What a 1964 Book About American Anti-Intellectualism Can Teach Us About the Trump Era

Some books written decades ago return to us, with a renewed relevance, in critical times. Richard Hofstadter’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book of 1964 Anti-Intellectualism in American Life is one. The eminent American historian, who taught at Columbia University in the 1950s and 60s, analyzed a strain in American culture that can help us understand some of the underpinnings of Donald Trump’s assaults on higher education, intellectuals, culture, and free speech. Anti-intellectualism is more than a descriptive term, it’s a concept that Hofstadter developed having studied the roots of the “national disrespect of the mind.” His study was prompted by the virulent assaults on intellectuals, liberalism, and higher education unleashed by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s in his tyrannous, anti-communist crusade, in which he claimed “commies” were infiltrating the government (even President Eisenhower was a suspect). 

Hofstadter traced anti-intellectualism to the following sources: 1) evangelical religion with its disdain for modernity, science, and rational thought, 2) pioneer individualism with its libertarian worship of practical skills and anti-institutionalism, and 3) businessman culture grounded in the practical life in pursuit of wealth and materialism. These strains have aligned primarily with the attitudes and political behavior of American conservatism and much of the Republican Party of the past hundred years. 

In this world-view academics are seen as “anemic, priggish, effeminate;” “Harvard professors” as “twisted-thinking intellectuals”; Elite universities are the breeding grounds for the “enemy from within,” and “rotten to the core.” Similar rhetoric was spewed by conservative legislators at the Congressional anti-Semitism hearings in December 2023 when they accused Harvard, Penn, and MIT of being “illiberal sewers of bigotry,” “infected by moral rot,” and devoid of “Bible literacy.” Going after liberals in the ‘50s was the right wing’s response to the New Deal, and McCarthy’s “bullying and conspiracy theories” were welcomed by a segment of America because they satisfied a “craving for revenge against intellectual elites”—especially those new experts of the administrative state. Even though New Deal policies helped poor and rural populations, hostility toward intellectuals and East Coast Ivy Leaguers ran deep.

Trump’s assaults on higher education are an irrational effort to destroy the segment of America that does enormous work for the national good.

Trump’s weaponization of anti-Semitism and DEI panic to justify massive federal budget cuts do not mask his real goal: the destruction of knowledge producing institutions, critical thinking, free intellectual inquiry which are threats to his authoritarian efforts to destroy the rule of law and the Constitution. It is unprecedented. In his first months, President Trump’s assaults on universities, especially Harvard and Columbia, the Smithsonian museums, Library of Congress, NEA and NEH, Kennedy Center; the termination of the Department of Education, efforts to censor the press, media, and law firms; censoring facts about American history from slavery to climate science from the web sites of the EPA, NEA, NIH, Smithsonian, and banning books at the US military academy libraries make it clear that what Hofstadter saw as a malignant manifestation of embittered scapegoat hunting populist strains in our culture has now emerged with unprecedented political ferocity. This President’s disdain for critical thinking is tied to an ideological agenda. 

We have descended into a new chapter of anti-intellectualism. McCarthyism was a short-lived phenomenon propelled by an alcoholic Republican Senator who died young during a sordid career. Richard Nixon, who was hostile to liberal culture, would have liked to go after higher education was wise enough to tell his conservative Republican colleagues when they advocated cutting huge amounts of federal funding to universities that “we’d be cutting off our nose to spite our face.” 

Hofstadter would have recognized Trump’s brand of businessman anti-intellectualism. From gold toilet seats to gold airplanes, Trump is the monetized man exploiting his power as president to make billions—even issuing meme coins of himself and his wife and promoting monetizing crypto currency programs to enrich himself; he posts on social media “it’s a great time to get rich,” or “it’s a great time to invest.” It has been documented that his private business practices have defrauded banks, contractors, and customers. His claims that elite universities are full of lunatics, radicals and Marxists, anti-Semites and racists are not only ludicrous lies, but propaganda designed to alienate a segment of the nation from higher education and distract Americans from the deep sources of Anti-Semitism and racism ensconced in the MAGA movement.

Reading Hofstadter now will give Americans a long view of how vital intellectuals have been to our nation.

But some things have changed since Hofstadter wrote his book. If Hofstadter would have recognized Trump’s crass businessman anti-intellectualism type, he would also have to update his assessment of the business community and its relationship to the academy. Long gone are the days of the Robber Barons who saw education as “bunk.” In recent decades, the creative synergy between the business community and higher education has been thunderous. Over the past thirty years financial giving to universities has increased by 175%. In 2022 the private sector gave a record high of 58 billion dollars to colleges and universities most of which contributed to academic programs and research as well as to the diversity of student bodies. Billion-dollar donation span a landscape from small liberal arts McPherson College to Stanford and Johns Hopkins. In addition, the independence of private universities and their tax status that encourages donations supports conservative and sectarian schools: Boston College, Notre Dame, Brigham Young, Liberty University, among many others.

Trump’s assaults on higher education are an irrational effort to destroy the segment of America that does enormous work for the national good: life-saving medical research, public health and safety, high tech and engineering from bridges to iPhones—and the essential work of critical thinking in the arts, humanities, social and natural sciences wherein complex problem solving and the cultivation of leadership for all sectors of society is taught. Steven Pinker also notes how deeply mutual the federal parternship is: “a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service—namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country.” Hofstadter called intellectuals the “moral antennae of society” and noted that of all the privileged classes they have shown the most consistent concern for the well-being for the less fortunate.

The American university is the envy of the world—drawing students from every continent—for the intense faculty mentoring that fosters young adults into professional and civic life. The twenty-first century American university is one of the great achievements of modern civilization and the destruction of the relationship between higher education, the federal government, and the business community would set America back to a parochial era that we left a long time ago. 

A liberal democracy depends on its intellectual and cultural producers to pursue their work with both freedom and support from the wider society and the federal government—if these are destroyed, we will slide into an authoritarianism that will smash 250 years of great building. Reading Hofstadter now will give Americans a long view of how vital intellectuals have been to our nation from the great minds of the Founding Fathers to today’s intellectual work-force from Cambridge to San Diego, from Seattle to Miami. His book reifies what Americans need to know in order to resist this irrational paroxysm of anti-intellectualism so we can emerge—as Hofstader did from the McCarthyist 50s—into a new age of moral and cultural growth that followed that period, and I believe will follow this one.