Anti-Intellectualism on the Right

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.

The state of the GOP is not good.

Bruce Bartlett last year at TNR:

Although Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan also adopted anti-intellectualism as a political strategy, for them it was just a cynical way to cater to widespread distrust of expertise and learning as a brand of elitism. As president, they routinely deferred to experts, scientists, and other intellectuals in developing and implementing their policies. Nixon famously reached out to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a professor of government at Harvard and well-known Democrat, to work for him in the White House. According to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, he used the columnist George Will, who studied at Oxford and holds a Ph.D. in politics from Princeton, as a sort of emissary to the intellectual community. And George W. Bush had as his vice president Dick Cheney, a man who had pursued a doctorate in political science at the University of Wisconsin, where his wife, Lynne, got a Ph.D. in British literature.

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The problem is that adopting faux populism and anti-intellectualism for purely political purposes eventually leads practitioners to take their own rhetoric literally and denigrate expertise as something to be distrusted per se. This is why the great conservative philosopher Russell Kirk rejected populist rhetoric as a path for conservative victory, even though the populist message might overlap with the conservative program to some extent. As he explained in a 1988 lecture at the Heritage Foundation:

Populism is a revolt against the Smart Guys. I am very ready to confess that the present Smart Guys, as represented by the dominant mentality of the Academy and of what [sociologists Peter and Brigitte Berger] call the Knowledge Class today, are insufficiently endowed with right reason and moral imagination. But it would not be an improvement to supplant them by persons of thoroughgoing ignorance and incompetence.

In a forthcoming article in Public Opinion Quarterly, political scientist Eric Merkley explains how populism and anti-intellectualism lend themselves naturally to the rejection of scientific expertise. As Republicans have tied themselves to the pseudo-populist Tea Party movement over the last decade, as well as to evangelicals and other fundamentalist Christians, their trust in scientific expertise has fallen. According to a 2019 article in Public Opinion Quarterly, in 1973 more Republicans had a great deal of trust in scientists than did Democrats (41 percent of the former, 35 percent of the latter). But by 2016, those percentages had reversed. The latest data from Pew show that 43 percent of Democrats have a great deal confidence in scientists to act in the best interests of the public, while only 27 percent of Republicans do. 

 

a depressingly accurate account of the deterioration if not eradication of intellectualism on the right. It truly is the know-nothing party. https://t.co/xmiDlFwq5t

— Jennifer 'pro-voting' Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) March 24, 2021

Newt: Anti-Intellectual or Professorial?

CNN interview, February 20, 1995:

BOB FRANKEN: Oftentimes people say that your political speeches are really Professor Newt lecturing to a larger audience.

Rep. NEWT GINGRICH: They are. They are. Very deliberately so. I am the most seriously professorial politician since Woodrow Wilson. I believe the purpose of my speeches is didactic. They're supposed to be educational.

BOB FRANKEN: So you're educating your peers, your political peers?

Rep. NEWT GINGRICH: The citizenry.

Marc Fisher quotes Gingrich at The Washington Post:

“I’m pretty happy being anti-intellectual,” he said. “We have a lot of academics and intellectuals in this country who are just wrong.

GOP Wonks and Pols

At Politico, Jonathan Martin writes:

Almost daily, there is a fresh op-ed or magazine piece from the class of commentators and policy intellectuals urging Republicans to show a little intellectual leg and offer some daring and innovation beyond the old standbys of cutting income taxes and spending. It’s not that the eggheads are urging moderation — it’s more like relevance. The standard plea: The GOP will rebound only when it communicates to working-class and middle-class voters how its ideas will improve their lives.

But there is virtually no evidence that these impassioned appeals for change are being listened to by the audience that matters — Republican elected officials. With few exceptions, most of the GOP leadership in Washington is following a business-as-usual strategy. The language and tactics being used in this winter’s battles with President Barack Obama are tried-and-true Republican maxims that date back to the Reagan era or before. And that, say the wonks, spells political danger and more electoral decline.
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“We had a false dawn from the 2010 midterm election,” said [former Bush aide Peter] Wehner, now a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “It reinforced this belief from some people that dusting off the old Reagan playbook was the way to go, that we should be more ideological and concentrate more on cutting back government at the expense of other issues. That’s not unreasonable, but I think it was wrong.”
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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor delivered a speech to the American Enterprise Institute last month touching on such topics as jobs training, overtime flexibility and education reform; and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has savaged the Washington GOP’s “obsession with government bookkeeping.”

But even these speeches are heavy on recycled conservative ideas (school vouchers in Cantor’s case; a balanced budget amendment is a Jindal favorite).

“They are an example of what’s both encouraging and discouraging,” said Wehner of Cantor and Jindal. “Their language is good, but the policy they’re proposing is old wine in new wineskin.”