The rapid ascendancy of Sarah Palin in the ranks of the Republican Party coupled with the increasingly negative campaign of Senator McCain and building upon the already baser instincts of the Republican Party such as its anti-immigration policy has resurrected claims that the Republicans are the Anti-Intellectual Party. Not that GOP party members are stupid, mind you, but that they embark upon a type of disingenuous populism that is used to fuse and motivate its ranks without necessarily offering anything substantive in the art of governance.
In 2006, an editorial in the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard by William Kristol attacked populist Republicans for not recognizing the danger of "turning the GOP into an anti-immigration, Know-Nothing party."
The lead editorial of the New York Times for Sunday, May 20, 2007, on a proposed immigration bill, referred to "this generation's Know-Nothings...."
Economist Paul Krugman, in a New York Times opinion piece dated August 7, 2008, writes
[K]now-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”
It is a trend that traces back at least to the “Red Scare” which crafted a domestic and foreign policy based on fear, and that emotional fear was the fuel of the party’s success. After all, the modern-day conservative movement was borne of the fear engendered by Ronald Reagan that America was being pushed around by a gnat of a nation, and that fear has been embraced by Messrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove in building policy in the context of a post-9/11 world. It is ironic that the two purported “mavericks” are actually reverting to the comfort of the “anti-intellectual” ideology by assailing Barack Obama as not “one of us” and therefore not of the correct “character” to lead us. The fodder for such notions are slender reeds of distorted “facts” built into a fog of innuendo meant to mask the lack of solutions that GOP has for the problems it has created. If anything, November 4th is a referendum on this anti-intellectualism.
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Only one comment I would offer. I think that, while the fear mongering became a strong weapon for Republicans circa and post-Reagan, both Reagan and GW still gave reasons for conservatives to vote for them. Reagan had an intellectual message of the whole trickle-down economic theory, along with a more visceral "crush the commies" message and the beginnings of the social conservative principles, coupled with the elimination of the safety nets. This gave Reagan both the fear part for his opponents, plus reasons for conservatives to vote for him, along with enough for non-conservatives to find some reason to vote for him.
With GWB, I think that the intellectual reasons to vote for him was reduced to economic, if you had enough $$, and social, if you were a fundamentalist christian. Fear became huge, as the reasons dropped to vote for him, but some were still there.
With McCain, I think that he has utterly failed to articulate any reasons to vote for him, instead only offering reasons to not vote for his opponent. And ultimately, I think it is why he has a difficult time winning, all fear-mongering and other reasons notwithstanding. It is why I believe that Kerry lost in 2004 and a fundamental strength that Obama has, that he is giving people strong reasons to vote for him, as opposed to note vote for McCain
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