Todd Gitlin comes closest to capturing the helpless alarm I feel at American disdain for intelligence, and the continual affront to a thinking person that comes with living in such an environment. This essay, The Renaissance of Anti-Intellectualism, is a thoughtful extension of the trends discerned in Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, and their culmination in the ascendency of Duh-bya. I spent the whole interminable campaign, as my social circle and readers of FmH know, sputtering ineffectually about how the electorate had to see how stupid the man is, only too late coming to realize that they did, and love him for it.

But the Bushes are men of social credentials who went to the right

schools and passed through them without any detectable mark.

They represent aristocracy with a populist gloss, borrowing what

they can from the evangelical revival, siding with business and its

distaste for time-wasting mind work, holding intellectual talent in

contempt from both above and below. Pleasant enough for the

pundits, they have been able to count on a surplus of populist

ressentiment. That Bush fils, country-club Republican, could gain

stature (and keep a straight face) in his presidential campaign

for proposing an “education presidency” and denouncing an

“education recession” tells us something about the closing of the

American mind that Allan Bloom did not dream of. The Chronicle of Higher Education [via wood s lot]