My favorite song is “If I Only Had a Brain.” Or at least it is if you go by the song that I sing most often. Following from my mom, I am always singing bits of songs that comment about what is going on in my life. And given that I find myself often doing very stupid things, singing “If I Only Had a Brain” is appropriate. It’s also a hell of a song with a catchy melody and clever lyrics. It is also wry and plaintive, which rather well captures the duality of my personality.

The part I most sing is actually done by Judy Garland. “With the thoughts you’d be thinkin’, you could be another Lincoln.” First: wow. I love that kind of smart and corny line. And there are others, like when “riddle” is rhymed with “individal,” a silly truncation of “individual.” Or rhyming “merry” with “dingaderry,” which may or may not be a word. And that’s the first part of the song:

What hit me this morning was what the lines imply: President Lincoln was a great man because he was smart—because of the thoughts that thought. This was an idea that I dimly remember from my childhood: that the president was smart. This idea has died, especially as of Reagan—but not because Reagan wasn’t smart. It is all part of the Republican Party’s push to authoritarianism.

If you push all the racism aside with the Nazis, what you are left with is a violent authoritarian movement. It mythologized violent, unthinking youths. And we see this everywhere in the modern conservative movement. Look at all the love that Putin is getting these days. Or look at how the religious right has turned Jesus into a muscle bound Rambo character who is coming back (Soon!) and taking names. But most of all you see it in the conservative faith that government is something that is best done by uneducated novices. (For a counter to that, see, Jerry Brown’s Liberal Bona Fides.)

The issue is not about being smart, however, but about valuing intelligence. The whole thing goes back to Paul Krugman’s line that reality has a well known liberal bias. This wasn’t true 50 years ago. But the conservatives have moved the country so far to the right that there really are very few policies they support that make any sense. So it isn’t surprising that they would start pushing the idea that stupid politicians are better than smart ones. They really don’t have many smart politicians who are willing to support their bad ideas.

Stephen Colbert mocks this rather well by talking about thinking with his gut. But it is a widely held belief. At least on the right. The last three Democratic presidents (Obama, Clinton, Carter) were, regardless of their other failings, very intelligent men. The last three Republicans presidents (Bush the Younger, Bush the Elder, and Reagan) were, while certainly not dumb, not known for their intelligence brilliance. If anyone were going to mention one of them in a song, it will be like this, “Complexity won’t trouble you; you’ll act just like ol’ W; before you get a brain!”