My latest bloggingheads diavlog is with
Elvin Lim, who is the author of the very engaging book
The Anti-Intellectual Presidency
, which hereby receives the official danieldrezner.com endorsement. Lim's argument, simply put, is that presidential rhetoric has become less intellectually nutritious over time. The book has some fascinating details, including the following:
- Using Flesch scores, the two least sophisticated set of presidential papers in the last eighty years are Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton -- i.e., they were written at an eleventh-grade reading level (the Bushes finish third and fourth).
- Using those same Flesch scores, social scientists write denser more sophisticated prose than those in law or the humanities.
We talk about the state of campaign rhetoric, the state of presidential rhetoric, and the movie
Idiocracy (well, I talk about it).
Go check it out!
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