Anti-intellectualism on the right keeps peasants in line
A lengthy article by Matt McManus in Current Affairs (h/t Greg Sargent) studies the impulses driving anti-intellectualism on the right. What intellectuals on the right mean to defend (and conserve) is power and privilege. The existential threat, the wolf at the door, as it were, is any idea(s) that might make the ruled take issue with their rulers:
The heart of the problem for conservatives is this: they instinctively fear that excess and critical intellectualism will induce anyone and everyone to “submit” authority to the “discussion” of each individual. In other words, the individual might have thoughts and ideas that lead them to question authority figures like kings and presidents. Imagine that!
Egalitarianism of the sort Jefferson advanced in the Declaration stands at odds with preserving the presumed natural hierarchy atop which the elite sit. Defense of the natural order, as it’s seen, may “take the form of doubling down on even more extreme authoritarianism and inequality.” Or it might require attaching “transcendent qualities” to “profane (worldly or non-sacred) institutions, beliefs, and hierarchies which the right values.”
McManus adds:
These transcendent qualities are usually further dolled up with a mysterious and even paradoxical quality to make them appear even more dazzling in the eyes of the beholder. The transcendent qualities of sublime idealizations are both comprehensible to human reason while exceeding the limitations of its understanding—usually just comprehensible enough so that we may submit to their excellence, but not so transparent that they could be scrutinized and or criticized.
Should sublimation fail, the right falls back on “that’s just the way it is” fatalism. Get over it.
“That’s the way God planned it |That’s the way God wants it,” as Billy Preston sang.
Like many a faith, relying on reason is discouraged. Don’t question. Believe.
The Good Liars make comedy out of that feature of MAGA insanity. Their videos hold up to mockery unsuspecting Trump fans who checked their brains at the door. But there are occasionally clever debunks in them.
Jason Selvig points out the essential nonsense in believing ANTIFA was behind the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
“Why would ANTIFA interrupt the certification of an election in which their candidate won?” Selvig asks.
“If you think about it,” Stephen Colbert said in explaining truthiness in 2005, it makes no sense. But doesn’t it feel right that ANTIFA, not MAGA, perpetrated the sedition?
In another clip, the Liars suggest that schools ban a book with a story about daughters who get their father drunk to get pregnant by him. People heartily agree until told it is the Bible (Genesis 19).
Reason itself is less valued on the right. Referencing the right-wing defense of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse, one Kenneth Ray McClain argues, “If your recourse to the terrorist is to look up the criminal history of the victims, it is no different from looking up the criminal past of everyone that died on 9/11 in order to justify the hijackers.”
“This shit is ridiculous,” McCain writes. But that is what the right’s up-is-downism delivers. By design.
Just for free, a couple of other “snappy comebacks” that popped up over the weekend.