In 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter at Columbia University published a book that would win him his second Pulitzer Prize. It was called Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. And it answered a question that most people were afraid to ask out loud.
Why do so many Americans hate educated people?
It had nothing to do with intelligence.
It was about resentment.
Hofstadter defined anti-intellectualism as “a resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind and of those who are considered to represent it.” He found that Americans did not distrust experts because experts were wrong. They distrusted experts because expertise felt like a social slight. The diploma on your wall is a mirror. It reminds people of a path they did not take. And instead of sitting with that feeling, they attack the path itself.
This is not new. Hofstadter traced this pattern all the way back to the earliest days of American evangelical Christianity, which valued the spirit over intellectual rigor.
He argued that America’s Protestant traditions would always be fertile ground for anti-intellectualism to take root. And he was right.
In 2020, researcher Eric Merkley published a study in Public Opinion Quarterly using the General Social Survey and a survey of 3,600 Americans. He wanted to test what happens when you show anti-intellectual people expert consensus on issues like climate change, nuclear power, and public health.
The results were stunning.
People who scored highest in anti-intellectualism did not just reject the expert consensus. They actually increased their opposition. The more evidence you showed them, the harder they pushed back. Showing them facts made them worse, not better.
Merkley also found a direct connection between anti-intellectualism and populism, the worldview that sees political conflict as a war between ordinary citizens and a privileged elite. When he exposed people to populist rhetoric, even rhetoric that had nothing to do with experts, it activated anti-intellectual attitudes in how they processed expert information.
In other words, every time a politician calls a scientist an elitist or a professor a brainwasher, it primes the audience to reject whatever that expert says next. The content does not matter. The distrust has already been triggered.
The 2024 election confirmed what researchers have been tracking for years. According to Pew Research Center, voters with a four-year college degree favored Kamala Harris by 16 percentage points. Voters without a college degree favored Donald Trump by 14 points.
That 16-point gap among college graduates was not a fluke. It was part of a trend that has been widening since 2016. Pew found that the gap in partisanship between college graduates and those without a degree has been wider since 2017 than at any previous point in their surveys dating back to the 1990s.
Voters with postgraduate degrees favored Harris by roughly two to one. The more education someone had, the less likely they were to support the Republican candidate.
This is not an accident. This is the result of decades of anti-intellectual messaging that has turned education itself into a partisan issue.
Republican-controlled states have been aggressively gutting public education through voucher programs, book bans, and funding cuts. House Republicans proposed slashing education funding by 11 percent in their 2025 budget. Multiple Republican senators have called public schools “cesspools of Marxist indoctrination.”
And yet many of the same politicians who attack higher education attended Ivy League schools themselves. They send their children to elite private institutions while telling their voters that college is worthless.
They send their kids to Ivy League schools and tell you college is a scam.
This is not a contradiction. It is a strategy. An educated population asks harder questions, demands accountability, and is less susceptible to manipulation. Anti-intellectualism does not exist because leaders believe education is bad. It exists because leaders know education is powerful and they would prefer you not have access to it.
Hofstadter saw all of this coming over sixty years ago. He watched demagogues use anti-intellectualism as a weapon during the McCarthy era. He saw how resentment of “the experts” could be channeled into political power. And he warned that it would happen again.
It is happening right now.
They told you being stupid was patriotic. And while you were burning books, their kids were reading them at Harvard.
Hofstadter, R. (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Alfred A. Knopf.
Merkley, E. (2020). Anti-Intellectualism, Populism, and Motivated Resistance to Expert Consensus. Public Opinion Quarterly, 84(1), 24-48.
Pew Research Center. (2025). How Voting Patterns Changed in the 2024 Election.
Pew Research Center. (2024). Partisanship by Race, Ethnicity, and Education.
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