Anti-Intellectualism in America

All these years, I have been unable to comprehend the strain of anti-intellectualism and aversion to nuance which is central to the conservative and Republican rhetoric in America. The origins have been unclear to me.

Till I came across Thomas Frank's article in the Wall Street Journal - "Joe the Plumber and GOP 'Authenticity'" Frank quotes Ronald Reagan's poll strategist Robert Wirthlin from his election strategy in 1980: "People act on the basis of their perception of reality; there is, in fact, no political reality beyond what is perceived by the voters."

He adds "The "perception of reality," on the other hand, is an amazing political tonic, and with it conservatives have cemented a factproof worldview of lasting power. It is simply this: Conservatives are authentic and liberals are not. The country is divided into a land of the soulful, hard-working producers and a land of the paper-pushing parasites; a plain-spoken heartland and the sinister big cities, where they breed tricky characters like Barack Obama, all "eloquence," as John McCain sneered in last week's presidential debate, but hard to pin down."

With Reagan, the strategy worked beautifully and has then been embraced whole heartedly by electoral strategists like Karl Rove with remarkable effectiveness. More than two decades of feeding on this mantra has shaped an entire generation's view that anti-liberalism equals anti-intellectualism and it is not going to be easy to shake off

David Brooks in his New York Time piece "The Class War Before Palin" says "Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. ..... What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect."

Brooks goes on "Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch"

Time will tell if an Obama presidency (assuming he does become president) will reverse this thinking in middle America. If the economic situation doesn't improve during the term (which is a probable scenario) sadly there may be yet another republican revolution and a re-establishment of red neck hegemony.