Is it true that the GOP promotes anti-intellectualism? If so, why?

Comic book movies rule (and Al Gore is a movie star), They Might Be Giants are the soundtrack to Dunkin' Donuts ads, and everybody is on the Internets.

A Democratic Party that promised "A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow" with alternative energy and gleaming infrastructure would be very popular. Instead, we're praying to the sky god and whitewashing the GOP's sins, in hopes that NASCAR dads will learn to love us.

they use Education as a convenient scapegoat and as a big example of "liberal bias"--but because you really need a Bachelors nowadays to get ahead, and there aren't well-paying factory or non-degree jobs that are available anymore, there are fewer and fewer who buy it.

The majority of voters still don't have degrees, so it still works like a charm--but non-college voters are fewer and fewer each cycle--

from 06: "... President Bush’s support is found in the states with the lowest education levels. In the 2000 national election, states with lower college graduate populations such as West Virginia (15.1%), Kentucky (18.9%), and Louisiana (19.6%) all voted Republican.

States with highest percentages of college graduates--- Connecticut, (36.8%), Massachusetts, (36.6%); and California, (30.6%) voted Democratic.

There were exceptions to this but they were few: Colorado, with a population of 35.5% college graduates went for Bush. Wisconsin, where just 25% of residents holds a college degree, went for Gore.

But if you added up all the “Red” states in 2000, you’d find, on average, only 24.7% of their populations hold a college degree. And if you averaged the percentage of “Blue” State college-educated, the figure is 31.2%. That’s a significant difference. ..." -- http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/...

_Anti-Intellectualism in American Life_ by Richard Hofstadter
NY: Alfred A Knopf, 1974

(9) Louis Bromfield's definition
Egghead: A person of spurious intellectual pretensions, often a professor or the protege of a professor. Fundamentally superficial. Over-emotional and feminine in reactions to any problem. Supercilious and surfeited with conceit and contempt for the experience of more sound and able men. Essentially confused in thought and immersed in mixture of sentimentality and violent evangelism.

(27-28) "The proper function of the human race, taken in the aggregate," wrote Dante in _De Monarchia_, "is to actualize continually the entire capacity possible to the intellect, primarily in speculation, then through its extension and for its sake, secondarily in action." The noblest thing, and the closest possible to divinity, is thus the act of knowing.

(35) In the main, intellectuals affect the public mind when they act in one of two capacities: as experts or as ideologues. In both capacities they evoke profound, and, in a measure, legitimate, fears and resentments. Both intensify the prevalent sense of helplessness in our society, the expert by quickening the public's resentment of being the object of constant manipulation, the ideologue by arousing the fear of subversion and heightening all the other grave psychic stresses that have come with modernity.

(39) I am not denying that we have had a number of conservative intellectuals and even a few reactionary ones; but if there is anything that could be called an intellectual establishment in America, this establishment has been, though not profoundly radical (which would be unbecoming in an establishment), on the left side of center. And it has drawn the continuing and implacable resentment of the right, which has always liked to blur the distinction between the moderate progressive and the revolutionary.

(41) The McCarthyist fellow travelers who announced that they approved of the senator's goals even though they disapproved of his methods missed the point: to McCathy's true believers what was really appealing about him were his methods, since his goals were always utterly nebulous. To them, his proliferating multiple accusations were a positive good, because they widened the net of suspicion and enabled it to catch many victims who were no longer, or had never been, Communists; his bullying was welcomed because it satisfied a craving for revenge and a desire to discredit the type of leadership the New Deal had made prominent.

(45-46) The case against intellect is founded upon a set of fictional an wholly abstract antagonisms. Intellect is pitted against feeling, on the grounds that it is somehow inconsistent with warm emotion. It is pitted against character, because it is widely believed that intellect stands for mere cleverness, which transmutes easily into the sly or the diabolical. It is pitted against practicality, since theory is held to be opposed to practice, and the "purely" theoretical mind is so much disesteemed. It is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism. Once the validity of these antagonisms is accepted, then the case for intellect, and be extension for the intellectual, is lost. Who cares to risk sacrificing warmth of emotion, solidity of character, practical capacity, or democratic sentiment in order to pay deference to a type of man who at best is deemed to be merely clever and at worst may even be dangerous?... Intellect needs to be understood not as some kind of a claim against the other human excellences for which a fatally high price has to be paid, but rather as a complement to them without which they cannot be fully consummated.

(48-49) The argument in this passage is similar to that commonly used by the evangelicals. One begins with the hardly contestable proposition that religious faith is not, in the main, propagated by logic or learning. One moves on from this to the idea that it is best propagated (in the judgment of Christ and on historical evidence) by men who have been unlearned and ignorant. It seems to follow from this that the kind of wisdom and truth possessed by such men is superior to what learned and cultivated minds have. In fact, learning and cultivation appear to be handicaps in the propagation of faith. And since the propagation of faith is the most important task before man, those who are as "ignorant as babes" have, in the most fundamental virtue, greater strength than men who have addicted themselves to logic and learning. Accordingly, though one shrinks from a bald statement of the conclusion, humble ignorance is far better as a human quality than a cultivated mind. At bottom, this proposition, despite all the difficulties that attend it, has been eminently congenial both to American evangelicalism and to American democracy.

(49) ... all those lonely adventurers whose cumulative mythology caused D. H. Lawrence to say, in one of his harsh, luminous hyperboles, that the essential American soul is "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer."

(62) Moreover, the clergy displayed, especially in the first generation, a weakness to which intellectuals are prone at times in political affairs - that is, they imagined that they might be able to commit an entire civil society to the realization of transcendent moral and religious standards, and that they could maintain within this society a unified and commanding creed.

(111) ... Dwight Moody [post Civil War revivalist, precursor of Billy Sunday] was consistently conservative; the union between the evangelical and the business mind which was to characterize subsequent popular revivalists was, to a great extent, his work. His political views invariably resembled those of the Republican businessmen who supported him, and he was not above making it clear how useful the Gospel was to the propertied interests.

(118-119) The two new notes which are evident in a most striking form in Billy Sunday's rhetoric, the note of toughness and the note of ridicule and denunciation, may be taken as the signal manifestations of a new kind of popular mind. Onxce can trace in Sundy the emergence of what I would call the one-hundred per cent mentality - a mind totally committed to the full range of the dominant popular fatuities and determined that no one shall have the right to challenge them. This type of mentality is a relatively recent synthesis of fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist Americanism, very often with a heavy overlay of severe fundamentalist morality. The one-hundred percenter, who will tolerate no ambiguities, no equivocations, no reservations, and no criticism, considers his kind of committedness an evidence of toughness and masculinity... "I have no interest in a God who does not smite."

(133) The literature of the extreme right also shows a significant continuity in style - indicative of the degree to which the pattern of fundamentalism has become the pattern of militant nationalism. (It was with an appropriate sense of this continuity that Gerald L. K., Smith named his paper _The Cross and the Flag_.)

(147) What was needed was not intellect but character, and here too Jefferson was found wanting: philosophers, the pamphleteer argued, are extremely prone to flattery and avid of repute, and Jefferson's own abilities "have been more directed to the acquirement of literary fame than to the substantial good of his country"... Smith hit upon a device that was to become standard among the critics of intellect in politics - portraying the curiosity of the active mind as too trivial and ridiculous for important affairs... William Loughton Smith: _The Pretnesions of Thomas Jefferson to the Presidency Examined_ (n.p., 1796)... No one wishes to say that he is opposed to "genuine" learning and wisdom but only to an inferior or debased version. Smith thought Jefferson a bogus philosopher, not a "real" one. He had only the external and inferior characteristics of a philosopher, which meant, in politics, "a want of steadiness, a constitutional indecision and versatility, visionary, wild and speculative systems, and various other defective features." Those who remember Adlai Stevenson's campaigns will find in these quotations a familiar ring.

(157) The contests in 1824 and 1828 between Jackson and John Quincy Adams porvided a perfect study in contrasting political ideals. Adams's administration was the test case for the unsuitability of the intellectual termperament for political leadership in early nineteenth-century America. The last President to stadn in the old line of governmetn by gentlemen, Adams became the symbol of the old order and chief victim of the reaction against the learned man. He had studied in Paris, Amsterdam, Leyden, and The Hague, as well as at Harvard; he had occupied Harvard's chair of rhetoric and oratory; he had aspired to write epic poetry; like Jefferson, he was known for his scientific interests; he had been head for many years of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; and as Monroe's Sceretary of State he had a prepared a learned scientific report on systems of weights and measures which is still a classic. Adams believed that if the new replublic failed to use its powers to develop the acts and sciences it would be "hiding in the earth the talent committed to our charge - would be treachery to the most sacred of trusts." It was his hope - as it had been Washington's, Jefferson's, and Madison's - that the federal government would act as the guide and center of a national program of educational and scientific advancement. But in proposing that Washington be developed as a cultural capital, he mobilizeed against himself the popular dislike of centalization.

(159) Adams was ourtdone in every section of the country but New England, in a battle fought unscrupulously on both sides and described as a contest between
John Quincy Adams who can write
And Andrew Jackson who can fight

(186-187) Invoking a well-established preconception of the American male, the politicians argued that culture is impractical and men of culture are ineffectual, that culture is feminine and cultivated men tend to be effeminate. Secretly hungry for office and power themselves, and yet lacking in the requisite understanding of practical necessities, the reformers took out their resentment upon those who had succeeded. They were no better than carping and hypocritical censors of officeholders and power-wielders. They were, as James G. Blaine once put it, "conceited, foolish, vain, without knowledge... of men... They are noisy but not numerous, pharisaical but not practical, ambitious but not wise, pretentious but not powerful."

(194) When he [Theodore Roosevelt] was invited to speak to Harvard undergraduates in 1894, he chose the subject, "The Merit Sustem and Manliness in Politics," and urged his listeners that they be not only "good men but also manly men, that they should not let those who stand for evil have all the virile qualities."

(254-255) The self-made man as a characteristic American type became a conspicuous figure early in the nineteenth century. Appraently the term was first used by Henry Clay in 1832, in a Senate speech on a protective tariff. Denying that the tariff would give rise to a hereditary industrial aristocracy, he maintained, to the contrary, that nothing could be more democratic; it would give further opportunities for men to rise from obscurity to affluence. "In Kentucky, almost every manufactury known to me is in the hands of enterprising and self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor." But the time of Clay's death thirty years later, the type was more recognizable, it was spiritually dominant.

(268) Faith is not a way of reconciling man to his fate: it "puts fight into a man so that he develops a terrific resistance to defeat." [Norman Vincetn Peale]

(308) "A book which is torn and mutilated is abused, but one which is merely read for enjoyment is misused." Mrs. Elson concludes, from an intensive analysis of these readers [primers of the nineteenth century], that "anti-intellectualism is not only not new in American civilization, but that it is thoroughly imbedded in the school books that have been read by generations of pupils since the beginning of the republic."

(320) The United States is the only country in the Wesdtenized world that has put its elementary education almost exclusively in the hands of women and its secondary education largely so. In 1953 this country stood almost alone among the nations of the world in the feminization of its teaching : women constituted ninety-three per cent of its primary teachers and sixty per cent of its secondary teachers. Only one country in Western Europe (Italy, with fifty-two per cent) employed women for more than half of its secondary-school personnel.

(339) The American mind seems extremely vulnerable to the belief that any alleged knowledge which can be expressed in figures is in fact as final and exact as the figures in which it is expressed... the misuse of tests seems to be a recurrent factor in American education.

(407-408) Intellectuals in the twentieth century have thus found themselves engaged in incompatible efforts: they have tried to be good and believing citizens of a democratic society and at the same time to resist the vulgarization of culture which that society constantly produces. It is rare for an American intellectual to confront candidly the unresolvable conflict between the elite character of his own class and his democratic aspirations.

(428) Earlier I observed that it has been largely the function of expertise which has restored the intellectual as a force in American politics. But the pertinent question is whether the intellectual, as expert, can really be an intellectual - whether he does not become simply a mental technician, to use the phrase of H. Stuart Hughes, working at the call of the men who hire him.

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most Democrats--esp younger and college-educated ones--do not at all even know that the vast majority of voters are not college-educated.

teach them. Certainly, success won't teach them, just reinforce the idea that drifting rightward and flailing about without core principles while flipping the bird to the traditional base is cool.

The Democrats didn't change strategy this year, it was the same old same old, just masked by Obama's cool kids popularity. On some levels, I totally get the people who didn't care about coolness but just wanted to freakin' win for once who voted for him back in February, and even early March.

Yes, we'll need a bit of luck for them to learn from this (if they lose), mostly in the form of just a few folks in charge who can reflect on what went wrong without ego. But there's always hope for change, doncha know.

Nothing is more essential than those two faculties. They simply aren't taught in a fundamental way that holds all subjects and arguments to the same rigorous intellectual standards.
You don't educate mathematicians by only teaching them methods without proofs. Likewise, you don't produce skilled programmers by only teaching them high level programming languages--I'm sorry to say that seems to be the norm these days. I also hear of the number of engineers and architects leaving school with a firm grasp of the software they were taught to use and little else.
If students aren't taught proficiency or mastery in the art of thinking then their education is worthless, and they'll accomplish little until they seek those out on their own.

First, you can't beat Hofstadter on this subject.

The impression I have is that Americans see intelligence as an inherited trait, and that a government of the "best and brightest" would inevitably become a hereditary aristocracy, something that we are opposed to deep in our marrow. Americans hold no such reservations against wealth - our belief seems to be that anyone can become rich, but not everyone can be smart. In that sense, wealth appears to be more democratic than knowledge. The belief seems to be that we can study as much as we want, but our knowledge will always be limited by our natural capacity for learning.

One of the lessons Ronald Reagan taught the Republican Party was that Americans are infatuated with style. If you look, talk, and act right, people will be more inclined to trust you on that alone, and will be less likely to look into what you actually stand for. This insight has enabled the GOP to claim the mantle of Jacksonian democracy as their own; they realized that if they acted like salt-of-the-earth Americans, few people would investigate what their actual policies were. Over the years, this has also served to gain support for Republican policies that are destructive to the middle class - the thinking is, "They look and act like me, maybe I should think more like them".

How do we make inroads? It's going to be tough, because a lot of strategies will look like the Democrats are just trying to imitate the Republicans' winning formula. Reviving the unions would be a big step in the right direction. There's also this perception out there that the leading Democrats are all lawyers and college professors - two professions right down there with used-car salesmen in the eyes of the American middle class. Diversifying that image is key to regaining the trust of middle Americans.

...for the rest of us

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/con...

Zolodoco hits on a very good point about critical thinking. Rote learning has taken primacy over critical thinking, though, I hear we're better at critical thinking here in the United States than say Japan, where they are masters of rote learning.

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. It makes a pretty strong argument that rather than creating a super-smart, super-informed army of younger people (defined in the book as the under-30 crowd), the internet and social networking in particular has created a generation that looks only to itself for its knowledge of history (abysmal), politics (ditto), and citizenship (double ditto).

Not so much on how to reverse it, though, except implicitly (eg, the 'rents should spend less time trying to outhip their kids and more time trying to be just regular boring families, or, maybe that whole self-esteem movement thing didn't work out quite as well as we planned), but lots of food for thought.

link (yes, the Amazon page, bc I have to post and run). Oops, except here's an extremely dumbed-down slideshow summary of the book (irony -- not dead). Nos. 6 and 7 the most interesting.

Here's my thought for the day, though: assuming The Dumbest Generation is right (the book that is, not the generation) can stark ignorance finally start working for Democrats rather than for Republicans?