Show Notes
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 t
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There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.
There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching something fall apart in exactly the way someone told you it would. Not vaguely. Not in broad metaphorical strokes. In order. Step by step. With the stages so clearly defined that anyone paying attention can call the next one before it happens. Plato had that frustration 2,400 years ago. He lived through it. He watched the Athenian democracy, the most advanced political experiment in the ancient world, turn on itself. He watched it execute Socrates, his teacher, arguably the sharpest mind in the city, for the crime of asking uncomfortable questions. And instead of moving on, Plato spent the rest of his life trying to explain how a society capable of producing genius could also be stupid enough to kill it. The result was The Republic. And while most of the book covers justice, education, and the nature of reality, Book Eight is something different entirely. Book Eight is a manual. It is Plato at his most concrete, walking through the specific sequence of events that takes a functioning democracy and turns it into a dictatorship. Not in abstract terms. In stages. With causes, mechanisms, and outcomes laid out in an order that has repeated across civilizations for two millennia.