More from the OpEd ...

... I am not saying the members of the Trump administration are not intelligent. We all know high-I.Q. people who behave in a way that's as dumb as rocks. I don't believe that there are stupid people, just stupid behaviors.

As the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla once put it, "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."

And I am certainly not saying Donald Trump's supporters are less intelligent than others.

I've learned over the years that many upscale Democrats detest intellectual diversity. When they have power over a system -- whether it's academia, the mainstream media, the nonprofits or the Civil Service -- they tend to impose a stifling orthodoxy that makes everybody within it duller, more conformist and insular.

If Republicans want to upend that, I say: Go for it.

I define stupidity as behaving in a way that ignores the question: What would happen next?

If somebody comes up to you and says, "I think I'm going to take a hike in a lightning storm with a copper antenna on my head," stupidity replies, "That sounds like a really great idea!"

Stupidity is the tendency to take actions that hurt you and the people around you. ...