Dumbing down America

What are the markers of anti-intellectualism? Not even Hofstadter worked that answer out fully, since it includes questions of elitism (both as a magnet of resentment and as an attitude held by some intellectuals), overlaps with questions of cultural ignorance (related but not interchangeable) and, in the postwar period particularly, was wrapped up with anti-Communist fervor (because socialist or communist ideas were attractive to many intellectuals at the time).

Taking her cue from William Jennings Bryan, who railed against a "scientific soviet" that was "attempting to dictate what shall be taught in our schools, and, in doing so, to mold the religion of the nation," Jacoby identifies three enduring features of anti-intellectualism: the portrayal of experts as alien to the American polity; viewing the educated minority as an overclass bent on imposing its views; and identifying this class as an enemy of religion. She asserts that two anti-rationalist components remain "largely unchanged since the 1890s": treating higher learning as an opponent of religion and accepting pseudoscience "which Americans on both the left and the right continue to imbibe as a means of rendering their social theories impervious to evidence-based challenges."

The historicism in "The Age of American Unreason" drags its focus backward more often than not, which is effective in explaining the origin and continuity of ideas but stands out as a distinct liability whenever Jacoby deploys sharp insight on our present straits. She observes, for example: "Unlike its predecessor in the twenties, the current anti-rationalist movement has been politicized from the bottom up and the top down, from school boards in small towns to the corridors of power in Washington." That statement comes in a discussion of intelligent design -- creationism by another name -- and one can see the candle burning at both ends. The journalist Bill Moyers, often attacked for the pro-science, pro-rationalist content of his television programs, may have the best line here, quoted by Jacoby from a speech he delivered about Revelations-based "end time" beliefs: "One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal."