"Three enduring elements of twentieth-century American anti-intellectualism may be inferred from Bryan’s rhetorical melding of fundamentalist faith with opposition to the world’s first Communist state and its official atheism. First and foremost is the portrayal of experts—not just a “soviet” but a “scientific soviet”—as an alien organism within the American body politic. Bryan then expresses resentment toward an educated minority seen as a separate class, determined to impose its views on the majority. Finally, this separate class is identified as an enemy of religion. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which has always been seen by its opponents as ideological and metaphysical rather than scientific, tapped into the vague resentment most people feel toward experts on whom they depend but whose work they do not understand."
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The Age of American Unreason
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