Joe Scarborough Shreds Democrats for ‘Intellectual Laziness’: ‘Groupthink’ Kills Campaigns

Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough blasted Democrats for their “intellectual laziness” and “groupthink” which he argued made it difficult for candidates to “defend” the party’s ideals on the campaign trail and, ultimately, made them “lose elections.”

The host’s point came as the MSNBC crew were discussing President Donald Trump’s ongoing feud with Harvard University over activism on campus, particularly in the form of pro-Palestine protests, which the president called “anti-semitic.”

Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks, who was a guest on Wednesday’s Morning Joe and identified himself as a conservative, protested Trump’s campaign against the university as overreach but did argue that the showdown with the White House offered opportunity for the institution to “change” by rejecting “activism” and pushing for more “intellectual inquiry.”

Scarborough continued the point by lamenting that in higher education institutions liberals were not challenged to defend their ideas in the same way that conservatives were. He went on to argue that this bore out in the wider political conversations being had in the country and dysfunction within the Democratic Party.

Interjecting into the discussion, the host argued:

If you were a conservative at Harvard law school, anytime you opened your mouth, you better have thought about it about 20 different times because you were going to get crushed.

Here’s the important point, now we talk about why the left may be adrift and at loss, the other side of that is, the intellectual laziness that every — that — that occurs every time you open your mouth and they all agree with you. And you’re part of groupthink.

So you never have to defend your idea. So when you go out and run a campaign and you think everybody’s going to agree with you, it’s just the opposite.”

You never had to be on your toes before intellectually, and now you do, and you lose elections because of it.

Watch above via MSNBC.