"Liberty, according to my metaphysics is a self-determining power in an intellectual agent. It implies thought and choice and power." -- John Adams
 |
| Clay Bennett |
There's a war on intellectualism. The right shoves us liberals ALL into the "intellectual" box. And not only that, they portray the intellectual elite as disdainful of the "common man." I just don't get it. I am the most liberalish, snowflakey, leftist there is, and how they portray us all as Socrates-reading, Latin-fluent, escargot-and-champagne-eating blue bloods beating down a truck driver just doesn't resonate with me.
Anti-intellectualism is a trademark of totalitarianism, and its uprising is concerning in the face of the specter of fascism that we have. Back in June, I outlined the hallmarks of fascism one by one, with examples of fascist behavior from the Apricot Pol Pot. The one trait I deferred giving evidence about was "Disdain for Intellectuals." Now I give the subject a little more attention.
According to Wikipedia, anti-intellectualism is, "hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectualism commonly expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy, and the dismissal of art, literature, and science as impractical and even contemptible human pursuits. Anti-intellectuals present themselves and are perceived as champions of common folk—populists against political and academic elitism—and tend to see educated people as a status class detached from the concerns of most people, and feel that intellectuals dominate political discourse and control higher education."
Anti-intellectualism had perplexed me. It hadn't been on my radar before, but now it's everywhere. I have intelligent, kind friends on the right, who share items that ring of the belief that the "intellectual elite" are bad and are going to ruin the country.
This was one.
The Real Reason They Hate Trump by David Gelernter. Dr. Gelernter has B.A. and MA from uber-elite Yale. He studied ancient Hebrew literature and has a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He is a professor of Computer Science at Yale. Smart guy, highly educated. He is a writer, philosopher, artist. He's really intelligent; he's one of the pioneering computer engineers of the 20th century. A real intellectual, yes? No. He is one of the most fervent anti-intellectuals in the country. He has railed often against academics and the intellectual elite, including in his book, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled Our Culture (and Ushered In the Obamacrats).
This essay recently appeared in the Wall Street Journal (here is link to the op/ed on Outline, where you can read the whole essay without subscribing to WSJ), where he wrote, "The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans." (By the way, in the same essay, this anti-intellectualist equated U.S. foreign policy to what "Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared." Intellectual much, Mr. Gelernter?)
And then I ran into this video, posted by a friend on Facebook. It's another anti-intellectual rant, this time by a self-described Blue Collar guy, but this one is mostly superlatives and ad hominem attacks outlining "deep psychological triggers" that we libtards, who are "finally free of the jocks and cheerleaders that ran our high school," suffer in the face of having Dumb Don as President*. The reasoning is really hard to follow. My favorite line about why we intellectual elite hate 45 is when he says that it's because Donny is "no worse than anybody else. He just refuses to pretend that he's any better. Of course he constantly brags about being better, but this just makes him look worse, which proves that he doesn't care about looking like he's any better."
Wow. What linguistic gymnastics it took to get that thought into a set of sentences!
Though it is new to me, disdain for the intellectual is not new among the right. It turns out that anti-intellectualism is at best, a tactic for the right to connect with the common man and at worst, a propaganda weapon by dictators to demonize thinkers and people of reason.
Looking back, it's now obvious that it was a tactic used by the conservatives in America to folksy-up and dumb-down some actual elites, like Ronald Reagan and George W Bush.
Reagan, in a 1964 speech supporting Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, said, "This is the issue of this election: whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves."
And most of us remember W in a commencement speech, talking about his days at Yale. Awwww, yeah, he's just a dum-dum, not at all a Yale elite who gained admittance due to legacy status.
But now, we have TЯUMP. He is not faking stupidity (or should I say facking stupidity?). He is stupid, and proud of it. And he's also fascist to boot. The war on intellectuals from his camp is front and center today, and it's a constant rallying cry. This new breed of anti-intellectuals is contemptuous of the thinkers on the left and implies that all of us on the left are indeed an evil that will destroy America. They are using anti-intellectualism as a propaganda tool.
"Intellectual elite" doesn't describe me, or my friends, most of whom are on the left fringes. We are typical working folks. Yes, many of us have educations, but most of us aren't in the ivory tower of academia, sitting at our desks plotting ways to overthrow the right (OK, we are doing that, but we're not in the ivory tower--we're out on the streets!). But why is intellectualism bad? It's true that education helps to promote liberal ideas, because an education promotes reasoning, problem-solving, science, and critical thought.
..........OOOooooooh! Yeah. OK. I just described the Right's worst enemy. Knowledge. Critical thought. The search for truth. Making judgements based on evidence. On merit. Okay, okay, I'm getting it now.
And their other argument. That we somehow all hate all blue-collar workers, that we look down on the common man. What the heck? Look up the definition of "liberal" you silly anti-intellectuals! Liberals by definition want to help blue-collar workers by organizing unions; increasing minimum wage; getting them healthcare; providing federal assistance; gaining the tax breaks that they, and not the 1%, deserve; and by protecting their civil liberties. But the lie that the left is somehow out to get them helps to rally them.
Why are "intellectuals" like me bad? I do not hate or fear blue-collar workers. I don't even think they are all--or even mostly-- conservatives. I don't think uneducated people are bad. I do think willfully ignorant (aka stupid) people are bad, ones like Individual-1. So why do they think "intellectuals" like me are evil?
The right likes to point out that education is evil because it makes people more liberal. And they're not wrong. Engaging in critical thought naturally leads one to progressive ideas. FiveThirtyEight found that education, more than income, was the better predictor of who would vote for SCROTUS. And Pew found that there is a widening ideological gap when there is more education.
The educated left is evil simply because we have educations! We are critical thinkers. We search for the truth. We question authority. And the "intellectuals" who are the true ivory-tower academics have the job of finding that truth through science and critical thought, and to disseminate information and encourage further critical thought. All of this is antithetical (look at her and her $10 words!) to the mission of many on the right, especially the far-right. The far right wants their minions to make up their minds about the facts based on what they assert the facts to be, to unquestionably follow, to distrust the truth, and to stay weak and scared. The far-right is full of hatred for the truth about climate change, gun violence, and equal protection under the law.
The left's best leaders have been intellectuals, people like John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama. If Obama was an intellectual, intellectuals must be bad!
Totalitarianism depends on anti-intellectualism to quash dissent, and it has been true through the ages, from Stalin to the Nazis, to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to Mao. This is where anti-intellectualism is at its worst: when it is used to intimidate, harass, and foster hate and intolerance while suppressing dissent.
And so today some on the right are acting out against the educated and the educators. We're entering an era of particularly nasty and dangerous attitudes and behaviors toward intellectuals. The right has websites like "Professor Watchlist," run by the far-right organization Turning Point USA, a decidedly odious group. The watch list is designed to target "liberal" professors. And this kind of targeting can be dangerous. This professor of psychology at the University of North Georgia was severely cyber-harassed, and it went on an on. It's a sobering read. Here's a thorough essay and interview from Salon that lists several other right-wing attacks on academics.
The current fascist government is so disdainful of education that it is trying to make it harder for people to get an education while at the same time making education available only to the financial elite. Betsy DeVos, the non-educator Secretary of Education, is ironically making education even more elite by defunding public schools and giving breaks to private schools, all while stripping civil rights from at-risk students, and at the same time making higher education more difficult to achieve by reversing student loan protections.
Trump's base is largely uneducated, but not necessarily stupid. Unfortunately, they've fallen for his lies that he will help them, when in reality he will make their problems worse. He brags about not being able to read and that he "loves the poorly educated." They love him back, but don't understand that he and his policies are actually dangerous to them.
The saving grace: The voting populace is becoming more liberal, more diverse, as well as younger and more educated. The Republican party is more white, older, and less educated. Their numbers are shrinking. So I predict that the "power" that the anti-intellectuals have will diminish. We can more readily do the work to truly help the problems that the poor and uneducated suffer. And we can beat back the fascist tendencies. We've already begun, by electing the representatives that we did for the new Congress. With them, we will fight for critical thought and the search for the truth.
And then we can begin to fight the real enemy of the people. The real enemy isn't the intellectual elite. Our enemies are fascism itself and the financial elite. We've had warnings about impeding fascism from many sources. And the 1% have infiltrated our government, when corporations have been given status as people and poured money into the pockets of those who are supposed to be representing us. Those are the ones who profit from ignorance, distrust, fear, hatred, and unquestioning acquiescence. They are the real enemy of the people.
 |
| Tom Toles |
No comments:
Post a Comment