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There are definitely leftists who know things, they're not the biggest problem with democracy! A democracy off Matt Yglesias and Ezra Kleins would have different problems from today's democracy, and the biggest problem with democracy is all of the low-information median iq voters, half of whom are left wing.
I wasn’t just pointing at leftists, a right-winger can do just as much damage. Ignoring the Holocaust, Hitler ran Germany into the ground and by all accounts Mussolini wasn’t much better.
My point is that the low-information median iq voters are far from perfect, but they tend to be instinctively low-c conservative and have to deal with the realities of life at some level. To really cock things up you need a smart guy with a terrible idea. It wasn’t the median iq voters who came up with One Billion Americans, Greed Is Good, or Socialism.
I think you can cock things up well enough with a dumb guy with terrible ideas. We get close to that with Corbyn.
I was never sure how bright Corbin was, because on the left you only read hagiographies and on the right only vitriol. But in any case I consider Corbin essentially a delivery mechanism for Karl Marx.
Corbyn’s personal intelligence is interesting. He was born to a high school math teacher and an electrical engineer, which suggests a good inheritance, and he went to grammar school, but as the press regularly repeated, he got 2 Es at O/GCSE level and then dropped out. From his speeches and writing, I think he was of pretty middling intelligence. It was quite interesting in that all three of the leading triumvirate under Corbyn - himself, McDonnell and Abott - were all academically very unimpressive.
As for socialism in general, I don’t think Marx was particularly intelligent. Hegel was, Lenin certainly was, Stalin probably was. Marx? Not really, his writing doesn’t have that spark.
Really? He wrote a social critique that resonated for centuries, I thought that he would be obviously intelligent. I had always understood that the more thick-headed elements of Marxism came from Engels and the Communist Manifesto. But reading at least a bit of Marx in the original is on my to-do list, so I’ll find out for myself someday.
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Calling Corbyn "dumb" on my part may not have been fair, but I think he's about as low-end as you're realistically going to find among leaders of major parties in western democracies.
No, I agree with you completely.
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