Anti-Intellectualism and the "Dumbing Down" of America
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-americaSusan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason (link is external), says in an article in the Washington Post, Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.
There has been a long tradition of anti-intellectualism in America, unlike most other Western countries. Richard Hofstadter, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964 for his book, Anti-Intellectualism In American Life, describes how the vast underlying foundations of anti-elite, anti-reason and anti-science have been infused into America’s political and social fabric. Famous science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once said: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."...
Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America (link is external), adds another perspective: “The rise of idiot America today represents--for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power--the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert.”
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All those potential employers out there must be intimidated by my intellect. 
were debating something with a right-wing co-worker.
This was a few years ago, so I don't recall the issue, but I remember the right-winger said to my friend (who had just had a baby with his wife): "I bet you want your daughter to go to college, too."
He said it as if he had just scored some zinger of an insult.
My friend glanced at me, a little confused, and said: "Well, yeah."
This same right-winger would always lambaste the "liberal media." I would point out to him that "the media" aren't owned by Marxist collectives...they're owned (mostly) by a small handful of profit-driven corporate conglomerates that by and large have conservative to far right (FOX) worldviews.
Each time I'd tell him that (and I told him a number of times), he would just stare blankly at me and we'd stand there in awkward (for me) silence.
It was the weirdest thing.
...in denigrating and ridiculing intellectualism. Most of those people are from elite, highly educated backgrounds themselves. 
In the American context, anti-intellectualism serves a right-wing conservative political agenda - because the intellectual disciplines have historically been a site of resistance to and criticism of power and its hegemonic processes. In this context, I'm thinking especially of the radical/left-wing intellectuals and campus activists who arose out of the campus movements of the 60s and 70s. These intellectuals and the movements that they were associated with were a direct threat to elite power; thus, the need to repress or worse, co-opt or otherwise undermine them.
