If there’s one thing that Americans can’t stand, it’s the idea that someone is better that us. If a neighbor kid has better toys, we spin it that he’s “spoiled”. If a classmate gets better grades, we miss no opportunity to emphasize his lack of physical prowess or unstylish grooming habits.
In fact, middle and high school culture maintains a whole value system built around turning the tables on those who would otherwise be high on the pecking order.
I think something similar culture of resentment towards people who “think they’re better than you” has developed in the adult world that politicians and pundits on the right have been able to exploit. Calling someone an “elite” should be a compliment since it implies they’re a person of high caliber. But elitism often refers to the attitude displayed by the upper economic classes that they are entitled to greater privilege and authority on society.
The natural and typically American resentment of this attitude has been hijacked and used against people like journalists, scientists, and educators because they often portray the world in ways conservatives would rather not see it portrayed. “Don’t listen to them. They’re bad people because they think they’re better than you”.
True to some degree, but you hear a lot less ranting that most intellectuals are Jews nowadays, surely because so many on the right have embraced both a) the cause of Israel and b) the neocon doctrine of Kristol, Strauss, and people with similar-sounding surnames.
I know what you are saying. But both sides do it. On the right, it called being an evangelical or whatever. They want you to be SAVED! The common ground is that left or right, there is the real urge, the compulsion, to help you. And by help you, we all mean that we think you should see things our way.
The libs want you to stop smoking and start eating healthy. How DARE they?
Conservatives don’t want you to have sex for fuck’s sake!
Then they’re not all one big camp, are they? There’s a lot of diversity among non-conservatives. Conservatives can’t inoculate themselves from all criticism by pointing to one issue that some of their opponents are arguably wrong about, because most of them probably don’t share that view but have plenty of arguments about things that conservatives are wrong about.
Wesley said: “From the wikipedia article it said there were basically 3 motives for anti-intellectualism. Populism, authoritarian politics and religion.”
Which, for starters, is not true. The Wikipedia articles lists those as the three sources of anti-intellectualism. A source is a place where a certain way of thinking begins, and thus quite different from a motive, which is something that causes an individual to behave a certain way.
More importantly, though, Wikipedia’s list of “sources of anti-intellectualism” is laughable. As we can see from this thread, it’s easy to name a great many sources of anti-intellectualism not listed on the Wikipedia page. Further, the discussion of “religion, authoritarian politics, and populism” on the Wikipedia page looks like it was written by a seventh grader. It probably was.
That was derogatory towards you and a lot of other southerners, so I’m sorry. My point was that Clinton was (to my understanding) encouraged not to act too intellectual.
I do think there is a political and cultural battle between the south/midwest and the coasts (the west coast and the northeast coast). And my impression has been that intellectualism can be derided as a sign of ‘ivory tower liberalism from the coasts’ unlike the ‘genuine, common sense’ of the midwest and south. And I felt Clinton was going to be attacked for his intellect in these regions for it.
Either way, not everyone from the south/midwest is dumb and not everyone from the coasts is an intellectual.