Anti-Intellectualism and the Attack on Expertise

Fascism is constitutively anti-intellectual. Eco lists "action for action's sake" and the irrationalist contempt for careful thought as foundational features of Ur-Fascism. The fascist ideal is the man of instinct and will, not the hesitating intellectual.

Expertise is portrayed as a form of elitism that disconnects rulers from the authentic instincts of the people. The university, the press, the scientific establishment, all are suspect as potential sites of cosmopolitan, anti-national thinking. Stanley (2018) identifies "anti-intellectualism" as one of his ten core fascist tactics.

Digital information ecosystems have dramatically weakened the epistemic authority of credentialed expertise. The peer-reviewed article competes on social media on equal algorithmic footing with a YouTube video by a layperson. The structural equality of posts, regardless of source, credentials, or epistemic rigor, combined with recommendation algorithms that amplify engagement rather than accuracy, produces a systematic degradation of expertise as a social institution.

This is documented extensively in Benkler et al. (2018), who show that false or misleading stories in right-wing media ecosystems are rarely corrected through interaction with mainstream fact-checkers. The COVID-19 pandemic made this dynamic visible at civilizational scale: epidemiologists competed against influencers and politicians for epistemic authority and frequently lost in the short run. Morozov (2013) anticipated this, arguing that "solutionism" encodes a deep contempt for the complexity that expertise addresses.