Mastodawn

I'm certainly not the smartest person, but I CAN learn and GROW.

"In 1963 historian Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University published Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. The book won the Pulitzer Prize. It remains one of the most important examinations of American culture ever written. And its central argument was not what most people expect.

Hofstadter was not writing about stupid people. He was writing about resentful ones.

His central finding was that anti-intellectualism in America was never primarily about ignorance. It was about status. Specifically it was about the specific psychological pain of feeling looked down on by people with more education, more credentials, and more cultural authority than you. And the response to that pain was not to close the gap. It was to attack the people on the other side of it.

Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as the resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.

Read that definition carefully. Resentment. Suspicion. Minimization. These are not the responses of people who simply disagree with expert conclusions. These are the responses of people who feel threatened by the existence of expertise itself. People who experience a doctor’s recommendation or a scientist’s finding or a teacher’s lesson not as information but as an implicit judgment about their own worth.

When you feel stupid in the presence of educated people you have two choices. You can do the hard work of becoming less ignorant. Or you can decide that the educated people are the problem.

One of those choices is difficult and humbling and takes years.

The other one takes about thirty seconds on social media."

Why Conservative Men Cannot Spell

Why Conservative Men Who Hate Education Cannot Spell

Lucas Bean Daily

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Wm.son Jun 19

2/2

The modern conservative war on education is not a policy disagreement. It is Hofstadter’s anti-intellectualism running at industrial scale with a political party behind it and a media ecosystem amplifying it.

Pew Research found that 59 percent of Republicans believe colleges and universities are negatively impacting the country. Not specific colleges. Not specific programs. Universities as a category. The entire project of higher education as a net negative on American life.

Think about what that means. The same political movement that tells working class Americans they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps is simultaneously telling them that the institutions best positioned to help them do that are the enemy.

Hofstadter, R. (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Knopf.

Hofstadter, R. (1965). The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Knopf.

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Emily Vale, Gendermancer Jun 19

@Sfwmson my experience of growing up in the Midwest among a mostly conservative populace pretty much bears this out exactly. I remember my grandfather ranting about colleges and universities for a bit, then he paused for a few seconds, and spat out the word "freethinkers," like it was some kind of curse.