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Ever since the presidential election, it's been hard to
avoid reading about what it all means,
and much of
that commentary, at least from liberals, alleges that the
Bush victory, along with increased Republican control of
Congress, represents yet another spate of
anti-intellectualism
in this country.
This seems odd, given that Bush is a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, two dens of intellectualism, and that he devoted considerable attention to education when he was governor of Texas and during his first term in the White House.
Further, in recent years the GOP has boasted that it was
the party of ideas.
Two of its leading lights in the
1990s, Georgia Rep. Newt Gingrich and Texas Sen. Phil
Gramm, had been college teachers.
In politics, intellectualism goes in and out of fashion.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower might have warned us about
the military-industrial complex,
but he wasn't
nearly as witty as the man he twice defeated for the
presidency, Adlai E. Stevenson.
Some intellectuals of the era found Eisenhower wanting, and as evidence they pointed to his fondness for Zane Grey westerns. They admired his successor, John F. Kennedy, and pointed to his fondness for Ian Fleming spy thrillers.
Having read both Grey and Fleming, I can't see either
novelist as offering much more than entertainment -- the
characters are caricatures and the plots are predictable.
Why one is more intellectual
than the other escapes
me.
But it was fashionable to be intellectual then, and Kennedy constructed an appropriate public persona. He flaunted his ghost-written books, and thus this fellow who loved Broadway show tunes appeared to cherish Bach concertos.
In more recent years, Americans have preferred the
regular guy
presidency, which explains why George
Bush the Elder, a Connecticut blue-blood if there ever was
one, let it be known that he liked pork rinds and the Oak
Ridge Boys.
If you look at American political history, it's little wonder that anti-intellectualism appears at intervals. Consider some of the theories that intellectuals have proposed.
Go back to the 1890s, and there was Social Darwinism:
survival of the fittest
should be applied to human
society, and therefore it was right for the strong to prey
on the weak. Government would be disturbing the natural
order if it intervened on behalf of the weak, or even
allowed the weak to organize to gain strength.
Should we be surprised that the anti-intellectual
Populist Party arose to combat this? And was it
anti-intellectualism
or actually people of modest
means organizing to protect themselves from rapacious
millionaires and their experts who were happy to endorse
any theory that justified greed?
A related intellectual fad was influential in the 1920s
and 30s -- eugenics. The idea was to improve the national
character by selective breeding, and this led to everything
from immigration restrictions (inferior
types from
southern Europe and Asia were excluded in favor of their
betters from northern Europe) to compulsory sterilization
in many American states.
Opponents were criticized as being anti-science
or anti-intellectual,
yet America is supposed to be
a place where all men are created equal
and deserve
equal protection of the laws.
Eugenics eventually
fell into disfavor because some German intellectuals used
it to justify Nazi genocide.
In more recent times, very few dubious undertakings
enjoyed more intellectual support that the Vietnam War in
1964. President Lyndon B. Johnson may have had his silent
doubts as the escalation began, but certain intellectuals
of the day, often called the best and the brightest,
were all for it.
They justified it on the basis of the now-discredited
Domino Theory.
Among them were Walt Whitman Rostow,
holder of a Ph.D. from Yale who had taught at Cambridge,
and McGeorge Bundy, former dean of the faculty at
Harvard.
Now, I don't think that this year's election represented
a triumph of anti-intellectualism.
But even if it
did, is that really a problem, considering some of the
intellectual fads and currents of the past century or
so?
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