Why Americans Are Anti Intellectual - Road to the Middle Class

“WHY IS the US so anti-intellectual?” asked a Kerry-voting friend a month after the recent presidential election. “Don’t answer right now, but I’d like to hear your response.”

It’s right for Kerry supporters to be asking a question or two now that they are emerging from denial. They might learn something. They might learn why the American people just aren’t too enamored of America’s educated, intellectual elite these days. But why should this be? Why should Americans reject the people who have done so much for them, bringing them public schools, women’s suffrage, labor laws, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, environmental protection, civil rights for blacks, women, gays, consumers, and support for the traditionally marginalized?

The answer is that the experience of living under the rule of America’s enlightened elite has not been quite the bed of roses that liberal Whig history likes to portray. The governance of America’s intellectual elite has been good for the elite, that is for sure. But it has not always been good for the rest of us. Let us take a look at a few examples.

The jewel in the crown of intellectual America is supposed to be the common school system that was enacted in the 1840s. Yet before Horace Mann had returned glowing from his tour of Prussian schools Americans were already about 90 percent literate. Almost everyone got at least 3-4 years of schooling in the mixture of academies, urban schools, and rural “old-field” schools that flourished in the early nineteenth century. In those days parents could select the school of their choice. Today, after a century and a half of schooling directed by the intellectual elite, average parents have little or no choice in schooling for their children. And about 30 percent of Americans have trouble reading a bus schedule. Should they be grateful for this?

About 70 years ago the intellectual elite grandly presented the American people with Social Security, a pay-as-you-go system in which beneficiaries have no property rights. But college professors, teachers, and many government employees enjoy fully funded retirement programs that are legally the property of the beneficiaries. Should the American people be grateful for this?

Let’s talk about crime. The intellectual elite told us that crime was a result of “root causes” such as poverty and lack of education. We shouldn’t blame the underprivileged youth that committed the crimes and just lock them up, for incarceration only dealt with symptoms. Only a program that attacked the root causes could reduce crime. In England, of course, they went a step further and actually convicted householders of the crime of resisting burglars. It has made householders “confused” and burglars “confident” according to the London Daily Telegraph. In New York, in the teeth of opposition from the intellectual class, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bratton tried the “broken window” policy proposed by neoconservative thinkers. They arrested young punks for public drinking, loitering, and turnstile-jumping. And crime rates went down. Today in New York, criminals feel “confused” and upright citizens feel “confident” about crime. And the dirty little secret is that 6 percent of men commit over 50 percent of crimes. Lock up the 6 percent, and the crime rate will plummet. Should the American people elect the candidate of the intellectual elite to power after the success of this little social experiment?

Then there’s the family. To free women from servitude to unwanted children and unhappy marriages, our intellectual elites have championed unrestricted abortion and no-fault divorce. They wanted women to have the right to live public lives and enjoy fulfilling creative careers just like men. Today American children yearn for the brothers and sisters they will never have, and they live in terror of their parents splitting up. But is the “creativity” of fulfilling work really a greater good than the act of creation and raising a family? Many Americans don’t think so. As David Brooks has written, many natalists and Patio-men have fled the cities and their elite mores for the ex-urbs where they can have big families and get them out of the nest before the intellectual elite notices. Should they be grateful that they had to hide in the boondocks to have the right to create the environment they wanted for their children?

Nobody doubts that our intellectual elites are highly evolved, profoundly tolerant of diversity, and environmentally sensitive. Understandably, they have used their cultural and political power to bring their concerns to the fore, concerns that are good and noble. But other Americans are not particularly attracted to their lofty goals. Most Americans are fully challenged by keeping a job, finding a home in a nice safe neighborhood, paying the mortgage, and finding a good school for the kids. That’s why they once voted for an “amiable dunce” and now for President Moron.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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