Some books written decades ago return to us, with a renewed relevance, in critical times. Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of 1964 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is one. The eminent American historian, who taught at Columbia University in the 1950s and 60s, analyzed a strain in American culture that can help us understand some of the underpinnings of Donald Trump’s assaults on higher education, intellectuals, culture, and free speech. Anti-intellectualism is more than a descriptive term, it’s a concept that Hofstadter developed having studied the roots of the “national disrespect of the mind.” His study was prompted by the virulent assaults on intellectuals, liberalism, and higher education unleashed by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s in his tyrannous, anti-communist crusade, in which he claimed “commies” were infiltrating the government (even President Eisenhower was a suspect).
Hofstadter traced anti-intellectualism to the following sources: 1) evangelical religion with its disdain for modernity, science, and rational thought, 2) pioneer individualism with its libertarian worship of practical skills and anti-institutionalism, and 3) businessman culture grounded in the practical life in pursuit of wealth and materialism. These strains have aligned primarily with the attitudes and political behavior of American conservatism and much of the Republican Party of the past hundred years.
In this world-view academics are seen as “anemic, priggish, effeminate;” “Harvard professors” as “twisted-thinking intellectuals”; Elite universities are the breeding grounds for the “enemy from within,” and “rotten to the core.” Similar rhetoric was spewed by conservative legislators at the Congressional anti-Semitism hearings in December 2023 when they accused Harvard, Penn, and MIT of being “illiberal sewers of bigotry,” “infected by moral rot,” and devoid of “Bible literacy.” Going after liberals in the ‘50s was the right wing’s response to the New Deal, and McCarthy’s “bullying and conspiracy theories” were welcomed by a segment of America because they satisfied a “craving for revenge against intellectual elites”—especially those new experts of the administrative state. Even though New Deal policies helped poor and rural populations, hostility toward intellectuals and East Coast Ivy Leaguers ran deep.
Trump’s weaponization of anti-Semitism and DEI panic to justify massive federal budget cuts do not mask his real goal: the destruction of knowledge producing institutions, critical thinking, free intellectual inquiry which are threats to his authoritarian efforts to destroy the rule of law and the Constitution. It is unprecedented. In his first months, President Trump’s assaults on universities, especially Harvard and Columbia, the Smithsonian museums, Library of Congress, NEA and NEH, Kennedy Center; the termination of the Department of Education, efforts to censor the press, media, and law firms; censoring facts about American history from slavery to climate science from the web sites of the EPA, NEA, NIH, Smithsonian, and banning books at the US military academy libraries make it clear that what Hofstadter saw as a malignant manifestation of embittered scapegoat hunting populist strains in our culture has now emerged with unprecedented political ferocity. This President’s disdain for critical thinking is tied to an ideological agenda.
