Why are the Republicans so anti-intellectual?

The "New Scopes Trial" is coming soon to a right-wing "News" outlet near you. Chris Mooney at the American Prospect reports that the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit on First Amendment grounds against the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district. The reason is that the school district has decided to include the religious idea "Intelligent Design," or ID, in its biology curriculum. The curriculum is one designed and pushed by the ultra-conservative Discovery Institute.

Hearings will begin September 26, 2005.

In 1966 two young liberal Republicans, Bruce Chapman and George Gilder, published a book called "The Party That Lost Its Head." In it they

...critiqued Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential candidacy. The book labeled the Goldwater campaign a “brute assault on the entire intellectual world” and blamed this development on a woefully wrongheaded political tactic: “In recent years the Republicans as a party have been alienating intellectuals deliberately, as a matter of taste and strategy.”

The modern American conservative movement is another of the many Post - World War I reactions to the Liberalism of 19th century Enlightenment Europe. As stated by Paul Berman in his excellent book "Terror and Liberalism" [see right column of this web magizine and click through] such reactions against Liberalism include Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and Islamicism. American religous fundamentalism is another basis for such an attack on rationality, liberal popular government and modernism. All are anti-intllectual and based on the attempt to take society back to some mythical previous state that Berman calls an "Ur-Myth." All use modern propaganda techniques, violence and dictatorial government to achieve their ends.

Essentially the Republicnas today are anti-intellectual because that is the political ideology that allows them to skim the most money off the productive people of society with the minimum effort. Am I saying that they have been bought and paid for by anti-intellectual forces?

Tell me, why did the tobacco executives tell the U.S. Senate they did not believe tobacco caused cancer. We all know the anser to that. They were bought and paid for, and money meant more than any form of social responsiblity. They had theirs and didn't care who got hurt when they got it.

The Tobacco Executives were all Republicans, too.

Being well-paid and stealing money from the taxpayers forces you to be anti-intellectual.