One of the most recognizable cultural traits of American culture is its anti-intellectualism. Like its concept of democracy―and like any idea presented as new―it was associated with a historical or mythological era of prestige: ancient Greece. A similar (and equally distorted) phenomenon existed with regard to intellectualism in this country. We might suspect that the root of anti-intellectualism coincides with the death of true democracy―the one that sparked the Enlightenment and adorned the American Revolution: Native civilization, and more specifically, the Iroquois-Algonquian civilization.
Once the United States was founded, its 1776 Declaration of Independence and its 1789 Constitution reflected the Enlightenment ideas of its founders. The ideas, not the practices. One of the first major figures to gain firsthand knowledge of the Iroquois culture and system of direct democracy was Benjamin Franklin, another Enlightenment thinker. Franklin combined in his intellectual life both admiration and contempt for the so-called savages, which stemmed from his Enlightenment intellectualism and his European racism.
Before analyzing the historical roots of this problem, let us note a constitutive element that will nourish the roots of the phenomenon. Anti-intellectualism has always been one of the existential conditions of capitalism, since its emergence in the 16th century (in a more radical and fanatical form within the context of the Calvinist Reformation), and it remains so in contemporary capitalist consumer culture.
The British empiricist intelligentsia distinguished itself from the French rationalist one―I suspect that this was not the cause but a consequence of a prior cultural factor. Even though the British produced thinkers such as John Locke (who justified the transformation of the medieval nobleman into the liberal capitalist), the central needs of capitalism and imperialism did not require philosophers or critics, but rather investors indifferent to anything other than net profit and colonists indifferent to any moral scruples. Philosophers were not needed, but propagandists were, and there is no propaganda without a radical simplification of ideas into some simple dogma, however absurd it may be, such as “my selfishness is a blessing for others.”
The brutality and greed of the Iberian conquerors and settlers were no less, but their ideology and their religious and racial fanaticism were a few steps below that of the Anglo-Saxons. In religion, the intellectualism of the Jesuits stood at the opposite pole from that of the Puritans. The same was true of the degree of messianic and racist fanaticism―a difference that persists to this day.
The Founding Fathers were closer to the intellectual world of the French Enlightenment. From Benjamin Franklin to Thomas Jefferson, with exceptions such as George Washington, they were all intellectuals―not only because of their vast culture and their reflections on existence and politics, but also because of their distance from the way of upholding a truth based on repetition, on the authority of faith over reason, and on the conditioning (and fear) of not questioning the dogmas received in childhood.
Intellectuals and hypocrites, of course: the slave system they protected was an expression of radical capitalism―the privatization of land, people, and profits. This system, grounded first in religious theories (Manifest Destiny) and later in racial theories (the superiority of the Caucasian race), also had an anti-intellectual core.
Few cultures, few civilizations were further removed from this reality than the Native peoples, such as the Iroquois. From the French Jesuits of the 16th century to Franklin, two centuries later, the Native peoples of the Great Lakes were described as peoples who believed in verifiable evidence, to the extent of accepting the possibility of their own error. The Native peoples used reasoning to distinguish between good and evil, and their leaders were not chosen for their physical or material power, much less for their capacity to intimidate, but for the exact opposite: they were leaders because of their dialectical power, their ability to convince their people of the wisdom of a decision at the national level.
The founding generation of the first American republic was an elite of intellectuals, as racist and pro-slavery as the rest of the population but, by far, less fanatical. The first generation that followed was that of Andrew Jackson. Jackson was not only a semi-illiterate soldier, nicknamed “Killer of Indians” not by chance, but he also hated the founders for their intellectualism. It was no coincidence that Jefferson’s books were banned. It was no coincidence that Jefferson distrusted miracles and religious tyranny over freedom of thought. All elements present among the natives.
This was the first refounding of the United States: the open anti-intellectualism of Andrew Jackson. Illiterate, fanatical, and genocidal but not stupid, Jackson extended the right to vote to all white men in order to include settlers and slaveholders without plantations, whom he considered the “true lovers of freedom.” Many of them were not farmers, but settlers involved in the real estate business through the appropriation of Indigenous and Mexican territories. By the late 19th century, these figures were idealized as the “pioneer” and the “frontier man,” romanticized in myths such as David Crockett and Daniel Boone. The frontiersman became a symbol of freedom, masculinity, and individualism when, by the late 19th century, it was proudly accepted that the United States was an empire, as brutal as any other―albeit in the name of freedom and democracy. This new culture helped to silence, with relative success, anti-imperialist intellectuals such as Henry Thoreau, Mark Twain, Jane Addams, Du Bois, Ernest Hemingway, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn. Intellectual life survived, largely, in universities and within communities of writers and artists. Naturally, these were demonized as “nests of leftists”―something we explained in greater detail years ago.
In 2021, current Vice President J.D. Vance delivered a speech at the National Right-Wing Conference in Orlando titled “Colleges Are the Enemy.” In it, he quoted Richard Nixon (from a conversation recorded in the Oval Office in 1972 between Nixon and Henry Kissinger) in which Nixon stated that “professors are the enemy.” Vance added that conservatives should “honestly and aggressively attack the universities of this country.”
The puppets of the colonies, such as the libertarians in Argentina, did not hesitate to copy this as well. This stance reflects one of the principles of what has been called, for a couple of decades now, the “Dark Enlightenment”―not unlike “war is peace.”
What is the source of this hostility? It stems from the agony of Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Culture and universities can be bought, just like other sectors of society, but they are harder to control. On the other hand, lovers of money and power rarely become professors or writers, since academic life typically demands decades of research with meager financial rewards. As a result, many academics tend not to favor anti-intellectual, religiously tinged, business-friendly pragmatism. A stance that, in turn, is frequently branded as un-American―by capitalist and anti-intellectual power.
When, on a freezing night in January 1777, after several centuries of existence and successful resistance against the two greatest empires of the time, the French and the British, the Great Iroquois Peace League extinguished its fire, one thing must have been clear ―if we do not underestimate the intelligence of the Iroquois and the beliefs of the brutal hordes of Anglo-Saxon settlers who attacked, plundered, and murdered them in the name of their god: in the end, victory―the difference between survival and extinction―was based on force; on the force of religious fanaticism, allied with the brute force of the rifle and the cannon. Not on reason.
Jorge Majfud, April 2, 2026.
