The Dire Consequences Of Anti-Intellectualism

The conservative movement has long fostered a paranoid strain that spreads conspiracies and rejects scientific expertise. The 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a Tennessee teacher was prosecuted for teaching evolution, is well known. So is the John Birch Society’s 1950s hysteria over the fluoridation of water, which its members insisted was a Communist plot to poison Americans. And George Wallace was renowned for, among other things, his denunciations of “pointy-headed” intellectuals.

Still, the Republican Party retained a deep reservoir of respect for science, for intellectual prowess, for simple facts. During the 1950s and ’60s, William Buckley, an Ivy-League-educated intellectual, was a leading light of the conservative movement. The Grand Old Party embraced the science necessary to beat the Soviet Union to the moon. It supported vaccinations and funded research institutions.

But somewhere along the way, that all changed. The GOP is now “the stupid party,” as Bobby Jindal, the Republican then-governor of Louisiana, put it. The nadir of its decades-long descent into know-nothing, flat-Earth denialism was its embrace of Donald J. Trump, the “very stable genius” who denied that the coronavirus pandemic was a crisis until a few days ago. Continue reading.