In Defense of American Anti-Intellectualism

“I don’t fw any of it but sometimes it’s better to just not pay attention to it lowk.” Reads the text I received from a longtime friend yesterday afternoon. 

“Like i have the privilege of being able to not pay attention lol,” he writes, “so i will use it.” (In reference to Nazis taking control of one of the world's most dominant superpowers.)

In freshman year, I experienced loss for the first time. In the same month I read “1984” and “Brave New World” and became a radical supporter of Ted Kazinsky(note the credulousness of teens). Seeing our world reflected as it is–sick and broken beneath the weight of a few men's sins–made me miserably depressed. I lost all passion for school and my hobbies, isolated myself, and channeled what little energy I had into writing cynical poetry. 

There is a question I see bubbling beneath every American’s internet posts right now, sometimes it looks like “Who can I blame?” but most of the time it’s the shape of “What am I to do?”. Do we settle in, buckle up, and wait four years? Do we read? Do we rebel? Where do these things intersect? It seems everyone is telling me they’re the same, but I disagree. There’s a resentful fourteen-year-old me bouncing back and forth, teeth barred, in the cage of my mind, screaming for action and not just passive contextual awareness put away at the click of a button.

I believe “good” art has two things: a pulse and a bullet. An idea you can rip from the piece and feel beating in your palm, that you can take out into the world on proud display; a “good” idea is wanting, acting–bleeding. There is also the imminent danger(or should I say power?) of a “good” work, one that bewitches a nation; a novel, a speech, something that arranges the right words in the right aerodynamic order so they shoot out fast and hit hard—the bullet of speech, the weapon of the people. 

Here’s a quote by Alexander Tytler that I often see misused by the MAGA faithful. Reading it in the face of the fascist goliath that is Trump's second coming–Musk, DOGE, and ICE raids–it’s translucent in its application.

 “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.”

It fits this quote found itself at home on a personal blog(Joel D. Hirst’s) in a rhetorical analysis of Gladiator, particularly of the film’s quote, “There once was a dream that was Rome”. I struggle to imagine what the dream of America would look like completely faded. I struggle to imagine a world where America has fallen, the dream spoken above a whisper, the vast nation of beauty like an apple having rot. 

“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.” writes Tytler, “Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage,” 

But what is it that the nation’s therapists whisper, now? To be aware, but not obsessed. Informed, but not compelled to act. And who am I to say that is wrong? I often hear of these plagued by “anti-intellectualism”; the people who participate in the world on most levels save for understanding or caring for it; these haunted souls who can’t bear to look history, literature, and art in the eyes. I often hear of them as if they are to blame, but as I said, I think the basis of this argument is unsound. 

In his Substack essay “in defense of pretension” Ayan Artan writes: “corpses walk among us. they might look like you and i but in truth, they are contaminated by a disease that has turned them into empty shells, mannequins masquerading as people. richard hofstadter had a word for this sickness– anti-intellectualism”.

The basis of this argument is that progress will come to society once it is rid of those who “do not care,” as if they exist(and as if any society has become better by simply willing away an existing mindset). The mindset exists in response to a problem far grander than a distaste for knowledge; the problem is the fall of American democracy–wealth and corruption at their glorious climax.

In theory, the dream of America is education. In theory, the dream of America is freedom and power over one’s life. In theory, the dream of America is lawful and orderly.

Quid faciant leges ubi sola pecunia regnat?

What good are the laws where money alone is king?

What good is anything, morality and knowledge, when the power no longer lies in the hands of the best student, artist, or speaker? Before the children couldn’t read, they were told that their lives were being judged on monetary income and that there was none in the humanities. Now that they can’t, they believe the only choice is to “sit tight and wait”. 

At this, I return to the idea of “good” art, which is arguably more common now due to exposure or rarer due to commodification. Where are the leaders of the people? I ask the brick wall. Where is the urgent rhetoric that inspires? 

I believe the good is hidden in the cave of fear that what we learn will drive us insane and inoperable. I believe my friend does not avoid literature out of numb disinterest, but because of an absurdist phenomenon that the “right” thing is often the “unproductive” thing; two ideas that have been rendered unable to coexist reasonably in America.

In defense of anti-intellectualism, I plead that the reader understand the enormity of the world to the youth, and the indomitableness of it to a working parent. I plead that we go out into our worlds– populated by people more similar to us than we know–not in search of blame, but of evermore understanding and purpose.