Columbia’s Richard Hofstadter published Anti–Intellectualism in American Life in 1963, and one year later, the work won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non–Fiction. As Hofstadter explains in the introduction, the book is not a comprehensive history of American culture but instead a “critical inquiry” into those aspects of American society that allow for such an “acuteness of anti–intellectualism” in our culture as opposed to others. Anti–intelectualism is the sentiment (or even the specter), rather than the concrete idea, that the cultivation of the intellect in the academy or elsewhere is non–essential, undesirable, and potentially harmful. In Hofstadter’s analyses, anti–intellectualism is the sentiment that intellectual pursuit introduces to American life a hostile moral relativism, a disdain for propriety, and a commitment to anti–pragmatism.
Hofstadter identifies anti–intellectualism in four main aspects of American culture: religion, politics, business, and education. Anti–intellectualism in religion is primarily the influence of the evangelicalism that arose in the mid–seventeenth century following the Great Awakening; it took the form of fervent preaching that emphasized emotional reactions to Biblical study over the learned, rational approaches of the seacoast New England Puritans. Later, following the advent of evolutionary theory, evangelical Christianity’s hostility toward Darwinian theory developed into a mistrust of secular intellectual life in general. In politics, the specter of anti–intellectualism first arose as a result of Jacksonian Democracy and the decline of aristocratic political leaders like Jefferson and Adams, men with a high–minded appreciation for Enlightenment philosophy and classical literature. Hofstadter presents business as “the vanguard of anti–intellectualism in our time,” where America’s practical culture deemed interest in philosophy, history, and literature—the subjects at the heart of Hofstadter’s intellectualism—unnecessary and anti–pragmatic. In education, a similar mentality arose among school curriculum committees and among educational theorists such as John Dewey (also of Columbia).
Anti–intellectualism in American Life is an extremely important work not because of its detailed analyses of this strain in American culture, but because Hofstadter’s work has introduced a lens of social analysis that has application far beyond the social context of the book’s publication. Richard Hofstadter did not take anti–intellectualism with him to the grave when he died at the tragically young age, of 54 in 1970. On the contrary, anti–intellectualism in American life has ebbed and flowed in the last four decades, waxing in our political discourse while arguably waning in our secondary education curricula.
The most pressing case of anti–intellectualism in American life today, one that has received much attention from media personalities over the past few months, is that contained in the discourse of the 2008 presidential election, and in particular the campaign tactics of the Republican Party. Commentators that run the gamut of the political spectrum, from Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh and The New York Times’ Frank Rich on the left, to Christopher Buckley (formerly of the National Review) and New York Times columnist David Brooks on the right, have expressed concern over the anti–intellectualism that Rich claimed was “apotheosized by Sarah Palin” in campaign discourse. They celebrated what they saw as anti–intellectualism’s defeat in Barack Obama’s victory. These gentlemen are entirely correct to worry about such a blossoming of anti–intellectual tendencies, a frightening development in light of the Bush presidency, which justified its lack of cultural awareness in matters of foreign policy and domestic affairs using the rhetoric of anti–intellectualism, or “flag–pin shallowness and junk science,” in Hirsh’s words.
Yet President Bush’s anti–intellectualism was subtler than the McCain–Palin strain, about which Hofstadter discusses at length. Insinuations of “Un–Americanism” from the academy and pressrooms might have been common during the last eight years, but the discussion of anti–intellectualism never reached the pitch of this year’s election. Bush was, notwithstanding his Texan patois and infamous malapropisms, a graduate of two Ivy League schools and heir to a political dynasty. Even if Mr. Bush was a president the American populace “could sit down and have a beer with,” just as Hillary Clinton was the candidate with whom America could down a shot of whiskey, he did presumably cultivate a life of the mind at some point in the past.
 : In one of the iconic moments of the 2008 election, then-Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama is confronted by Joe Wurzelbacher, who quickly became known as “Joe the Plumber” and an icon for the right in the weeks leading up to the election. WashingtonTimes.com |
Unlike Palin’s representational anti–intellectualism, which claimed to represent rural (as opposed to urban) values, Bush’s anti–intellectualism was reductionist. The “with us or against us” attitude, as he mentioned in his press conference in Warsaw on November 6, 2001, and his subsequent approach to foreign affairs (at least through his first term), best represented his presidency at its most anti–intellectual.
In addition to cultivating an appreciation for the history of thought, intellectualism is also an appreciation for “nuance” (recall Kerry’s ill–fated use of the word, and Bush’s public lampooning of it) in political life, that no situation of great importance can ever be reduced to such a binary. Nuanced politics did not merely escape Bush; he sometimes directly opposed them.
What the columnists above have yet to address is the larger and more dangerous question of why candidates view such anti–intellectual policies as a strategy to garner votes, and such tactics are successful. Hofstadter’s work sheds light on this: the rise of evangelicalism in opposition to higher secular education and religious pluralism is certainly an important factor. John McCain’s retraction of his comment in 2000 that ministers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were “agents of intolerance” is indicative of the amount to which the Republican Party need cater to evangelical interests. But not everyone in the United States, or even the Midwest, is an evangelical Christian opposed to evolution. Why then does the Republican Party, as in the 2008 Republican National Convention speeches of Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani, continue to emphasize anti–urban (rather than pro–rural) rhetoric? Why does this folksiness take on such a hostile tone toward higher education and legitimate political debate?
Part of the answer is that intellectualism is now and has historically been associated with elitism and aristocracy. In one of the most interesting passages of his book, Hofstadter explains, “America has been the country of those who fled from the pastÉwith an anti–cultural attitude that represented a republican and egalitarian protest against monarchy and aristocracy and the callous exploitation of the people.” Intellectualism, and by extension prestigious institutions of higher education, the Northeast, even President Barack Obama himself, are elitist rather than democratic, aristocratic rather than meritocratic. Cultivation of the intellect is something that demands leisure time and access to resources such as competent professors and materials, luxuries that many Americans do not have.
This past election witnessed acute rural–urban warfare. John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin represented an attempted answer at Obama’s cosmopolitan aura. More alarming than what Sarah Palin said or did, which the McCain campaign advisors did their best to contain, was what Sarah Palin represented: a small–town governor of a big state, far removed from the Eastern Establishment, with little outward appreciation for higher education and socially conservative values. That she had little political experience—McCain’s primary charge against Obama before selecting Governor Palin as his running mate—simply did not matter because she was the very embodiment of the hallowed Republican “base.” Where Obama represented a chic, sophisticated, and nuanced approach to American politics, Palin represented a folksy alternative. The single debate between Governor Palin and Senator Biden, for instance, resulted in a discussion over which candidate had the better pedigree in small towns.
Times columnist David Brooks wrote extensively about class values in the 2008 election. He views the political tactic of pitting one social class over another—the “real America” versus, one must assume, the “fake” America—as antithetical to the interests of the Republican Party and the conservative movement at large. At a time when more Americans are going to college, Brooks contends, the Republican Party continues to be the party that conflates higher education with elitism. “The GOP is squeezed at both ends,” he writes. “The party is losing the working class by sins of omissionÉwhile it has lost the educated class by sins of commission—by telling the members of that class to go away.” The current anti–intellectual values of the GOP are thus self–defeating, since education cannot be the future of America while tacitly remaining “un–American.”
American conservatism need not be anti–intellectual, nor does the Republican Party. The party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, William F. Buckley and George Will, the GOP does not have to search long or hard to point to prominent Republican thinkers who have shaped the political and intellectual dialogue of the country. Nor is the Democratic Party without its fair share of anti–intellectuals: Michael Moore, Markos Moulitsas, and half the population of Hollywood serve as proof. It is not opinions on the correct size of government that make an anti–intellectual: no one can rightfully call Milton Friedman or Robert Nozick anything but intellectual. What makes an anti–intellectual is just the opposite of what makes an intellectual: a passion for examining the foundations of any belief system, skepticism for ideology of all types, and a love for and dedication to interacting with large ideas. Regardless of whether one is Republican or Democrat, evangelical Christian or firebrand atheist, it is ideational complacency that breeds anti–intellectualism. When we stop questioning our own views, when feel that we no longer need to examine ideas contrary to our own and attack without warrant those who harbor them—this is the beginning of anti–intellectualism. Anti–intellectualism in American Life made America aware of a lingering danger present in our culture, but its lasting value shows that America is also a nation that can confront this problem head–on. Let us hope that the new Obama administration does just that.
Above: Sarah Palin addresses a campaign rally during the 2008 election, delivering one of her trademark winks to the crowd. Palin came to represent a populist, anti-intellectual strain in the Republican party, serving as a stark contrast to the Ivy League-educated Barack Obama. ©Los Angales Times
WILLIAM LANE is the Deputy Arts and Letters editor of the Current. He is majoring in East Asian Studies, with a focus in modern Chinese history. William can be reached at wgl2104@columbia.edu.