The Right Wants You Stupid

The opening of Russell Kirk’s classic book The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot begins, as much of right-wing thought does, with grievance. Kirk had a serious axe to grind against J. S. Mill, the patron saint of progressive liberalism. Kirk resented Mill’s biting charge that, by and large, “most stupid people are conservative” and that this was “so obviously and universally admitted a principle” that he thought hardly anyone would or could deny it. Kirk, a thoughtful man very capable of effectively apologizing for some frequently bad ideas, wanted to reject the charge. 

“‘The Stupid Party’: this is John Stuart Mill’s description of conservatives. Like certain other summary dicta which nineteenth-century liberals thought to be forever triumphant, his judgement needs review in our age of disintegrating liberal and radical notions. Certainly many dull and unreflecting people have lent their inertia to the cause of conservatism … But the conservative principle has been defended, these past two centuries, by men of learning and genius.”

Kirk was right to take offense. Conservatism, and even more radical forms of right-wing thought, has often been defended with insight and even profundity. Liberals and leftists would benefit from spending more time internalizing the wisdom of the right. Nevertheless Mill, who was very familiar with intelligent right-wing contemporaries like Carlyle and Coleridge, grasped an important point that Kirk rarely acknowledged: the undeniable anti-intellectual streak that has pervaded the right down to Donald Trump declaring his love for the uneducated and JD Vance proclaiming professors are the enemy. This is a feature, not a bug, of many (though obviously not all) on the right’s worldview. Throughout this essay I’ll be a little heavy-handed with long quotations to avoid taking things out of context.

Defending unthinking people

“There is a natural instinct in unthinking people—who, tolerant of the burdens that life lays on them, and unwilling to lodge blame where they see no remedy, seek fulfilment in the world that is—to accept and endorse through their actions the institutions and practices into which they are born. This instinct, which I have attempted to translate into the self-conscious language of political doctrine, is rooted in human nature, and in elaborating its foundations I have also been adumbrating a tentative philosophy of man … But the task has now met an obstacle. To defend the unthinking prejudice of the normal active person was easy in an age when prejudices followed at once from the dogmas of received religion, or when social continuity ensured that those who rose to self-consciousness nevertheless departed only in the smallest items of belief from the happier mortals who were fated to never question what they knew.”
—Roger Scruton, the Meaning of Conservatism

Scruton understood better than anyone the foundational origins of the right’s anti-intellectualism and defended it explicitly. Scruton realized that allegiance to the hierarchies that bind society together operate far better when they are treated as eternal, organic, and beyond contestation as natural law. Scruton lyricized this as commending those who don’t have reasons for their beliefs, and described the job of the conservative intellectual as offering reasons for why ordinary people ought not to have reasons. Just so. An excess of thinking on the part of ordinary people tends to turn obedient subjects into free and equal citizens who, upon deliberating, realize that a king is but a man and a queen is but a woman and therefore aren’t owed automatic obedience. For Scruton, an orderly society depended on cheerfully “unthinking” people who had internalized the all-important virtue of obedience to their betters.

James Fitzjames Stephen captures this spirit of the right in his classic polemic against Mill, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. 

“The main point is that enthusiasm for liberty in this sense is hardly compatible with anything like a proper sense of the importance of the virtue of obedience, discipline in its widest sense. The attitude of mind engendered by continual glorification of the present time, and of successful resistance to an authority assumed to be usurped and foolish, is almost of necessity fatal to the recognition of the fact that to obey a real superior, to submit to a real necessity and make the best of it in good part, is one of the most important of all virtues—a virtue absolutely essential to the attainment of anything great and lasting.”

Origins of thoughtlessness

The origins of right-wingers defending unthinking people goes back to the Revolutionary Age. Liberalism had burst onto the world as a novel creed demanding liberty, equality, and fraternity for all. In Modern Social Imaginaries philosopher Charles Taylor notes how “pre-modern” views of society tended to naturalize and even divinize inequality. In the City and Man Leo Strauss echoes this idea when he points out that for a thinker like Aristotle “political inequality is ultimately justified by the natural inequality among men. The fact that some men are by nature rulers and others by nature ruled points in turn to the inequality which pervades nature: an ordered whole consists of beings of different rank.” Taylor describes the prevailing model of society as pivoting around “hierarchical complementarity.” It was understood that people of different ranks needed and depended on one another, but ought not to possess the same dignity or status. 

This was seen as the natural order of things, even ordained by God. Sometimes naturalization and religious sublimation went together. In Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Order Don Herzog points out how churchgoers learned about the “Great Chain of Being” where the cosmos were ruled over by God the king, and every other being occupied an ever lesser rung on the chain. Human societies, from the kingdom to the family, emulated the structure of the Great Chain of Being in microcosm. This was all taken for granted as the way things are and ought to be, with early conservatives like Robert Filmer defending the monarchy as analogous to natural and divinely ordained patriarchal control in Patriarcha. 

This all changed during the Enlightenment, when liberal and radical thinkers came to dismiss mythological cosmologies like the Great Chain of Being as superstition. Instead, they presented a new vision of society as a voluntary creation of free and equal citizens who maintained certain fundamental rights even after submitting to the laws of civil society. These ideas caught fire because they spoke to thousands of increasingly educated and literate people who felt marginalized under the authoritarian domination of ancien régimes. Many, though not all, on the contemporary right are nostalgic for these pre-liberal social imaginaries and wish to recover them. Even when those on the right understand that’s impossible, their utopian visions are meant to overturn the liberal aspiration for free and equal societies.

Faced with powerful mass movements that rejected longstanding arguments naturalizing and sublimating their preferred hierarchies, the modern right wing responded in several ways. As Corey Robin notes in The Reactionary Mind plenty of them were actually fiercely critical of establishment elites for failing to turn back the tide of ascendent revolution. They called for a rejuvenation of the elite, or even demanded a new, more worthy elite take the place of the old one. Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism” and early twentieth century “conservative revolutionary” thought falls into this paradigm. Others suggested offering some tentative reforms on the basis that prudent conservatives had to change in order to conserve what they could of the old order. 

But the tactic I want to focus on is the redirection of critical emphasis against mass intellectualism. Rather than acknowledge the source of social dissatisfaction in the practices and institutions liberals and leftists criticize, right-wingers located the dissatisfaction in the fact that liberals and leftists were criticizing. It's much easier to insist that if only liberal and leftist intellectuals stopped riling up ordinary people with their polemics and scandalous ideas, the “pleasing illusions” that held society and its authorities together would function just fine. The alternative of course would be conceding the source of people’s dissatisfaction in fact came from problems with existing practices and institutions, which would strongly suggest they ought to be reformed or undone. Edmund Burke articulated the point well in Reflections on the Revolution in France.

“But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which by a bland assimilation incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded, as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. On this scheme of things, a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal,—and an animal not of the highest order.”

The age of chivalry, with its knights, castles, kings, and dignified aristocrats was over. That of the “sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded.” As a result Burke worried that we’d never again see “that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom!” Burke laid much of the blame on the intellectuals who had relentlessly examined, criticized and found fault in their societies and then stirred the masses to revolt through spreading the “polluted nonsense of their most licentious and giddy coffee-houses.”

Burke would often not bother to directly rebut the claims of his intellectual opponents; he would  sometimes even implicitly concede their points. He granted that the sublime religious ideas attached to the feudal aristocracy were illusions. But Burke thought that was irrelevant if pleasing illusions, prejudices, and unthought opinions were needed to order society from top to bottom. What mattered was that an idea was effectual, rather than it was true. This extended all the way to how we should even understand the founding of one’s country and its authority structures, which rarely meshed with patriotic mythologies. Who cares? Much harm was caused when the all too human origins of society were exposed, which is why Burke also recommended not examining those origins too deeply. He insisted in a 1788 speech that there was 

“a sacred veil to be drawn over the beginning of all governments. Ours in India had an origin like those which time has sanctified by obscurity. Time, in the origin of most governments, has thrown this mysterious veil over them; prudence and discretion make it necessary to throw something of the same drapery over more recent foundations, in which otherwise the fortune, the genius, the talents, and military virtue of this nation never shone more conspicuously. But whatever necessity might hide or excuse or palliate, in the acquisition of power, a wise nation, when it has once made a revolution upon its own principles and for its own ends, rests there.”

We see this today in how Ron DeSantis, Trump, and the MAGA intelligentsia obstruct ordinary people from thinking about the colonialism, slavery, etc of the American founding today. This in turn inoculates existing society against the claim that the damage caused at the founding still has an impact.

The agitation of the philosophes and the revolutionaries turned subjects from “protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions.” They impart “false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life” which served “only to aggravate and embitter that real inequality which it never can remove, and which the order of civil life establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in an humble state as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy.” Decades later Nietzsche echoed a similar sentiment in Twilight of the Idols when he chastised the quite conservative German ruling class for educating the working people. He asked “what do people want? If they desire a certain end, then they should desire the means thereto. If they will have slaves, then it is madness to educate them to be masters.” Educating ordinary people forever excluded the possibility of having a docile and passive “Chinamen” who would do as he’s told.

Thoughtlessness through the years

Burke was far from the only figure who resented efforts to intellectually awaken the masses. His contemporary Joseph de Maistre was even more emphatic. In The Generative Principle of Political Constitutions de Maistre described Enlightenment philosophy as fundamentally a destructive force. It led individuals to prioritize their own reason and thinking for themselves. This led to society dissolving into skepticism and endless deliberation, from which nothing great could come because no authority could be maintained.

“When the individual reason dominates, there can be nothing great, for everything great rests on a belief, and the clash of individual opinions left to themselves produces only skepticism which is destructive of everything. General and individual morality, religion, laws, revered customs, useful prejudices, nothing is left standing, everything falls before it; it is the universal solvent.”

What then was the alternative? De Maistre had an answer. The “nascent reason” of individuals “should be curbed under a double yoke; it should be frustrated, and it should lose itself in the national mind, so that it changes its individual existence for another communal existence.” To ensure this a person’s “cradle should be surrounded by dogmas; and, when his reason awakes, all his opinions should be given, at least those relating to his conduct. Nothing is more vital to him than prejudices.” 

In Poisoning the Minds of the Low Orders, his great book on early modern conservatism, Don Herzog notes how British conservatives relentlessly argued that the lower orders ought not to be educated lest it provoke “insubordination.” Herzog cites an 1806 pamphlet by Patrick Colquhoun:

“It is not, however, proposed … that the children of the poor should be educated in a manner to elevate their minds above the rank they are destined to fill in society … Utopian schemes for an extensive diffusion of knowledge would be injurious and absurd. A right bias to their minds, and a sufficient education to enable them to preserve, and to estimate properly, the religious and moral instruction they receive, is all that is, or ought ever to be, in contemplation. To go beyond this point would be to confound the ranks of society upon which the general happiness of the lower orders, no less than those that are more elevated depends; since by indiscriminate education those destined for laborious occupations would become discontented and unhappy in an inferior situation in life.”

Burke and de Maistre speak in a powdery vein that thinly conceals deep anxiety. Their work is filled with declarations about the providential and natural necessity of existing hierarchies. This is belied by their simultaneous insistence that these hierarchies are somehow terribly fragile—so fragile that, per Colquhoun, giving the lower orders a little education that goes beyond religious and moral instruction to keep in their place threatens to bring the whole hierarchy down. They were right to be worried. As education extended the eternal social hierarchies the early modern right insisted were absolutely necessary were gradually recognized as largely unnecessary and replaced. Society trudged on, often for the better, especially those like women and slaves who had been denigrated as natural inferiors for centuries and yet demanded emancipation when the opportunity came. 

The right’s anti-intellectualism in the modern era 

In the modern era the right and its intellectuals have often been more taciturn in cheerleading overt thoughtlessness. This is in part for strategic reasons. In an increasingly democratic era it is dangerous to chastise potential voters for deliberating on politics and commend them for sheep-like obedience. Moreover, as the range of political ideologies grew and the naturalness of longstanding hierarchies were increasingly questioned, the right recognized the need for intellectual justification. To offer “reasons” for why people ought not to have reasons, to invoke Scruton again. This meant cultivating their own intellectual canon and activists.  

But that hardly means that injunctions to thoughtlessness, let alone anger towards upstart intellectualism, have stopped. The right remains resolutely opposed to excess critical reason, seeing it as a disintegrative force that continues to undermine authority structures that ought to be called sacred. 

A key text to understanding the American right is Wilmoore Kendall’s 1959 essay “Was Athens Right to Kill Socrates?” (originally published as “The People vs Socrates Revisited.”) Like Kirk, Stephens, and later Patrick Deneen it should come as no surprise Kendall thinks J. S. Mill is the worst thing to ever happen to society. Kendall takes issue with Mill’s Socratic insistence that everyone should have maximal liberty to deliberate on society, and that every social practice and institution ought to be critically examined. Kendall rejects this commitment to an “open society” defined by Socratic dialectic. Instead Kendall insists that elites, going back to the Athenians, are right to execute gadflies like Socrates who stir the youth of the city to excess questioning. As Kendall puts it:

“They cannot tolerate Socrates on the grounds that he is harmless because, for one thing, he has followers who may, if he keeps on talking, become more numerous tomorrow, and may become sufficiently numerous the day after tomorrow to take over, and destroy the Athenian way of life out of hand. For them to let Socrates go on talking, given his ability to fascinate youngsters who know no better than to be convinced by him, is to court that danger, and that is no less irresponsible and immoral than to carry out Socrates’ revolution themselves.”

The national conservative philosopher Yoram Hazony articulated a similar point about the dangers of critical reason to traditional hierarchies very well in his recent opus Conservatism: A Rediscovery. Echoing de Maistre centuries before, you can imagine Hazony directing his charge against modern Marxists, critical race theorists, and woke feminist liberals who trouble the providential order of authority structures:

“Indeed, the only thing that reasoning without reference to some traditional framework can do with great competence is identify an unlimited number of flaws and failings, both imagined and real, in whatever institutions and norms have been inherited from the past. Where individuals are encouraged to engage in this activity, the process of finding flaws in inherited institutions proceeds with ever greater speed and enthusiasm, until in the end whatever has been inherited becomes a thing of lightness and folly in their eyes. In this way, they come to reject all the old ideas and behaviors, uprooting and discarding everything that was once a matter of consensus. This means that Enlightenment rationalism, to the extent that its program is taken seriously, is an engine of perpetual revolution, which brings about the progressive destruction of every inherited institution, yet without ever being able to consolidate a stable consensus around any new ones.” 

Police your mind against thought

All this has had profound effects on the valences of right-wing politics. I’ll only cover some features here.

One is that the right has enormous general reservations about the value of free enquiry. In America this goes back a long way. One only need read William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale to learn how uninterested he was in ideological neutrality. As far as Buckley and his contemporary disciples are concerned “academic freedom” is a misnomer because schools aren’t there to inspire students to critically debate values. They’re there to indoctrinate students in “true” values. Which of course are theirs. 

You can see extensions of this in Chris Rufo/Ron DeSantis and the Trump administration’s never-ending crusade against higher education. As JD Vance said, “professors are the enemy.” This isn’t to say that there aren’t right-wing intellectuals still residually loyal to classical liberalism, who defend free speech for its own sake. But for many, the free speech arguments advanced during the “woke era” were less principled than strategic. They were intended to mobilize popular anger against liberal and left-wing excesses on behalf of a principle most Americans support. Now that the Trump administration is in power those contingent commitments to freedom of speech and academic inquiry can be dropped. 

We see this in Florida, where sociology professors are now required to refrain from discussing or even gesturing to structural discrimination. How an American sociologist could describe existing society without discussing the legacies of strike-breaking, women’s legal marginalization, or Jim Crow is left to the imagination. In Texas a philosophy professor was recently prohibited from teaching Plato, since works like the Symposium critically examine gender, sexuality, and other now taboo topics. The self-proclaimed defenders of Western civilization are really in the business of defending Western Civ^™️. Much like Kierkegaard’s Christendom was a banalized version of Christianity that trivialized the message of Christ far more than honest atheism, Western Civ^™️ is a banalization of the complex internal diversity and profound debates of a millennia-spanning culture. It reduces the tradition down to the tropes accepted by the golf course class.

Another feature of the right’s anti-intellectualism is the approach conservatives now take towards intellectual debate. Much has been written about the ever lower quality of conservative engagements with liberal and left-wing arguments. The attitude often seems to be we can break our standards quicker than we can lower them. Right down to Mark Levin railing against the “Franklin School of Critical Theory.” Part of the reason for this deficiency is institutional. By and large liberals and leftists are over-represented in academia and journalism, meaning many conservative intellectuals no longer internalize the skill set needed to carefully rebut views they are less familiar with. 

But there is a broader ideological explanation as well. In The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy Theory, A. J. A. Woods ponders why conservatives increasingly use catch-all, wildly inaccurate terms like “cultural Marxism” to describe anything they don’t like, and why they seem indifferent to countless critics calling them out for sloppiness. Woods discusses a 2020 conference where William S. Lind—who coined the term “cultural Marxism” in an American context—described its value to the right in affective rather than analytical terms. Lind stressed that terms like “Cultural Marxism” should be used as a “delegitimizing tool in the United States, because many Americans regard anything even remotely Marxist as illegitimate.” As a result there was no need to “quibble over definitions of Marxism or prove that political correctness is genuinely Marxist, because, as Lind claims, the American public does not generally care about these academic debates. Do not waste your time on research, Lind counsels.” 

In other words, intellectual battles for the right are often not about proving what is true and what is false. To go back to Kendall, they think it's naïve to imagine politics could ever be a Socratic dialogue between competing sides with an aim of arriving at the truth. Instead, to invoke Reagan intellectual and white nationalist Samuel Francis, politics is about power. This relates to ideas because whoever is atop the pecking order gets to implement their ideas, and those who are subordinated don’t. Naturally, the right thinks there always ought to be a pecking order, and think it ought to be them on top. This dovetails with their broader anti-intellectualism to induce an attitude of indifference towards getting the arguments of their adversaries right. Who cares if caricaturing their claims mobilizes anger and resentment in strategic directions?

Lastly, the right’s anti-intellectual animus sometimes reaches such a fever pitch it extends downwards into encouraging their own followers to think ever less critically. There is a real fear that sincere dialogue with liberals and leftists would imply there might be plausible reasons to hold progressive positions. This is perceived as threatening—a bridge too far towards the kind of open-mindedness and democratic impulses that tends to induce. In Right Wing Revolution the late Charlie Kirk recommends that right-wingers “police” their own thinking to prevent themselves or onlookers imagining they are open-minded about whether their views are correct. A lack of dogmatism has no place in contemporary right-wing politics where framing an issue as reductively as possible is crucial to victory. Even if that means not acknowledging doubts. As Kirk puts it: 

“So how do we turn back wokeness? It starts by refusing to give a single inch on framing. This has to happen on two levels. First, don’t let the woke set the frame tactically by deciding what words are used. But second, and even more importantly, police your own thinking to make sure you aren’t letting them set the moral framework of debate. We should be confident that our worldview is correct. Even if we aren’t fully certain what is right in a given context, we can definitely be certain that the left is wrong. So quite simply, stop giving them a pass. Chase a clear-cut, black-and white, Luke Skywalker vs Darth Vader attitude toward every issue possible.”

Kirk could be quite insightful, and his argument here takes everything I’ve said to a neatly logical conclusion. We can understand now that Mill was partially wrong. It's not that conservatives are stupid people. It's that conservatives want people to be stupid.

Featured image is Tucker Carlson, by Gage Skidmore