DOUGLAS KENNEDY ON THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION - LA TRIBUNE DIMANCHE - CHRONIQUE 4

29 September 2024

ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM AS AN ELECTION INFLUENCER

Back in 2016 – when he was still just a shifty real estate mogul and reality television star turned Republican presidential candidate – Donald Trump made a speech less than a fortnight before his shock election victory.  And in what was a typically rambling discourse (as reported back then in New York magazine) Trump had this to say about his cerebral fellow citizens who weren’t embracing his rhetoric.

“Folks, we’re run by people that are not smart people, or to put it a different way, we are run by stupid people. Stupid people”.

Trump often divides individuals into winners and losers (all determined by the amount of money they make), not to mention smart and stupid (the dumb ones not recognizing what a genius Donald Trump is). As the New York journalist, Jonathan Chait, shrewdly noted back then:

“One of the more peculiar aspects of Trump’s campaign is his relationship to intelligence. In most ways, he is manifestly anti-intellectual. He is grossly simplistic, both in the concepts he tries to communicate and in the syntax with which he expresses them. He redirects every question from abstract knowledge to personal authenticity… Trump displays another classic element of anti-intellectual politics, which is the flattering of his supporters. Unlike those snobs who hate us, we have true smarts, not the kind you learn from books or at fancy schools”.

What is intriguing about Trump is that, while proclaiming himself a decided anti-egghead (to use old American argot for anyone bookish), he also brags about his Ivy League education (at the University of Pennsylvania). And though he grew up in an outer borough of New York (Queens), he resided as the child of privilege in a mock Tudor 23 room mansion.

But this need to paint himself as someone who distrusts academic erudition is not just a Trump political gambit. Many far right Republicans who espouse similar disdain for the country’s cerebral thinkers are (like the ex-President) themselves byproducts of its most prestigious universities. Ted Cruz – the hardline conservative senator from Texas – was educated at Princeton. His fellow Trumpite Republican, John Hawley (Senator from Missouri), graduated from Stamford and Yale Law School – but still argued for the overturning of the electoral college result after Biden won in 2020. No doubt this bit of banana republic anti-constitutionalism was heartedly endorsed by JD Vance – the anti-feminist Republican senator from Ohio, now Trump’s running mate. And for all his talk about his hillbilly heritage, Vance also benefited from a Yale Law School education.

‘Us versus them’ is a familiar refrain in populist politics – and one which points up the cultural wars that now so divide American life: urban, educated progressives versus heartland conservative Christians… with the latter receiving much backing from a plutocratic class determined to pay as little tax as possible. It’s one of the stranger ironies of modern American life: the fact that the midwestern heartland, the deep South and the High West – where there is much educational and economic hardship for the majority of  its citizens – have so bought into the anti-intellectualism of the Republican Party. And central to their message is the specious idea that secular, over-cultivated, entitled liberals of the two coasts look down upon ‘Real Americans’… and who mock the ‘God, Flag and Family’ trifecta that are the alleged cornerstones of US values.

What is astonishing about this simplistic ‘We hate brainy snobs’ strategy is that it has been a successful vote-getter from Reagan onwards. During the 2004 Presidential campaign the Republicans painted John Kerry to be an elitist, out of touch with the needs of those in the so-called ‘flyover’ states (all terrain between the two coasts, over which the privilege class flies when trading New York for LA). They mocked his Yale education and (horror of horrors) the fact that he speaks fluent French. The sitting president, George W. Bush, was sold to the heartland as good old boy with the common touch… ‘someone you could have a beer with’. 

The truth of the matter was that Bush was from an even more patrician background than Kerry; that he also studied at Yale (not to mention Harvard Business School); and as a reformed alcoholic turned born-again Christian he no longer touches beer (though I’ve always sensed that Bush 2 is a dry drunk: someone who, having sworn off booze, still so desperately wants a drink).

These tactics against Kerry were exceptionally successful. They also worked seventy-two years ago, when a true philosopher prince among American politicians – Adlai Stevenson – was roundly defeated by the midwestern, plain speaking, war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower – for the presidency. The ensuing McCarthyite Communist witch hunt – which destroyed so many careers in the arts and entertainment – also targeted academics and intellectuals as un-American. And though Eisenhower did not initially denounce McCarthy he quietly worked behind the scenes to eventually bring him down. Nonetheless, as the great American historian Richard Hofstadter later wrote:

“Eisenhower’s decisive victory [in 1952] was taken both by the intellectuals themselves and by their critics as a measure of their repudiation by America… Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. [also a major American historian], in a mordant protest written soon after the election, found the intellectual “in a situation he has not known for a generation.” After twenty years of Democratic rule, during which the intellectual had been in the main understood and respected, business had come back into power, bringing with it “the vulgarization which has been the almost invariable consequence of business supremacy.” Now the intellectual, dismissed as an “egghead,” an oddity, would be governed by a party which had little use for or understanding of him, and would be made the scapegoat for everything from the income tax to the attack on Pearl Harbor…The intellectual ... is on the run today in American society.”

This passage comes from Hofstadter’s landmark book, Anti-Intellectualism in America, which won the Pulitzer Prize on its publication in 1963 – and which today remains the key text on the blatant national contempt for the learned, the scholarly, the erudite. Tracing the undercurrent in the American psyche back to the rigid Puritanism of the early colonies – where intellectualism ran contrary to the theocratic worldview of its evangelistic leaders – Hofstadter’s book is especially unsettling in its prescient vision of a country where populists target intellectuals as dangerous to the public good:

“The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor, the irresponsible brain truster, or the mad scientist, and by applauding the politicians as they pursue the subversive teacher, the suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy adviser. There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes, or immigrants.. . In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition… the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.”

The hatred of science – as expostulated by the anti-vaxxers, the denier of climate change, the Bible thumpers who absolutely believe in the creationism as outlined in the Book of Genesis – is prevalent everywhere now in conservative American thought. Sixty-one years ago Richard Hofstadter foresaw that - within the Make America Great Again movement that Trump now spearheads - anyone well-read, culturally well-versed, cosmopolitan in his/her worldview, would be castigated as someone who truly can’t be dubbed a true American. And if Trump wins again, this hatred for the intellectual will truly magnify  – as it always does in authoritarian regimes.