Max Boot's "How the 'Stupid Party' Created Donald Trump" is, in part, a stunning validation of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Or perhaps I should say that Boot voiced a collective validation of The Effect. For I've no doubt that, among others, the Heritage Foundation, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, Bill Bennett and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan ("who," says Boot, has "devised an impressive new budget plan for his party") would all agree with the author that they are living contradictions of modern conservatism's anti-intellectualism; that they are the intellectual cat's meows.
After seeing the title of Boot's op-ed this morning but before reading a word of it, I retrieved my copy of Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, just to see what gems might be re-gleaned on Boot's subject. I made a couple mental notes, but one was unnecessary, for Boot, I soon found, had landed on the same:
By the 1950s, it had become an established shibboleth that the "eggheads" were for Adlai Stevenson and the "boobs" for Dwight D. Eisenhower — a view endorsed by Richard Hofstadter’s 1963 book "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which contrasted Stevenson, "a politician of uncommon mind and style, whose appeal to intellectuals overshadowed anything in recent history," with Eisenhower — "conventional in mind, relatively inarticulate."
Hofstadter was right about Eisenhower's conventionality but wrong about his lack of articulation. (Some of his public statements were deliberately muddled "to preserve his political room to maneuver," writes Boot, correctly. Much of Ike's private prose, however, was strikingly eloquent.) There was also this from Hofstadter, unquoted by Boot:
In 1952 only intellectuals seemed much disturbed by the specter of [McCarthyism's] anti-intellectualism; by 1958 [post-Sputnik, post-McCarthy] the idea that this might be an important and even a dangerous national failing was persuasive to most thinking people.
To most thinking people. That of course is one key to the non-mystery of contemporary conservatism's anti-intellectualism: Thinking people were shifting their partisan allegiances, leaving unthinking people as those to whom the GOP had to pander. Another key — directly related — is Barry Goldwater, a name you won't find in Max Boot's brief history of Republican anti-intellectualism. He cites Ronald Reagan's endorsement of the party's 1964 nominee (again, not by name) and Reagan's contemporaneous opposition to "a little intellectual elite in a far-distant Capitol." But that's it. "Here’s the thing," observes Boot. "The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on. At least until now." Until, that is, Donald Trump.
Boot concedes that in the interim — betwixt the 1960s and today — "Republicans embraced [anti-intellectualism] for their own political purposes." But it was far more than that. Goldwater embraced anti-intellectualism because he was unlearned (even he admitted that much). He saw the world in black-and-white frames, which is characteristic of the unschooled, uncurious mind.
Goldwaterism almost immediately inaugurated the New Right, which was even more genuinely ignorant than Goldwater. Critical constituents of the New Right were Christian evangelicals, who were doctrinally uncurious and faithfully proud of their ignorance. Reaganism was a prominent product of the New Right, replete with the utter anti-intellectual absurdity of supply-sided economics. From there Republicanism moved to Gingrichism, which made a religion of partisan malevolence and one-dimensional thinking. Then we experienced Bushism, which, through neoconservatism, treated the world to Republicanism's authentic dunderheadedness. Then on to overtly racist Tea Partyism and the natural, vile excrescence of Donald Trump.
Throughout, Hofstadter's observation held true: Most thinking people were persuaded that anti-intellectualism was a "dangerous national failing." To the Republican Party, however, ignorance and hostility to the arduousness of thought was an art — one practiced so consistently, it became the concreted foundation of modern Republicanism itself.
Indeed the Republican Party so eagerly saturated itself in stupidity it became unable to gauge just how stupid it was; time and again, it overestimated the lasting power of its insidious pandering and convinced itself that somehow its corrosive stupidity was brilliant. The party is a tragic victim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.