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Robert Westbrook
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In this
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Reading Michael's commentary, I thought immediately of
Hofstadter's remark at the beginning of his book that "American
intellectuals have a lamentably thin sense of history," for
Michael was celebrating the very period that provoked Hofstadter
to investigate American anti-intellectualism.*
tuals had an honored position," the fifties was a decade like our
own in which, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. said in 1953, the
intellectual was "on the run" (4).**
*
Michael was wrong not only about the 1950s but about the
Van Dorens. As my colleague Joan Shelley Rubin has demonstrated,
Mark Van Doren was among the last of a dying breed of middlebrow
critics and his son was celebrated more for his personal magnetism than for his intellectualism. Quiz shows such as that on
which Charles Van Doren earned fame, fortune, and infamy advanced
a view of culture as "the acquisition and display of information," and Van Doren "captured the imagination of the public by
exhibiting the mastery of information, earning money, and redefining culture as performance." Moreover, such quiz shows often
appealed to the anti-intellectualism of their audiences, who most
enjoyed those moments in which intellectuals, professors, and
experts were "stumped" by ordinary men and women. Stumping
experts was not a means of emulating them "but of repudiating
their authority as irrelevant." See The Making of Middlebrow
Since the turn of the century, as Hofstadter argued, intellectuals have most affected the public mind when they have acted
in one of two capacities: as experts or as ideologues.
As he
4
On the whole, the intellectual as ideologue has been even
more resented than the intellectual as expert.
As ideologues,
As Hofstad-
. . . If there is anything
5
Hofstadter wrote his book--an era of liberal ascendancy.
These
In the immediate
6
intellectual.
Such intel-
7
American culture, to rewrite history and to espouse a set of
values which are essentially destructive."*
Anti-intellectualism has become an essential component of
conservative politics because of the important place it holds in
the pseudo-populist strategy upon which Republican political
ascendancy rests.
Edsall has shown, the GOP has been "increasingly able to define
the Democratic party, its intellectual allies, and the bureaucracy that enforced redistributive laws, as a new left elite--an
effective alternative target, as [George] Wallace had shown [in
1968] to the 'fat cat' business class which, between 1929 and
1964, had reliably attracted the lion's share of popular resentment."
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racial, cultural and social liberalism on recalcitrant white,
working and middle-class constituencies."*
Not only have liberal Democrats offerred little effective
opposition to this Republican strategy, they have enhanced its
effectiveness by aligning themselves with the court-mandated and
enforced "rights revolution" that extended new rights to racial
minorities and other "outsiders"--affirmative action in government contracts, college admissions, and employment and promotion
in both the public and private sectors, reproductive rights for
women, constitutional protections for the criminally accused,
relaxed immigration restrictions, and free-speech rights for
pornographers.
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In making such a commitment, the liberal wing of the national
party guaranteed that the field on which presidential politics
were fought--the field of majoritarian public opinion--would tilt
in favor of the Republican party."*
Anti-intellectualism is a central feature of the rhetoric of
Republican pseudo-populism.
Attacking intellectuals
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transcendent ideals of the West rather than the word of God,
under which march the much more numerous and significant battalions of fundamentalist Christianity.
At the same time that anti-intellectualism has become more
central to conservative politics, intellectuals have been rendered particularly vulnerable to its effects by their nearwholesale incorporation into the American university.
This is
As
satisfying than the pursuit of truth and nothing more boring than
truths that no longer remain elusive.
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tion rations prior to World War II.
Universities--even private
little magazines has often proved more wary of giving them a free
hand in a classroom in front of impressionable young minds.
To
offer but one example of this: witness the recent ad for Imprimis, the newsletter of Hillsdale College, a Michigan bastion of
conservative right-mindedness, which has run in the first issues
of the new conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard.
Headlined
"It's Amazing What You Can Do to Your Child for $20,000," the ad
features a photo of a loving father and his little girl and a
warning to parents that most colleges and universities are a
waste of their hard-earned money and a threat to the intellectual
*
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and moral well-being of their children.
"Instead of learning to
Some
As Russell Jacoby
From
And
**
*
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Mention of The Weekly Standard brings to mind another
distinctive feature of contemporary anti-intellectualism: the
emergence of a substantial, well-funded coterie of anti-intellectual publicists who, thanks to the largesse of conservative
foundations and corporate sponsors, have set themselves up in
plush bunkers outside the infrastructure of the university and
from there they have taken the lead in lobbing shells into the
better academic neighborhoods--particularly the humanities
departments of elite universities.
wide hearing for their views, much wider than that of those
academics who have made some feeble efforts to respond to their
assault on the university.
Many of these
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the semi-literate, full of seriousness and high purpose about the
cause that bring them to the attention of the world" (21).
Finally, it should be said that just as liberal Democrats
have given conservative Republicans plenty to work with, so too
have some academic intellectuals given aid and comfort to antiintellectualism by promoting a radical skepticism that amounts to
an act of unilateral disarmament in the culture wars.
For truth
is often the only and always the best weapon that intellectuals
have had against anti-intellectualism.
"The politics
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of truth," Mills wrote, "is the only realistic politics of consequence that is readily open to intellectuals."**
**