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Related: About this forumJane Austin
(9,199 posts)It started with Vice President Spiro Agnew, who (with speechwriter Pat Buchanan's help) demonized "Pointy-headed intellectuals" for their opposition to the Viet Nam war.
mrmpa
(4,033 posts)and into the '50's with the HUAC and McCarthyism. The right hated the State Department (because it was full of Ivy Leaguers) it went after professors, etc.
Archae
(46,337 posts)An essay he called "The Cult Of Ignorance."
It's still there.
They used to call intellectuals "eggheads" who never could get the girl like Mr Tall Dark Handsome and Stupid.
Nowadays, "Nerds," "Geeks," who still can't get the girl like Tall Dark and Scraggly 5-day Beard.
The_Commonist
(2,518 posts)Og discovered a new and more efficient way of removing lice from the other tribe members' hair using twigs. Grog thought Og was being all fancied-pantsed, and smashed Og in the face with a rock.
It's been going on ever since then...
Dont call me Shirley
(10,998 posts)DeSwiss
(27,137 posts)John Stuart Mill,
May 20 1806 May 8 1873
appalachiablue
(41,146 posts)Conservative Wm. F. Buckley ramped up the attack on liberals in the 1960s or earlier. Noting that not all intellectuals are liberals, and visa versa.
riversedge
(70,244 posts)I've used that as my sig line for a long.....
Ed Suspicious
(8,879 posts)Divernan
(15,480 posts)Although five United States presidents have identified as Unitariansthe two Adamses, Jefferson, Fillmore, and Taftit has been more than fifty years since a Unitarian was the nominee of a major political party. The last was Democrat Adlai Stevenson, who lost to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956.
Stevenson loved language and was a gifted orator. A sharp wit, he could be both high-minded and self-deprecating. In one oft-quoted story, a supporter shouted, Governor Stevenson, you have the vote of all the thinking people, to which he replied, Thats not enough, madam. I need a majority. New York Herald Tribune columnist Stewart Alsop coined the term egghead to describe the urbane, intellectual, and balding Stevenson.
The talent among his speechwriters was breathtaking: Archibald MacLeish, John Kenneth Galbraith, John Hersey, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Even so, he personally reworked every speech, often penciling in hundreds of changes, keeping crowds waiting, even letting them disperse, until he felt prepared. His advisers joked hed rather write than be president, according to biographer Jean Baker.
His political opponents in 1952 were vicious: Vice presidential nominee Richard Nixon, red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover smeared the Stevenson campaign as a bunch of pinks and pansies.
My former Pennsylvania Senator, Rick Santorum is the antithesis of an egghead.
NCjack
(10,279 posts)stupidicus
(2,570 posts)if by right wing "conservative" is meant, I'd say since the ideology formed as a political means of protecting the aristocracy and their riches.
Obviously if you're gonna recruit the masses into that cause, intellect is the last thing you're gonna cultivate.
mopinko
(70,135 posts)blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)RiverNoord
(1,150 posts)more thoroughly and soundly than others? Since the first bully squared off with the first human who was smarter than he was, and lost? Unfortunately, power and the capacity for sound reasoning seldom travel in the same company....
a kennedy
(29,675 posts)exactly the difference between the intellectuals and the physicals......
A-Schwarzenegger
(15,596 posts)thanks to the commonist for linking to your post
Fred Sanders
(23,946 posts)randr
(12,412 posts)LiberalElite
(14,691 posts)is it like the cosmos with no beginning or end?
MisterP
(23,730 posts)started with the Reagan Revolution when he forged a new party out of four major constituencies: warmongers (Haig, Secord, Singlaub), fundies (Hargis, Robertson, Moon, Falwell), corporatists (Dow, the MIC, Justice Powell, Hunts, Kochs, Big Oil), and right-libertarians (Hunts, Kochs, Big Oil): so for instance the very scientistic (but also Romantic) Robert Heinlein would fall into the militarist and libertarian quadrants and loathe the other two
the televangelists themselves are quite recent--after Coughlin, the 50s and 60s' attitude was that God was either American, dead, or that hippie woman you're digging: even the Baptists had to have a coup to serve their new role in the late-70s backlash
there were many, many scientists--hardliners and technocrats who thought that Dow and Boeing HAD won Vietnam but victory had been stolen by those hippies that want us to TALK to savages about what jungle plants they use for "medicine"; Reagan LOVED science--or at least the napalm and missile and space-laser parts of it; thousands of scientists and engineers were materially or ideologically tied to the MIC and the "Science Wars" quickly turned to slamming women, Blacks, and everyone in the Third World
then came Gorbachev: one way or another the USSR fell and there was nobody to have any more "races" with: as the sole superpower we didn't need the B-2 or anything like it, our nukes and heavy-lift missiles rusting; the big-ticket SSC was cancelled after losing $2B; tens of thousands of engineers and managers and researchers were let go by Lockheed and Raytheon and General Dynamics and IBM and Boeing--it was a massacre (and yet somehow the Pentagon contractors' incomes didn't go down: we got no "peace dividend." funny, that); the sector's logic of cost-plus accounting and feeding its sparrows only through a horse caught up with its own workers, "rightsizing" consuming its own labor
already there were mutterings that this shift in priorities and doctrine was a sign that "America didn't respect science anymore": such complaints are often tied to "school reform" calls ("we're falling behind in math and science! the school of the 60s/80s/10s needs less violins and Beverly Cleary!"
the Reaganauts turned to telecom messianism and then cyberselfishness; at the same time the 90s corporatists needed scientists to start covering up their own discipline's results: CFCs, global warming, tobacco, junk food, and GMOs were suddenly big issues and coming under attack: now there's two ways you can insulate yourself and keep your profits at $20B instead of $19.5B: you can directly buy scientists, of course, but the more lasting and flexible approach is to create a massive propaganda campaign: people talk back to whitecoats now, so after Watergate FUD is much more cost-effective; these two wings work together--only 50M Americans would believe it if a Senator said that AGW can't be real because of Genesis 9:17, but another 100M will delay judgment if you add James Randi to the mix (like how Islamophobia is increasingly carried on "liberal" currents)
JHB
(37,161 posts)Required reading on this subject.
http://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paranoid_Style_in_American_Politics
http://www.amazon.com/Paranoid-Style-American-Politics-ebook/dp/B006L7RJ6O/
Also required:
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (also by Hofstadter, 1962)
http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Richard-Hofstadter-ebook/dp/B006LSVB1M/
Drunken Irishman
(34,857 posts)Anti-intellectualism has had a huge streak in our politics since the country was founded.
Look at William Jennings Bryan. He would be considered a creationist by today's standards - totally anti-Darwinism.
deafskeptic
(463 posts)My dad was a doctor (an M.D.) who was very anti intellectual and this despite his degree!
Like some other posters in this tread have pointed out (You likely knew that already), anti intellectualism has a very long history in politics and religion.
polynomial
(750 posts)It was interesting to listen about the Rush Limbaughs and Becks the so called Conservative intellectuals.
These media fabricated characterizations as todays Conservative intellectuals, yet mildly suggested as being propped up by social media.
There is a self-awareness in the University System, it is at the precipice of collision, knowing and understanding how it is being condemned by todays Conservative. These Conservatives do exactly what they are taught in economics, they take the derivative and dont care about you or me.
The simple flag of enlightenment being raised is the defiance, and arrogance in the underfunded pension plans though out the system.
All of a sudden the majority of intellectuals that have been quietly silent for decades prospering with a good pay checks now understand how these political characters are going to tap their future and swindle every penny they can.
My view about the intellectuals of the University System; they are getting punked in their pensions especially in Illinois , welcome to the club
Martin Eden
(12,871 posts)The only way servants of the plutocracy can win popular elections is by manipulating the base instincts of the ignorant.
The purpose of anti-intellectualism is to keep them ignorant.
valerief
(53,235 posts)Ergo, propaganda to deny facts is and has always been essential to RW politics, because once you deny facts, you have opposing populations to divert attention from the predatory actions of the billionaires.
swilton
(5,069 posts)has yet to be mentioned in this thread.
To quote Susan Jacoby in 2008 in a Washington Post (cited below) article
The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/15/AR2008021502901.html