The Disappearing Intellectual in the Age of Economic Darwinism

Anti-intellectualism and political illiteracy are sweeping across the American media and cultural landscape, giving rise to discourses that are unabashedly nativist, racist, and reactionary. Populist sentiments drive the rabid individualism and anti-government rhetoric of right-wing groups such as the Tea Party movement. Underlying these sentiments is not simply religious or libertarian ideology, but an insidious neoliberal, pro-corporate agenda that supports deregulated capitalism and the demise of the social state. As anti-intellectualism spreads in the media and political spheres, Americans increasingly accept as a principle of governance the reality of living in a Darwinist, survival-of-the-fittest world. If democracy is going to have a future in the United States, critical education and universities as democratic public spheres need to be defended and expanded in order to resist a growing wave of anti-intellectualism that heralds the disappearance of the critical intellectual, the depoliticization and reduction of civic responsibility to banal acts of production and consumption, and the rise of the punishing state and a culture of cruelty that abandon racial minorities, the unemployed, sick, elderly and poor to lives of violence, hardship, despair, and insecurity.