I was going to write an ambitious, highly speculative piece tying
together brain drain, anti-intellectualism, and disinvestment from education in
the context of rural America. All that assumed that rural people are more anti-intellectual.
But
this paper from Jay A. DeSart of Utah Valley University blows that
assumption out of the water.
If I’m reading his table right, he finds that rural people
not significantly more likely to be anti-intellectual per-se, only that they’re more focused on practical education. But
since rural America is older, less-educated, more religious, and more conservative,
it looks like that at first glance. But some regression analysis to control for
various factors causes that to drop away. Surprisingly (or perhaps not) after
controls for, e.g. education income too is unassociated with
anti-intellectualism.
So now I’m dipping into the literature to see what there is
to see. DeSart’s paper, very helpfully, reports the strength of his findings
and finds only 4 clusters of factors that are relevant with high confidence:
Education, religiosity (church attendance, biblical literalism, etc.),
political beliefs (ideology, sense of power over one’s life, trust in
institutions, etc.) and gender.
So this is a cross-sectional snapshot. What about over time?
Enter Gordon Gauchat of University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill. He has a
2012 paper examining trends in politicization of anti-intellectualism
and distrust of experts over time. SPOILER ALERT: American conservatives have
been gradually getting more anti-intellectual and less trusting of experts
since the 1990s. Liberals have trended in the opposite way. Quoting from the
abstract:
“Results show that group differences in trust in
science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying
as conservative.”
A
more recent and in-depth study by Matthew Motta of University
of Minnesota-Twin Cities finds the same thing in 2016 and shows further that support
for Trump was associated with anti-intellectualism above and beyond the support
for Trump from conservatives in general. That is, more anti-intellectual Republicans
were more likely to support Trump.
So where does that leave the project that motivated this
exploration? Sunk and gone. There are two real questions. First: why has
conservative anti-intellectualism has grown and hardened? And second, what does
this mean going forward. Here I will resume wild mass guessing – since after
all I write this for my own amusement.
You may remember
this poll that found that a majority of Republicans, for the first
time ever, said they thought higher education was bad for the country.
Here’s one hypothesis: pure tribalism. Education tends to
make people less conservative, and less anti-intellectual. If you
want to keep people in the “tribe” of conservatism, you want to keep them away
from higher education. This is, on an individual level, fairly rational. Of course you want to avoid the strife,
the arguments, the emotional distance and social fracturing that will result
from little Connor going off to college and forming a worldview that differs from
your own.
But this is somewhat hard to do, since it’s a well-established result
that higher education generally leads to higher earnings and better life
outcomes.
So, what you have to do is say to Connor “college is bad.”
Not bad for Connor – because it plainly isn’t – but bad for society, bad in
general.
You can see the shape of the intergenerational dynamics of
this: the most intellectually inclined “educate out” on the margin, becoming less anti-intellectual
and less conservative. Leaving the rest more conservative and anti-intellectual.
But how did anti-intellectualism become so intertwined with American
right? It could be religion, if religiously motivated anti-intellectuals have
sorted into the GOP since the 1990s.
But my guess is that it is something more fundamental.
The death of expertise in the GOP and the anti-intellectualism
of the conservative movement are intertwined. Why do you need experts? Because
you care about what’s true and understand that the world is complicated and
difficult to understand. But what if what is true is (politically)
inconvenient? You could change your
beliefs. Or you could change your beliefs about beliefs, and cease to care
about the truth at all. But if the truth doesn’t matter, if facts don’t matter,
if ideas are no longer tested by experience – why have experts? Why seek to
know, why welcome knowledge at all?
And if your party doesn’t care about the truth, about knowledge,
and intellectuals, almost definitionally, do,
then of course you aren’t going to have much support among them, and every
new cohort is going to look at the existing cohort and think – “why bother, they
don’t care about my work”.
The GOP’s position on a host of issues follows this pattern –
with climate change being the most clear-cut and obvious example. The entire
trajectory of the policy minds around that man in the White House follows this
pattern and I think it’s important to point out that this is not a break with the
norms of the American right, but rather a continuation of decades-long trends.
So now for the second question: What does this mean going
forward?
I don’t know, but I doubt its good. One possibility is that the
conservative movement suffers an intellectual “death spiral” with each round of
intellectuals exiting (or not entering) causing more hostility or indifference
to intellectual thought, leading to more exits, etc.
That leaves a political movement that’s nothing but a
seething ball of white rage with absolutely no regard for the facts and even
the minimal restraints of reality. That seems… bad.
Another possibility is that intellectual collapse proceeds
political collapse, and from the rubble a new, saner, coalition can be built.
That would be a good outcome, but I imagine the process would be chaotic and
uncertain.
One thing I do not see happening is this trend reversing anytime
soon. For now, this is American politics.
