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Will the world ever stop being anti-intellectual?
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this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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I wouldn't say "the world" is anti-intellectual, some populists are. The US right is definitely anti-intellectual and they have better PR so you're getting a lot of if in the media. It's because Republican voters are mostly from small towns and not well educated so the party is trying to demonize education as something elitist. It's the same in Poland where the ruling, far-right party's electorate are mostly people from smaller towns and villages. But in Spain where the right wing voters are mostly upper class and well educated and left wing voters are working class you don't see a lot of anti-intellectual rhetoric. For example the anti-vax movement during covid was mostly non-existent here. I think UK is the same: right wing party is the party of well educated voters so they don't promote anti-intellectual ideas.
That maybe was the case at one time. Labor was certainly the party of the common man.
But Tories became more populist as xenophobia and racism became more valuable to them. Just look at all the Brexit nonsense and their embrace of UKIP. Michael Gove, a prominent member of the conservative party, during the lead-up to the Brexit referendum, said in favor of Brexit, "I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong."
Edit: but I'm not British, so I could be wrong.
Same, I'm not British so I'm basing this only on what I've see in the news but as I see it it's more about nationalism and racism than anti-intellectualism. It's more like "it's time to stop listening to the economists and just kick all the foreigners out". You know, as in experts might be right about the economy suffering but we don't care, we just want "our country back". I really don't see a lot of "education is bad, universities are bad" propaganda from UK right. Boris was definitely pretending he didn't got to the elite schools and clubs but the rest of recent PMs do not.
Populists are anti-intellectual because it is a prevailing opinion. That's what populism means.
It's prevailing in some countries as I explained, not in the entire world IMHO.
But it's not just some countries, it's our entire corner of the world - for my purposes the more or less "western aligned" one.
I'm Norwegian and we've just almost definitely flipped conservative again after a remarkably efficient belly flop by "Labour". They fucked up bad enough even local elections turned markedly conservative, in some cases ending basically 100 years of Labour tradition. Sweden is seeing a marked rise in the "immigrant bad" Sverigedemokraterna, which were pretty fringe until recently. Germany has the whole AfD thing going on. You already mentioned Poland and the UK. There's also Hungary in the same vein. Slovakia just turned pro-Russia which is inherently hard to couple with intellect. All of this has been fairly noticeable over the past decade, and that's just the Euro view. In the US they went from "your suit sucks" to "you weren't born here" and then really jumped the shark.
You're confused. We're not talking about countries turning right, we're talking about countries being anti-intellectual. It's not the same. Far-right Spanish parties are not anti-intellectual, far-right UK parties are not (IMHO) anti-intellectual. Also, is the other way around: people are not voting for far-right parties because they are anti-intellectual. Attacking education is just a tool used by right with parties to create division between "us" (the God fearing, traditional values loving conservatives) and "them" (the educated elites that want to destroy the traditional way of living). The growing anti-intellectual sentiments is just a result of right wing parties gaining power, not the other way around.