One of the most aggravating things to me in this world has to be the absolutely rampant anti-intellectualism that dominates so many conversations and debates, and its influence just seems to be expanding. Do you think there will ever actually be a time when this ends? I'd hope so once people become more educated and cultural changes eventually happen, but as of now it honestly infuriates me like few things ever have.
I wouldn’t say “the world” is anti-intellectual, some populists are. The US right is definitely anti-intellectual and they have better PR so you’re getting a lot of if in the media. It’s because Republican voters are mostly from small towns and not well educated so the party is trying to demonize education as something elitist. It’s the same in Poland where the ruling, far-right party’s electorate are mostly people from smaller towns and villages. But in Spain where the right wing voters are mostly upper class and well educated and left wing voters are working class you don’t see a lot of anti-intellectual rhetoric. For example the anti-vax movement during covid was mostly non-existent here. I think UK is the same: right wing party is the party of well educated voters so they don’t promote anti-intellectual ideas.
Populists are anti-intellectual because it is a prevailing opinion. That’s what populism means.
It’s prevailing in some countries as I explained, not in the entire world IMHO.
But it’s not just some countries, it’s our entire corner of the world - for my purposes the more or less “western aligned” one.
I’m Norwegian and we’ve just almost definitely flipped conservative again after a remarkably efficient belly flop by “Labour”. They fucked up bad enough even local elections turned markedly conservative, in some cases ending basically 100 years of Labour tradition. Sweden is seeing a marked rise in the “immigrant bad” Sverigedemokraterna, which were pretty fringe until recently. Germany has the whole AfD thing going on. You already mentioned Poland and the UK. There’s also Hungary in the same vein. Slovakia just turned pro-Russia which is inherently hard to couple with intellect. All of this has been fairly noticeable over the past decade, and that’s just the Euro view. In the US they went from “your suit sucks” to “you weren’t born here” and then really jumped the shark.
You’re confused. We’re not talking about countries turning right, we’re talking about countries being anti-intellectual. It’s not the same. Far-right Spanish parties are not anti-intellectual, far-right UK parties are not (IMHO) anti-intellectual. Also, is the other way around: people are not voting for far-right parties because they are anti-intellectual. Attacking education is just a tool used by right with parties to create division between “us” (the God fearing, traditional values loving conservatives) and “them” (the educated elites that want to destroy the traditional way of living). The growing anti-intellectual sentiments is just a result of right wing parties gaining power, not the other way around.