Anti-Intellectualism: A Republican Winning Strategy?

Charles, a Liberal Outposts reader from Virginia, wants to know why Michelle Bachman this week denigrated President Obama, as well as her fellow Republican primary opponent Newt Gingrich, by calling them "professorial." When did being a professor become a liability in this country, he asks, and why is anti-intellectualism such a hot-button political score?

Thanks, Charles. As the spouse of a popular professor at the second largest public university in the nation, University of Central Florida, I've often pondered this issue. I and my lovely wife, a professor of social work, witnessed the 2008 Republican presidential campaign attacks on Mr. Obama's community organizing credentials with great dismay. Now, as your questions suggest, it appears the 2012 Republican presidential candidates are doubling down on their blatant tactic of discrediting credentials by vilifying the most scholarly among us as being dangerously smart.

Charles, let me pose a question: Why is anyone surprised by this anti-intellectual attack mode? Whenever a series of unfortunate events in America has tested our faith in our country's cherished institutions, Republicans have used the emotional bludgeons of religion, fear, and bigotry to exploit voter uncertainty and prejudices for their own power-grabbing gain. Anti-intellectualism is just one more effective arrow in their political quiver being used to target an increasingly bifurcated voting public.

With the exception of Mr. Gingrich's scholarly past, the Republicans running to replace Mr. Obama --  who was editor of the Harvard Law Review and taught Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago -- have decided to redefine the word "intellectual" into a generic slur. That's why it was okay for Hermann Cain to boast of not knowing the name of the leader of Uzbekistan. Why it was not unexpected when Rick Perry's idea of criticizing Mr. Obama's diplomacy abroad was to accuse him of trying to outsmart everyone else in the room. Why no one was surprised when Sarah Palin laughed off her erroneous description of the midnight ride of Paul Revere and made up the word "repudiate." Why, despite our current stubborn unemployment figures, not a single Republican candidate for president could raise his or her hand during one debate in support of a proposed $10 of spending cuts for every $1 of tax increases to address our long-term budget deficit.

Why do Republicans run away from smart public policy in favor of dumb-and-dumber rhetoric? Ironically, it has to do with intellectual and political dishonesty. The GOP discredits and mocks intellectual thought as a matter of political expediency. They do it because it has worked in the past and they believe it can work again.

For one depiction of this strategy, allow me to introduce the observations of my liberal and favorite intellectual hero, the Nobel Laureate economist and The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In August 2008 he wrote:

"… Know-nothingism -- the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there's something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise -- has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party's de facto slogan has become: 'Real men don't think things through.'"

This tendency by the GOP to promote emotive, black-and-white pronouncements in leu of the nuanced proposals of our more thoughtful Democrats works because enough voters buy into it. It's uncomplicated. Unlike intellectuals, who ask questions and examine issues to discover facts hidden below the surface, today's anti-intellectual conservatives actually mock such rigor. By defining today's complex problems in the simplest terms, Republicans are taking advantage of today's polarized populous by interpreting any evidence contradicting their version of reality as bogus and by attacking the Democratic messengers, many of whom happen to hold advanced degrees from America's premier seats of higher learning.

Of course, many Republicans in pursuit of Mr. Obama's job are no dummies. They, in fact, sometimes are the products of those same Ivy League universities (George W. Bush was a Yalie, after all). So the tactic of identity politics -- "aw, shucks, I'm just as undereducated as you" -- by conservatives is a ruse meant to play on the anti-elitist, anti-intellectual attitude among certain voting blocks. It's the politics of resentment, allowing Republicans who favor tax breaks for the wealthiest 1 percent to curry favor with lower and middle-class voters whose tendency is to distrust their better-educated brethren.

The dishonesty in the Republican approach today and their reasons for pursuing it has never been clearer. Contempt for elites and thoughtful policy discussions in the 2012 election cycle is allowing Republicans to avoid being blamed for the 2008 recession, and, in fact, shift the blame onto the Obama administration. Never mind that their past policies failures (Taft-Hartley, trickle-down, job-killing NAFTA, tax breaks for the wealthy) promoted the vast and growing divide between economic haves and have-nots that is powering the Occupy movement. Never mind that their campaigns are backed by billionaire oil companies like the elitist, opera-loving Koch brothers, all the major banks that were bailed out to the tune of $700 billion by the Bush/Cheney administration, and well-connected pro-corporate business organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce. Never mind that if elected president, a Republican in the White House will join a Tea Party putsch on the federal programs most cherished by the very Americans whose support they seek -- Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment benefits -- not to mention the departments of Commerce, Education, and, uh, that other one Mr. Perry wants to kill if he can remember it.

Republicans, then, are acting totally in character by marshaling an anti-intellectual stance for their 2012 campaigns. They are depending on the electorate's growing frustration with power elites -- Obama, Congress, banks, corporations -- to make a case for their election that is simplistic (flat tax, 9-9-9, double electrified fence on the Mexican boarder), emotion-driven, and often at odds with provable facts.

Over the course of five decades, Republican policies have led America into what can rightly be called a cul-de-sac of despair. Today, their Fox News and Limbaugh-driven mantra has made the politics of resentment a house guest who never leaves. Their deceitful campaigns' success a year from now depends almost entirely on a crass manipulation of reality, an ability to rationalize their party's sordid policy record, and their ability to bilk votes from citizens who, for reason left for another post, regard knowledge with suspicion and liberals as "not like us." It is no wonder they've gone anti-intellectual. Their political lives depend upon it.