentrated autism

I don't like him, but people need to read more Nietzsche.

I've noticed people value "QI" style pointless trivia, rather than actual learning of any kind.

Nietzsche wasn't an atheist.

Democracy is babby's first socialism, except the "off with their heads!" cut-off point is much higher up the food chain.

Cultural elites are the despised class in wealthy democracies, industrial and commercial employers are despised in poor semi-socialist states like Venezuela, while peasant countries like Russia or China aimed their resentment much lower, and attacked moderately comfortable farmers and shopkeepers.

I'm sorry, Lisa Simpson. Politics is not a simple battle of smart, left-wing, allegedly classless people versus steak eating millionaires. In this case you are on the side of hereditary cultural property and aristocratic privilege, and I use the P-word in its proper sense.

Most people only understand that kind of knowledge. After all, everyone knows some bit of trivia.

One thing I've noticed about Americans is you're happy enough about politics up until it interferes with your ability to watch TV. Like even in a hypothetical sense, people will say shit like "yeah, local involvement in government would be great and all, but then I wouldn't be able to go home and watch TV", and while not everyone feels that way no one will go "that's a weird thing to say", like it's just accepted as a valid point.

Maybe that's the issue, they're worried these book people are going to stop them sitting in front of a box for several hours on some level.

I also have to point out that Bush's elections were some of the dodgiest elections ever, like you really can't go on about Putin being corrupt with some of the shit that went down there.

"branding" yourself as a "learned bibliophile" makes you look like a poser faggot, and no one wants a fucking poser faggot as president.

>no one wants a fucking poser faggot as president.

But orange conmen are ok?

I would rather have a pompous learned president than a fucking "common man" who fat mongoloids want to "have a beer with" or "get a firm handshake from." Ivory tower intellectuals make for the best leaders, there's a reason every prince in the history of absolute monarchies was educated on a wide variety of topics from birth until coronation.

a strong willed entrepreneur as opposed to a crooked as fuck career politician? yes, absolutely ok.

Might as well just approve of Harry Potter at that point.

She has probably read way more books than 90% of the population. Most of them are not literature but she is very intelligent, she has poor judgement though.

Isn't GWB actually a reader? I've heard he digs Tom Wolfe, and it made the news back in the day that he was reading The Stranger.

>who fat mongoloids want to "have a beer with" or "get a firm handshake from."
This shit just makes me feel bad for so many people. How lonely do you have to be that fantasizing about having a beer with some twat makes you want to vote them in for national leader?

Kek I remember this, there were national news stories on how Bush had his mind blown by The Stranger.

Kerry being a massive jerkoff is why he lost the election. Same with Romney.

They both had awful judgment sometimes. Yeah, being able to recite Prufrock is great, but how do you think that's a good thing to say when you need some morons in Florida to vote for you instead of thinking you're a huge fag.

>Entrepreneur

He inherited the family business. Him buying in Manhattan instead of Brooklyn makes that no less true.

>expands from real estate into casinos, hospitality, golf and resorting
(You)

It's just a euphemism for "likable guy" as opposed to "pretentious autistic cunt and probable homosexual".

Didn't the real estate go bust and had to be bailed out?
Didn't the casinos go bust?
Isn't golf and resorting under hospitality, and isn't his only golf course not open?

>Expands

Looks like we agree. He is not an entrepreneur.

>It's just a euphemism
I thought that at one point, but it's really not in most cases.

It's also not a euphemism, but I get what you mean and I can't remember the right word either.

I'm not sure if you're familiar with theatre but Hamilton is the most tourist pleb shit you could see on broadway

Not necessarily true, intellectuals can become absolute terrors when given any power because of their tendency to be obsessed with ideas of how the world works which write human dignity out of the equation. Just look at the early USSR. Yes, even Stalin was Veeky Forums as fuck. Some his anonymously published poetry is still studied in Georgian literature circles. He once used his literary connections to rob a fucking bank for the Bolsheviks.

what I don't understand is how the media keeps thinking that these fucking intellectual idiots like Gore/Kerry/Romney/Hillary are actually connecting with the American people. Obama's like them but at least he understands how to act human once in awhile.

It could have been Book of Mormon

yes. if you call yourself an intellectual, then any statement or argument you make can be waved away as being elitist nonsense. being educated means you don't know what real life is like.

I don't know if the media thinks they're connecting. I remember a lot of stories about how unlikable all 4 were. Their staffers and campaign managers surely made some grave miscalculations though.

No. The average person doesn't care about this stuff one way or the other, which is why most of the poor and working class, white or otherwise, don't vote, period. Gore, Kerry, and Hilary didn't turn off people because they were intellectuals. They turned people off because they came across as wooden and out of touch and weren't able to inspire their base and/or appeal to people outside that demographic. Liberals just like this narrative because it appeals to their sensibilities. As a rule, the average liberal is a bourgeois retard with crippling status anxiety who only reads Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and hysterical Salon articles but feels a great sense of power by aping the views of our cultural elites and chimping out on anyone who doesn't conform to them to the letter.

Obama came off as every bit of an intellectual as Hilary, Kerry, or Gore, but he still won two terms because he was able to inspire people, including many who voted for Trump, with a hopeful message. Although I wouldn't Trump as an intellectual type and he doesn't come across as particularly bookish, he does openly brag about having gone to the best schools and having "good genes" and "one of the highest IQs". This didn't even hurt him slightly. Being perceive as intelligent is good if you also don't come across as a sheltered lifeless stiff with barely concealed disdain for most of the people you're supposed to be governing.

This is true, the most intellectual president the US has had is probably Woodrow Wilson, he was a Princeton professor and University President. He was a terror for civil liberties, promoted eugenics, crushed opposition to WWI, etc. Academics tend to be really bad at compromise, something which is essential for the president.

Stalin did nothing wrong
>inb4 bureaucratic capitalist propaganda

Oh right a euphemism is just if it's offensive, right? Colloquialism perhaps?

I'm not a native english speaker.

Fuck off commie

G. W. read like 183 or so books during one year while he was in office.

Euphemism is if it makes it sound better than it is, as opposed to a dysphemism that makes it sound worse. So like powdering your nose or how's your father are euphemisms as they avoid mentioning toilets and wanking.

One thing I've noticed about non-Americans is that they tend to project their most disliked aspects of their own society onto the United States. For instance, even though Americans have some of the most theatrical and bitterly contested local politics in all of modern democracy, non-Americans will often make up highly elaborate imaginary scenarios wherein most Americans ignore local politics for the specific and expressed purpose of watching television, which they apparently plan every second of their life around.

Maybe the issue is that non-Americans feel resentful and inferior because their culture, economy, politics, media and society are controlled by another nation, so they cope with their subservience and insignificance by criticizing their betters.

>For instance, even though Americans have some of the most theatrical and bitterly contested local politics in all of modern democracy
There's a reason you have a two-party system, and it's the opposite of local politics being strong. I can't talk for everywhere (but neither can you), but a lot of local council meetings for example subsume a really very wide variety of issues that would be handled by separate meetings elsewhere. That has its good and bad points, but it's also a sign that local government is not all that overwhelmed by people wanting to be heard.

>non-Americans will often make up highly elaborate imaginary scenarios wherein most Americans ignore local politics for the specific and expressed purpose of watching television, which they apparently plan every second of their life around.
I've obviously touched a nerve here, it's suddenly gone from a fuzzy projection to every non-American saying what I've said in unison. You guys really really like your TV, that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's not even necessarily anti-politics (for example, I think the UK's Question Time is a very important part of democracy, and while there isn't anything similar in the US, television is still an important medium for news and such and hearing from politicians). So you know I'm right. It's not even the US that only has people that value the TV over other shit, but that that's just accepted as like normal. Elsewhere it'd be taken as a joke or something.

I also find it interesting that you've taken offense at the TV thing and not the anti-literature thing on the literature board.

Ok, I see.

What would "I'd like to have a beer with" be though?

>I read Proust in high school, too. But I had the decency to do it in the bathroom so everyone would just think I was jerking off."

What the hell.

Trump is literally a billionaire real estate tycoon.

But, trump also knows how to hang, you could picture trump in an alternate reality on some construction site talking with the other workers about how he grabbed some chicks pussy


The democratic party has become the party of the cosmopolitan elite, the smug moralizing upper class, the people who live in gentrified areas and gated communities.


This happened after the fall of the Berlin wall, capitalism decided to wear the lefts corpse as a skin suit and prance around the world demanding more "diversity" which is just a code word for slave labor.


So, after decades the supposed left lost touch with the working classes of their nation, replaced by diversity worship, neoliberlism douchy ivey leaguers, and celebrities.

So you have this world were some rich cunt is speaking down to a white working class person, some guy who lives pay check to pay check, had his job outsourced, is having his culture and country destroyed by mass immigration, is mocked on tv and every form of entertainment, so you have this guy, and you have some rich ivey leaguer telling him he is privileged, that he has white privilege!

and thats how we got trump


I leave you with this british classic all you libtards should listen to on repeat

youtube.com/watch?v=f4BNVD5v2EU

Neither is J. Alfred Prufrock

Americans can spot and smell pseuds from miles away

>There's a reason you have a two-party system,
Yeah there is, and you don't know what it is. You're masking and filling in your ignorance with arrogance and judgmental superiority complex nonsense.

This. There's a reason the working class no longer votes for worker's parties.

Wrong.

He literally made billions of dollars.

Good for him, what about all the people he didn't pay who did the actual work part of it?

He has employed thousands of people. I'm not even a Trump defender, but you sound like a moron with these arguments. LE BANKRUPT!

lol pathetic

i wonder if hillary likes middlemarch

What color is the cover of Middlemarch? If it's green I'll read it.

it's got some green in it.

I saw it and it's white, a satanic color. Only green books for me.

Wrong.

Let's face it, when people expressed doubts about Donald Trump's intelligence he responded by saying "I'm, like, a really smart person" during one of his rallies.

This behaviour suggests that rather than being strong willed, that he suffers from crippling insecurity. The fact that he has already abandoned many of the policies he campaigned on suggests he is either impetuous, or lacking in resolve.

It's one thing to have voted for Trump because you perceived him to be less corrupt than Clinton, but you would have to be a genuine imbecile to actually be taken in by him or his ideas.

>he is either impetuous, or lacking in resolve.
Heads you win, tails he loses. Have you considered applying for a position at CNN?

>This behaviour suggests that rather than being strong willed, that he suffers from crippling insecurity. The fact that he has already abandoned many of the policies he campaigned on suggests he is either impetuous, or lacking in resolve.

Yes, you're wrong.

Honest fortunes are built over generations. Most guys that become billionaires overnight are crooks, and there are plenty of examples: George Soros (insider trading and collusion), Mark Cuban (pump and dump), Mark Zuckerberg (theft). Plenty of guys inherited big fortunes and saw them shrivel away under the next generation of leadership, too, like the Bronfman family's Seagrams fortune. Boom and bust is the nature of business. The power to build a family fortune that lasts for generations is the pinnacle of human achievement, which is why that is the nexus of political power since time immemorial, pleb.

>Let's face it, when people expressed doubts about Donald Trump's intelligence he responded by saying "I'm, like, a really smart person" during one of his rallies.

Why do you think "He's dumb" is more intelligent than "I'm smart"? They're just locking antlers. Guess who won?

All of those people you named still put in more effort and ingenuity into their shit than a guy who inherits a NYC real estate business in the 70s.

>Be a celebrated poet and playwright
>Ramble about the glories of the Roman empire and whatever's giving you an intellectual hard on at the instant to the plebs while waving your hands around
>Then punch your way out when those plebs crowd around you in adoration
>Fly a plane into a war zone so you can drop pretentious poetry and take pictures
>End up starting your own country and getting caviar from fucking Lenin

Why are Italians so based?

look who's talking mate

OP here. This thread was a mistake.

Please, focus on literature /w/r/t candidates for POTUS and not on Donald Trump's business acumen.

What a disaster.

>The fact that he has already abandoned many of the policies he campaigned on
"fact"

Apparently her favourite book is The Brothers Karamazov. She has probably read most of the meme chart already.

Not the person you're responding to, but these are not mutually exclusive terms.

Ooooooooh!! Very clever post ;)

>saved money by not paying workers
>become billionaire

Asshole? Sure, but stupid? Should we assume he was so air-headed he couldn't keep up with his checkbook?

George Bush was actually a constant reader. He would read Shakespeare on his vacations.

Liberals love pushing the meme that their opponents are philistines, but they are just as tuned in. They just have a greater sense of perspective.

He has said numerous times the people he didn't pay did a shit job. Welcome to being an adult you piece of shit SJW.

I own a small business and I withhold payments to people who didn't do what was agreed on.

>90% of businesses fail in the US within 5 years
>Out of Trumps many businesses he "failed" in 3
LOL non business people are hilarious.

>idiots think bankruptcy literally means you don't have money
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHA

thats fine. the problem becomes when someone does an amazing job and you claim it was shit just because you dont want to pay.

>prove it was an "amazing job"
Oh wait you can't.
I have a harder time believing a guy who has paid probably THOUSANDS of businesses in his years as a businessman stiffed a handful because he's greedy and a racist....or whatever you want to claim. Most likely they did shit work and he withheld payment. Or he would have the reputation of CONSTANTLY not paying people. Put your ego to the side and you will also come to this conclusion.

Your logic is like believing the one,1 star review on yelp, over the 600 4-5 stars.

>She has poor judgement though

False. She is a smart yet corrupt person. Every decision she has made was for her own benefit or the benefit of her friends. Don't expect politicians to ever change something for the good of the people.

>90% of businesses fail in the US within 5 years

It's the same in Canada, very sad actually. Sole proprietorships make up 87% of our economy, 87% fail within a year. Not that parliament cares.

>LOL non business people are hilarious.
t. wage cuck

She is very likely of average intelligence. Which after her many failures and the way she speaks, I would put her at BARELY above average. She isn't smart. She's a normie riding on the coat tails of her Husband and advisers.
>false
>saying false on a subjective feeling about someone
>being this much of a self centered faggot

>desperately tried to convince Mussolini not to enter into the Axis with Hitler, even tried to sabotage relations himself when he couldn't turn Mussolini around
>Mussolini allegedly admitted he made a mistake not following his advice in 1944 according to Wikipedia lol
;_____;

Yes, you're wrong.

American detected

You don't understand moral hazard. Hell, I don't think Trump understands it all that well or he'd have moved into hedge funds and shit instead of casinos. Saying he has expanded into something and listing businesses that are either no longer in existence or not running yet is dumb af tho.

That's how the rust states went red, which is what gave Trump his victory, but it in no way sums up the majority of Trump voters, or why Trump is popular

The population of red voters this election was only a little bit higher than the previous election. The same population of conservatives that have been living among us for decades and voting republican for decades is the population that contributed most of those votes. It isn't the emergence of some new silent voter bloc who is suddenly fed up with SJW's and switched parties. It is textbook republicans voting for textbook republican policies, and the meme loving alt-right fringe group is just The Tea Party with a different name and an internet microcosm

Nothing created Trump, he is just an opportunist who won the support of republicans who would have voted republican anyway, it's only slightly more significant of a pendulum swing than is normal in the American political establishment.
8 years democrat, 8 years republican, rinse and repeat ad nauseam as each side paints the other an increasingly vulgar monolith

Wrong

Only half of them were read right-side-up, mind you.

My god, a sensible opinion. Truly I think people are very aware of the utter disdain most representative politicians have for them, the awful way they are talked down to in desperate attempts to appeal to them. I'm sure even racists were irritated labour made mugs with 'BRING DOWN IMMIGRATION' written on them because they could tell they were being patronised.

He means they literally want to have a beer with their selected dear leader.

what does yeb! read?