I think a lot of modern anti-intellectualism is really more of a pseudo-intellectualism.

It's anti-intellectual in the sense that it can be disdainful of intellectuals and intellectual institutions like newspapers, universities. But form-wise, it tends to be formulated around alternative facts, studies, experts and whatnot.

Flat earth or intelligent design theories are more pseudo-intellectual than anti-intellectual. They have their own studies & citations... mimicking scientific intellectualism rather than dismissing it. The from is of rogue or dissenting intellectuals against the mainstream. If they're in a tussle with Richard Dawkins, the criticism is that he is not really being scientific. It's rarely a criticism of science as an approach.

Go watch Carlin's old comedy bits. He talks about disinformation, culture wars, etc.

You think fake news and misinformation is new?

"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day..."

https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_sp...

Go look up how "conspiracy theories" were used as a weapon by the media/elites to silence those they did not like just a few decades ago.

It's all like generational groundhog day. Each generation lives through the same story over and over again.

Sticking with it’s prescience:

But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

I’d go as far as to say the protectionism and conspiratorial thinking is the result of an actual betrayal that the larger population have not emotionally reconciled. The right wing, along with the left wing, sold out to corporate interests in a steady manner over decades.

Sometimes, it can be difficult to accept betrayal. It’s similar to grief, you can’t believe it’s real - Say it isn’t true, there must be another explanation. Tell me it’s these social welfare programs, and immigrants, say it isn’t the systematic erosion of the working class.

My kid? Failed fifth grade? Me? A bad parent? Impossible, the teachers are bad, the education system .... Who is ready to accept this stuff immediately? The American public have been voting against their own interest for a long time. You have shitty healthcare and benefits because you got duped. You spent your tax money on foreign wars because you got duped. Your stock market is an unregulated casino where bankers toy with your money with impunity, and you’ll bail them out, again because you got duped into eating the bullshit. No, not my kid, he’d never murder anyone, the cops must have set him up. This is certainly the denial stage for the right wing.

The Left has it’s own grief coming soon enough. Lots of promises, lots of stuff that’s never going to come true. Lots of stuff about the Democrats that’s no different than the Republicans, and one day they’ll have to conjure up some conspiracy to deal with the dupe.

Some part of me almost understands the Trump voter. He transparently manipulates you (oxymoron?). If you’ve been lied to for decades, there is some dignity in accepting someone that straight lies to you versus the bells and whistles liars like some Presidents have been.

I had the check the publication date too. Not due to the content, but because you don't see pieces as well written and constructed in today's press.

There is a ratcheting effect in US conservative politics whereby the social conservative voting bloc needs to be cultivated with ever more extreme positions just to keep them interested enough to vote for the Republican party. This has mostly manifest through increasing racism but is also manifest by increasing hatred towards intellectuals and thinking people in general.

The pattern of social conservatives demanding increasingly extreme positions from their leaders is not dissimilar to how addicts become desensitized to their drug of addiction and need increasingly higher doses to get their high.

In the 1960s, using dog-whistles to pander to anti-black racism (through the Southern Strategy[0]) was enough to bring out the social conservative vote for the Republican party. Over time, the demands of social conservatives have made the dog-whistles less quiet and the number of targeted groups has expanded from only African-Americans to Hispanics, people who live in urban areas, to scientists and other intellectuals, and now to all Democrats. By 2016, it took Trump's level of vile xenophobia--directed against anyone who wasn't a willfully ignorant racist--to motivate social conservatives to vote in large numbers. In 2020, the social conservatives are demanding fealty to QAnon, a conspiracy theory that is at odds with objective reality. Whatever degree of racist anti-intellectualism social conservatives demand in 2020 and 2024 will be worse.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy