Reply #28: Nothing new in this kind of slur . . .

[Journeyman]

Richard Hofstadter chronicled the attack on the educated in his 1964 Pulitzer Prize-winning study, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life.

You can take heart, however, in Hoftstadter's assertion that anti-intellectualism is subject to cyclical fluctuations, and when society's disdain reaches its nadir something usually happens to bring intellectuals back into favor (e.g., the post-war euphoria for the intelligentsia's aid in winning the war with the atomic bomb gave way to the rabid abuses of McCarthyism, which in turn receded with the need -- indeed the demand -- for intellectuals in the wake of Sputnik).