Anti-Intellectualism

Liberalism has, for at least the last few decades, been equated with evil in American political discourse. The media and politicians alike have bent over backwards to assure Americans that they are not liberal. Communist was an epithet from the 50's, during the reign of Joe McCarthy. Terrorist became all the rage after 9-11 as the muzzle of choice for those seeking to shut down an rational— or, god forbid, intellectual—discussion. Barack Obama, with his superstar status, clearly deserved his very own adjective and Republican flacks were happy to provide him one: elitist.

We are only too happy to call soldiers, like Army Rangers or Navy Seals, members of an elite. However, when it’s your intelligence, sagacity or analytic skills that put you in an elite, that’s bad. It’s downright snobbish to be smarter than the hoi polloi. Knowing things and having ideas and considering things rationally have all been thrown on the dustheap of history as America strides boldly into the future with only a gut-feeling in its holster. After eight years of wrong answers from the Bush administration, the McCain/Palin ticket is still getting a remarkable amount of mileage out of anti-intellectualism.

Though The Triumph of Ignorance by George Monbiot points out, quite rightly, that much of the blame can be laid at the feet of “the great failures of the US education system [and] religious fundamentalism”, the article Sarah Palin’s War on Science by Christopher Hitchens (Slate) does a much better job of summing up the frustration felt by those who cling to Enlightenment principles:

“Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies.”

And, just to be crystal clear, this is not a purely Republican phenomenon; they make the best use of it, but are not the only ones profiting from it. At any rate, it’s not all Republicans—as Barack Obama put it in a recent interview (as detailed in Schurz: The True Americanism by Ken Silverstein (Harper's)):

“I do think there’s a difference between the parties, but here’s my belief. […] I think they’re a lot of Republican voters out there, self-identified, who actually think that what the Bush Administration has done, has been damaging to the country. […] If I can describe it as not a blanket indictment of the Republican Party, but instead describe it as the Republican Party having been kidnapped by a incompetent, highly ideological subset of the Republican Party, then that means I can still reach out to a whole bunch of Republican moderates who I think are hungry for change, as well.”

Whether or not you agree with his policies, you should try to see past the red haze of anti-intellectual hate to realize that his studious consideration of the issue is more-or-less correct. Obama seems to be interested not just in Democrats, but anyone willing to listen to reason. And he’s holding out an olive branch to those Republicans who’ve come to the slow realization that their party has long since gone off the rails. It would be very interesting to see him turn that inquisitive gaze on his own party to root all the rotton-ness at its core, as well. Time will tell.