JD Vance, the ‘running mate’ of Donald Trump, recently proclaimed: “The professors are the enemy”. Unsurprisingly, this remark alarmed me; I had not been previously aware of being an enemy of the people. Vance stressed that this was a quote by Richard Nixon made some 40 or 50 years ago. I looked up Nixon’s quote and found that the original is apparently a little different:
Never forget, the press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Write that on a blackboard a hundred times and never forget it.
So, why does Vance quote Nixon, who arguably is not one of the most honest men in the history of US politics? Why does he and Nixon insist that the professors are the enemy? Why was this puzzling quote followed by plenty of applause from his audience?
The answer could be that it is a populist theme that touches a nerve with right-wing audiences. But what does the sentence actually mean?
Until recently on Vance’s campaign website, he explained that “hundreds of billions of American tax dollars” get sent to universities that “teach that America is an evil, racist nation”. These universities “then train teachers who bring that indoctrination into our elementary and high schools”. Vance doesn’t want public funds to go to institutions that teach “critical race theory or radical gender ideology”. He rather wants them to deliver “an honest, patriotic account of American history”.
Vance and Nixon are not the only politicians to make claims of an anti-intellectualism nature. In 2016, the UK conservative Michael Gove refused to name any economist backing Britain’s exit from the European Union, saying that “people in this country have had enough of experts”.
According to Wikipedia, anti-intellectualism is hostility to and mistrust of intellect, intellectuals, and intellectualism, commonly expressed as deprecation of education and philosophy and the dismissal of art, literature, history, and science as impractical, politically motivated, and even contemptible human pursuits. Anti-intellectuals may present themselves and be perceived as champions of common folk – populists against political and academic elitism – and tend to see educated people as a status class that dominates political discourse and higher education while being detached from the concerns of ordinary people.
Totalitarian governments have, in the past, manipulated and applied anti-intellectualism to repress political dissent. During the Spanish Civil War and the following dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, the reactionary repression of the White Terror (1936–1945) was notably anti-intellectual, with most of the 200,000 civilians killed being the Spanish intelligentsia, the politically active teachers and academics, artists and writers of the deposed Second Spanish Republic. During the Cambodian Genocide, the totalitarian regime of Cambodia led by Pol Pot nearly destroyed its entire educated population.
Fascist movements are notoriously anti-intellectual and anti-science. Adolf Hitler apparently stated that he regretted that his regime still had some need for its “intellectual classes,” otherwise, “one day we could, I don’t know, exterminate them or something”. Joseph Goebbels was more explicit saying that:
There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be the man in the street. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology.
And the infamous ‘bon mot’, “when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun”, is attributed to several of the top Nazis of the Third Reich.
Here, I suspect, we might have a reason why a certain type of politician dislikes intellectuals and feels that the professors are the enemy. Professors do science, science is about finding the truth, and the truth is something that politicians like JD Vance must fear like a pest; it might disclose their agenda as being fascist.
It therefore seems to me that claims like “the professors are the enemy”, are arguments of politicians who have good reason to fear the truth, appealing to voters who are unable to understand the danger posed by those they wish to elect.
