Why Conservative Men Can’t Spell

In 1963, historian Richard Hofstadter sat in his office at Columbia University and wrote a sentence that described MAGA sixty years before MAGA existed.

He defined anti-intellectualism as “resentment of the life of the mind, and those who are considered to represent it; and a disposition to constantly minimize the value of that life.”

Not ignorance. Resentment.

That distinction is the key to understanding everything about the Republican Party’s relationship with education. They don’t attack experts because the experts are wrong. They attack experts because the experts make them feel stupid. And rather than do the work to stop feeling stupid, they declared that being stupid was a virtue and built an entire political identity around it.

Hofstadter won the Pulitzer Prize for proving this pattern is older than the country itself.

What Hofstadter Traced

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life was not a polemic. It was a 464-page historical excavation of the American hostility toward the life of the mind spanning four hundred years.

Hofstadter traced the pattern back to the earliest American religious movements. Revivalist preachers in the eighteenth century scorned the university-educated ministers of New England. They argued that genuine faith came from the heart, not from books. That God spoke to the simple and the humble, not to the learned. That education was a barrier to truth, not a path to it.

The pattern migrated from religion to politics during the Jacksonian era. Andrew Jackson’s populism celebrated the common man and framed intellectual achievement as fundamentally anti-democratic. The expert was the enemy. The professor was the elitist. The person who had spent years studying a subject was, by definition, out of touch with the real Americans who lived it.

Hofstadter showed that this pattern never disappeared. It ebbed and flowed with the political tides. It surged during McCarthyism, when intellectuals were treated as potential traitors. It surged again during the evangelical movements that declared secular education a threat to Christian values. And it is surging now, at an intensity Hofstadter could not have imagined, inside a political movement that has made the rejection of expertise into its core operating principle.

The thread that connects all of these surges is the same thread Hofstadter identified in his opening definition. It was never about ignorance. It was always about resentment. The people who attack education are not people who don’t understand its value. They are people who understand its value perfectly and resent that they don’t have it.

The Resentment Engine

This is where Hofstadter’s framework becomes precise and devastating.

Anti-intellectualism is not the absence of interest in ideas. It is the active hostility toward ideas and toward the people who carry them. And that hostility does not come from confidence. It comes from the opposite.

A person who feels secure in their own intelligence does not feel threatened by a scientist explaining climate data. A person who feels confident in their own knowledge does not feel attacked when a historian corrects a false claim. A person who is comfortable with what they know and what they don’t know does not need to destroy the credibility of every expert who enters the room.

The people who do feel threatened by those things are people who carry an unresolved wound about their own education, their own intellect, their own place in the social hierarchy organized around knowledge. The attack on the expert is not an argument with the expert’s position. It is a defense against the feeling the expert produces in them by existing.

“Do your own research” is not a research methodology. It is a declaration of independence from the people who make them feel small. “College is a scam” is not an economic analysis of the return on tuition investment. It is a story a person tells themselves so they never have to sit with the question of what their life would look like if they had gone.

This is the engine Hofstadter documented: resentment of what you don’t have, reframed as contempt for the thing itself. If I can’t have it, it must be worthless. If you have it and I don’t, you must be the enemy.

The Data That Proves It

In the 2024 presidential election, the education gap between the two parties reached its widest point in modern American history.

Voters with a four-year college degree or higher favored the Democratic candidate by 16 percentage points. Voters without a college degree favored the Republican candidate by 14 points. The gap had been 9 points in 2016. It was 13 points in 2024 by some exit poll measures. Every election cycle, the divide grows wider.

Among white voters, the gap is even more extreme. Sixty-four percent of white men without a college degree identify as Republican or Republican-leaning. Only 29 percent of white men without a degree voted for the Democratic candidate in 2024.

The Republican Party is now, by the numbers, the party of people without college degrees. This is not an insult. It is a demographic fact measured in every major post-election analysis conducted by Pew Research Center, the Associated Press, NBC News, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.

And the party’s response to this fact has not been to invest in education, to expand access to college, to improve schools, or to create pathways for their own voters to gain the knowledge they lack. The party’s response has been to attack education itself. To cut school funding. To defund universities. To demonize teachers. To call professors indoctrinators. To treat expertise as elitism and knowledge as a liberal conspiracy.

Hofstadter would have recognized every word of it. The pattern is four hundred years old.

The Hypocrisy That Reveals Everything

The most revealing feature of anti-intellectualism in the modern Republican Party is not what they say about education. It is what they do.

Every Republican senator who votes to cut public school funding sends their own children to private school. Ted Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard Law. Josh Hawley went to Stanford and Yale Law. Tom Cotton went to Harvard and Harvard Law. Ron DeSantis went to Yale and Harvard Law.

Charlie Kirk built an entire media empire telling millions of people that college was a scam. He applied to West Point and was rejected. He enrolled at a community college and dropped out after one semester. Then he spent a decade walking onto real college campuses with a camera crew, screaming at teenagers who were doing the thing he couldn’t do, and selling the performance to millions of viewers who needed to believe that the thing they also couldn’t do was not worth doing.

Every Republican who tells their base that education is worthless makes sure their own children are educated at the most expensive and prestigious institutions in the country. The message to the base is: you don’t need it. The message to their own families is: you absolutely need it.

They are not opposed to education. They are opposed to their voters having education. Because an educated voter is harder to manipulate. An educated voter asks better questions. An educated voter can tell the difference between a policy proposal and a slogan. And an educated voter is significantly less likely to vote Republican.

The anti-intellectualism is not a philosophy. It is a strategy. Keep them ignorant. Tell them ignorance is strength. And make sure your own children never suffer the same fate.

Why “Do Your Own Research” Is the Most Revealing Phrase in American Politics

There is no phrase in modern political discourse that better captures Hofstadter’s thesis than “do your own research.”

It sounds like an appeal to independent thinking. It sounds like a call for critical inquiry. It sounds like exactly the kind of thing an intellectually serious person would say.

It is none of those things.

“Do your own research” does not mean: consult peer-reviewed studies, evaluate the methodology, examine the data, and reach a conclusion based on the weight of evidence.

It means: Google something until you find a result that confirms what you already believe. Watch a YouTube video made by someone with no credentials. Read a Facebook post written by someone who misspelled three words in the first sentence. Screenshot a tweet and call it a source.

This is anti-intellectualism in its purest form. It mimics the language of inquiry while rejecting every single standard that makes inquiry meaningful. It borrows the vocabulary of the thing it is trying to destroy. It says “research” and means “confirmation bias.” It says “think for yourself” and means “reject anyone who has actually studied this.”

The person who says “do your own research” is not doing research. They are performing a rejection of the people whose research made them feel small. They are declaring that their 20 minutes on the toilet watching a conspiracy video on YouTube is equivalent to someone else’s 20 years of study.

That is not confidence. That is the sound of resentment pretending to be intellect.

What They Told You Being Stupid Was

Hofstadter’s deepest insight was that anti-intellectualism does not just attack knowledge. It inverts the value system. It does not simply say “education doesn’t matter.” It says “education is the problem.” The expert is not just wrong. The expert is dangerous. The professor is not just out of touch. The professor is the enemy. The scientist is not just mistaken. The scientist is part of the conspiracy.

This inversion is what makes anti-intellectualism so resistant to correction. You cannot educate someone out of a position that defines education as the threat. You cannot provide evidence to someone who has decided that evidence is the enemy. The more credentials you bring to the argument, the less credible you become in their eyes. Because your credentials are not proof that you know what you are talking about. Your credentials are proof that you are part of the system they have been taught to hate.

They told you being stupid was patriotic. They told you not knowing things was freedom. They told you the experts were lying and the conspiracy theorist on YouTube was telling the truth. They told you college was a scam and your ignorance was a badge of honor.

And while you were burning books, their kids were reading them at Harvard.

That is anti-intellectualism in America. Not the absence of knowledge. The weaponization of resentment against the people who have it. A four-hundred-year tradition of attacking the thing you wish you had and calling the attack a virtue.

Hofstadter documented it in 1963. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it. And sixty years later, the party that hates education still can’t figure out why they keep losing the people who have one.

Sources

Hofstadter, R. (1963). Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Alfred A. Knopf. (Winner, 1964 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.)

Hofstadter, R. (1964). The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Harper’s Magazine, November 1964.

Pew Research Center. (2025, June 26). Voting Patterns in the 2024 Election.

Pew Research Center. (2024, April 9). Partisanship by Race, Ethnicity and Education.

The Chronicle of Higher Education. (2024, November 6). The College-Degree Divide Is Becoming a Chasm.

Inside Higher Education. (2024, November 8). Education-Level Voting Gaps Are Highest Among Men, White People.

Mooney, C. (2005). The Republican War on Science. Basic Books.

Nichols, T. (2017). The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. Oxford University Press.

Motta, M. (2018). The Dynamics and Political Implications of Anti-Intellectualism in the United States. American Politics Research, 46(3), 465-498.

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