What is a "smart people"? Educated? Or wise and skeptical. I'll grant that the country has been on a slide due to Madison Avenue brainwashing. But we probably have more doctoral degrees than ever in history. But at the same time, we've been exposed to more manipulation by the media than any people ever. Somehow we've lost the "smart" of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. How long since you've heard a college grad quote any of those guys?
Labels ill apply to Mencken, who said, "I am my own party," although he certainly was against big government and for laissez-faire capitalism. But in the 1920s, scarred by the crackdown on German Americans and socialists during World War I, he was a radical freethinker who noisily waged war against the booboisie (his term for the stupid and the gullible)