Tag Archives: Anti-intellectualism

The Intellectual Decline of the Presidency

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Bush is my Hero

John McWhorter on Elvin Lim’s The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush:

“…[This] is not one more rant about the limited cognitive abilities of George W. Bush but a brisk, methodical deconstruction of ‘the relentless simplification of presidential rhetoric in the last two centuries and the increasing substitution of arguments with applause-rendering platitudes, partisan punch lines and emotional and human interest appeals.’ “

via FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life

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On Stupidity

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“The anti-intellectual legacy [Richard Hofstadter first] described has often been used by the political right — since at least the McCarthy era — to label any complication of the usual pieties of patriotism, religion, and capitalism as subversive, dangerous, and un-American. And, one might add, the left has its own mirror-image dogmas.

Now, in the post-9/11 era, American anti-intellectualism has grown more powerful, pervasive, and dangerous than at any time in our history, and we have a duty — particularly as educators — to foster intelligence as a moral obligation.

Or at least that is the urgent selling point of a cartload of books published in the past several months.” — William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

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