The Right Flexes That Anti-intellectual Muscle Between Its Ears Once Again

The Clinton-McCain pincer movement executed on Sen. Obama subsequent to his "bitter" comment has been a marvel to watch unfold. Although his original remarks addressed the urgent needs of the American people and how they have historically responded to those needs, "What's really going on here," as Ed Kilgore of the Democratic Strategist has noted, "is that Obama's 'gaffe' has provided an imperfect but adequate match for the most urgent needs of his Democratic and Republican critics."

In short, another opportunity for a full and honest debate about something, anything that actually matters to the body politic is being put to the demagogic sword.

As Kilgore concluded:

I have no idea whether this brouhaha will matter at all in terms of a Democratic nominating contest that Obama's coming close to wrapping up. Without question, it will provide some renewed impetus to Clinton's determination to stay in the race until she's all but mathematically eliminated, and lots of breaths will be bated in anticipation of poll results weighing the impact of all the media hype on Obama's 'controversial' remarks. The one thing we know for sure is that the Right's reaction is providing a full-on sneak preview of its strategy to defeat Obama if he is the Democratic nominee. And it ain't pretty.

No, it ain't. But it is entertaining, even if in a kind of masochistic way.

It was a Clemson University professor, Laura Olson, with her own masochistic specialty in politics and religion, who, early on, previewed for the Politico the coming political circus: "What I really would be concerned about ... is that Republicans could really spin this and they could say Obama is a Marxist. That’s what Marx said [about religion]: It’s the opiate of the masses."

Oh, come on, Laura, even demagogues have standards. Don't they? Surely the Republican attack machine wouldn't stoop so low as to transmogrify Obama's strikingly manifest intellectuality on politico-cultural impediments to progress into a manifesto of Marxist indoctrination. Would it?

Indeed it would.

In no time flat, for instance, there, in print, was the New York Times' resident expert on neodecency, Bill Kristol, coming unglued in "The-Commies-are-coming-again" terror. Obama's comment "sent me to Marx’s famous statement about religion," wrote Kristol, from which he somehow concluded in the old '60s radical patois that Obama is "disdainful of small-town America — one might say, of bourgeois America. He’s usually good at disguising this. But in San Francisco the mask slipped."

It was Kristol's statement, in turn, that sent me back to a passage I had just read the day before regarding the historical political currents of anti-intellectualism in America, of which Kristol, as a voice of the right, is an unabashed purveyor. For the passage had struck a chord and launched a fundamental question with respect to the immediate presidential campaign.

In the run-up to The-Commies-are-coming Goldwater campaign, the great American historian David Herbert Donald wrote in a personal letter to the even greater American historian Richard Hofstadter: "What I think we are both troubled about here, basically, is not anti-intellectualism per se, but that democracy has necessarily anti-intellectual overtones, which cannot be curbed under our peculiar system of society."

Yet, try as they might have the Goldwater forces were indeed curbed -- they were unable to successfully exploit this democratic weakness, which had reached its apogee 10 years before in the McCarthy era. Anti-intellectualism as a political weapon took its own hit in the '64 presidential campaign, albeit temporarily, for it came roaring back in the 1970s guise of the New Right. Now there was a movement that would have truly depressed the holy hell out of Hofstadter, who left us far too young at 54 and much too early in 1970.

But what of today? Will the right once again profit from democratic America's "anti-intellectual overtones," as we are watching it strain mightily to accomplish in the aftermath of Obama's comments?

So far, the answer is no. It's a tentative no, no doubt, but a no nevertheless. So far, all those bated breaths "in anticipation of poll results weighing the impact of all the media hype on Obama's 'controversial' remarks" that Ed Kilgore wrote about have been eased with gentle sighs. So far, all the anti-intellectual straining of the right -- in addition to the similar hysteria of the Clinton campaign -- has produced nothing of electoral value for it.

It may be that this time around the body politic is not only bitter, it doesn't mind saying so. That trend would be out of character for the usually upbeat American electorate, but if existentially true it opens the door for more of Obama's intellectual honesty and spells doom for the designs of the anti-intellectual right.

It can scream "Marxist" and "elitist" and "unAmerican snob" all it wants, and few will care, because most -- after nearly eight years of this horrifying right-wing experiment -- are finally beyond those ploys. Or at least so far, so it seems.