>I just love American left anti-intellectualism. Who needs a buncha
>pointy heads sayin things good plain folk cain't unnerstan, anyway?
It makes sense *for the Right* to put out anti-intellectual propaganda, since one of the Right's objectives is to diminish public support of higher education (& public education in general for that matter), curtailing working-class students' access to it, privatizing it piecemeal, etc. So, when *they* yuck about "pointy-headed denizens of ivory towers," they are doing what's in their political interest.
In contrast, anti-intellectualism of the Left doesn't make any political sense whatsoever today. Most American leftists, if asked, probably say that public funding of higher education is important, that the privatization (via higher tuitions, more reliance upon student debts than grants, increasing dependence upon funding from private sources such as corporations & foundations, etc.) of higher education is terrible, and so on. Then again, though, if you listen to them talk about evils of "jargon," "academic books," "academic Marxists," and so on, and so forth, you will find it hard to imagine that higher education is worth a penny of taxpayers' dollars. (I don't know if they are consistent in their personal lives & also encourage their kids not to waste time on "academic books.") Why pay for what's worthless? Doesn't make sense to me.
Naturally, this type of contradiction in the muddled thinking on the Left is more prominent in the USA than anywhere else.
Yoshie