Are the Tea-Party Candidates Anti-Intellectual? Yes, but Read the Fine Print

This is a guest post by Jon Winsor.

Despite the intensity of their initial support, Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman, and now Rick Perry have all seem to have peaked and fizzled (I find Josh Marshall’s take on Perry’s campaign interesting and convincing). But the surprising thing is that these candidates ever had support in the first place. A while ago Mark Fiore had a hilarious sendup of Perry, Palin, and Bachmann, covering a lot of the ground we’ve discussed on this blog:

I’m going to disagree with Chris that Rick Perry can’t be called an anti-intellectual–for a number of reasons, which I’ll get into in later posts. But I’m going to agree with Chris that there are things about conservatism that are difficult to “get,” and I’ll explain why in this post.

One thing is that the term “anti-intellectual” doesn’t convey to most liberals is that anti-intellectualism can be ingenious—smart in its own way. Rick Perlstein’s discussion of Nixon’s political style in Nixonland gives us a sense of how this can work (summarized here by a Canadian journalist):

Perlstein writes that even as an undergrad at Whittier College, Nixon defined his coalition as the excluded and snubbed. The student leaders were all in a club called “the Franklins” — “well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly.” Nixon formed a club from everyone left out, the Orthogonians, “the strivers, those not to the manner born…”

If the press is your enemy and the “Lawrence Welkish mass” is your base, certain odd tactics make more sense… [For instance] being very loose with the truth, even when you know you’ll be caught. Because who’s catching you? The Franklins is who. “Let them pounce on your ‘mistake,’ ” Perlstein writes, “then garner pity as you wriggle free by making the enemy look unduly aggressive. Then you inspire a strange sort of protective love among voters whose wounds of resentment grow alongside your performance of being wounded. Your enemies appear to die of their own hand, never of your own. Which makes you stronger.”

And there’s also a geographical component to this strategy. Nixon and his strategist Kevin Phillips were famous for working out the template for Republicans winning presidential elections, The Emerging Republican Majority. Republicans could do without certain “elitist” cosmopolitan areas, as long as they can persuade enough voters in other areas that they should be frustrated with the cosmopolitans in some broad-brush way. Back when it looked like Rick Perry was going to win, David Brooks discussed the heart of Perry’s strategy (with some sarcasm—you get a clear sense that Brooks really didn’t like the thought of a Perry presidency):

It used to be there were many threats on the horizon. Now there is only one: the interlocking oligarchy of politicians, academics, journalists, consultants and financiers who live along the Acela corridor want to rip America from its traditional moorings… [Perry’s] persona is perfectly tuned to offend people along the Acela corridor and to rally those who oppose those people. He does very well with the alternative-reality right — those who don’t believe in global warming, evolution or that Obama was born in the U.S.

Now in the case of Perry and Bachmann, this strategy has shown some limitations, but that doesn’t mean some variant of it couldn’t work in the future.

A second way liberals can be deceived by the term “anti-intellectual” is that there really arecertain intellectuals that Perry can claim to have on his side. Far from being someone dismissive of ideas, Perry can convince at least some people that he’s dedicated to ideas. For instance, a while ago Perry defended intelligent design, saying, “there are clear indications from our people who have amazing intellectual capability that this didn’t happen by accident and a creator put this in place.” I’m sure if he wanted to, Perry could have the Discovery Institute send reams of ID materials to any lucky reporter who asked him what he was talking about. And if the reporter went on to criticize those ideas, Perry could then rail against him as elitist and liberal, and the Discovery Institute would no doubt help him.

There are some obvious problems with how this all works, and the consequences are deeplyanti-intellectual—which leads me to disagree with Chris that you shouldn’t call Perry anti-intellectual. And I’ll explain the details of why in the next few posts.

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