April 11, 2018--Anti-Intellectualism

In my frustrating attempts to understand the America in which we are living, I suppose Donald Trump's America, struggling to understand why at least 35 percent of Americans support him with enthusiasm, no matter what he says or does, no matter how much he lies and makes a mockery of civility and shreds our traditional ways of conducting ourselves domestically and in the world, I turned again to one of my college professor's, Richard Hofstadter's, most enduring works--Anti-Intellectualism In American Life.

In it he argues that anti-intellectualism is one of the unintended consequences of the expansion of pubic education and the resulting democratization of knowledge. He sees this woven into our cultural fabric, one result of our evangelical Protestant heritage that valued belief more than intellectual rigor.

No wonder that after Trump was elected sales of Anti-Intellectualism briefly became a bestseller. It should be required reading. I know, you want me to say, "Assuming his 35 percent read!"

Reading through it again, I came upon this from the chapter, "The Rise of the Expert." How many in the public had become disenchanted with President Woodrow Wilson's inability at the end of the First World War to take progressive action and how, as a result, during the mid 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt was careful not to overpromise or include too many "experts" in his cabinet or to lead newly enacted social programs.

"Keep the whole thing pretty quiet," he counseled one member of his Brain Trust. Hofstadter wrote--

The public had turned on the intellectuals as the prophets of false and needless reforms. As architects of the administrative state, as supporters of the War, even as ur-Bolsheviks; the intellectuals [had] turned on America as a nation of boobs, Babbits, and fanatics.

Rings familiar. 

And here I thought pseudo-intellectual Steve Bannon and his alt-right minions came up with this business about the administrative state on their own. Now I realize his and their ideas are not only half baked but also not original.

Richard Hofstadter