Why Anti-Intellectualism Still Haunts American Politics
Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book produces as accurate reflection of 2025’s political climate as it did in 1962.
It’s uncommon for a book on American politics from the 1960s to hold up so well in 2025. Each political era is unqiue, but Anti-Intellectualism in American Life still explains the disdain American politics has for intellectuals that social media has highlighted and exploited so effectively.
Richard Hofstadter won a Pulitzer Prize for this book in 1964. It’s a masterful exploration of the intellectual trends that exclude intellectuals from areas where they may be the most useful. Donald Trump’s demonizing of “elites” who are hiding ideas and programs from ordinary Americans draws on a long history of anti-intellectualism that has waxed and waned throughout American history.
Early on, Hofstadter points out that anti-intellectuals aren’t unintelligent people:
“Quite the contrary: just as the most effective enemy of the educated man may be the half-educated man, so the leading anti-intellectuals are usually men deeply engaged with ideas, often obsessively engaged with this or that outworn or rejected idea.”
Anti-intellectuals actually have quite a bit in common with the intellectuals they spread suspicion about. They have ideas that they peddle and become enamored with. But that can be exactly where the danger lies:
“He [the intellectual] may live for ideas…but something must prevent him from living for one idea, from becoming obsessive or grotesque…When one’s concern for ideas, no matter how dedicated and sincere, reduces them to the service of some central limited preconception or some wholly external end, intellect gets swallowed by fanaticism. If there is anything more dangerous to the life of the mind than having no independent commitment to ideas, it is having an excess of commitment to some special and constricting idea.”
Intellectuals should be able to understand the limits of ideas as well as their merits. Anti-intellectuals often become so obsessed with a single idea that it subsumes all others. When the consequences of that singular idea become clear, it’s too late for intellectuals to point out the flaws with a narrowly targeted line of logic.
One example is a single-minded obsession that captured the 1950s: the hunt for communists
Anti-Communist Inquisitors
When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Russian government in 1917, the world’s democracies took notice. They became intensely worried about the stability of their own governments. Ignoring the Russian royal family’s downfall and the unique political weaknesses of the Russian monarchy, the world’s democracies made communism one of the most terrifying forces in politics.
While there were communists in many countries, the parties failed to gain significant traction in the United States. That did not stop Joseph McCarthy from launching the Red Scare and ruining victims’ lives by smearing them as communists or fellow-travellers.
Inquisitors in the style of McCarthy still organized after his downfall. The John Birch Society propagated the myth that Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was a communist plant. Those kinds of conspiracies had become uncoupled from a real communist threat and about something baser:
“The inquisitors were trying to give satisfaction against liberals, New Dealers, reformers, internationalists, intellectuals, and finally even against a Republican administration that failed to reverse liberal policies. What was involved, above all, was a set of political hostilities in which the New Deal was linked to the welfare state, the welfare state to socialism, and socialism to Communism.”
Hofstadter lays the obsession with communism well after it had lost any influence in the United States at the feet of a political faction more interested in attacking its political enemies than saving the country from a homegrown Bolshevik Revolution. The John Birth Society and its sympathizers were early versions of influencers who spread fears about “Marxist-Socialism” among liberal reformers and Democratic Socialists today.
Where Are Intellectuals Today?
The year 2025 lies in a similar era of anti-intellectual resentment as the 1950s. It’s not that the country is dumb. Rather, the suspicion of elites and their institutions is overly influential in politics and culture.
But once the pendulum swings back, where will the intellectuals be? Hofstadter ends his book with a sobering reminder:
“The truth is that much of American education aims, simply and brazenly, to turn out experts who are not intellectuals or men of culture at all: and when such men go into the service of government or business or the universities themselves, they do not suddenly become intellectuals.”
Our universities make students take classes in science and literature and other subjects to try creating well-rounded students. Instead, students check off classes that they immediately forget about once the exams are over. The best ones may specialize in their fields, but only one class per subject area outside of their fields doesn’t lead to the kind of depth across many topics that a dream college graduate may possess.
Engaging deeply with ideas isn’t just about social media debates between people talking past each other. Real engagement includes a clear recognition of what the consequences of ideas are, what the limits of their usefulness are, and how changing them in certain ways leads to different outcomes. Honest engagement means a commitment to fact-finding and mind-changing, two activities that social media has made optional.
Hofstadter’s book has never been a better read.