Fundamentalist Protestantism: Barack Obama

Vancouver Sun Dept: On the populist Right, members of the upstart Tea Party movement promote conspiracy theories to the effect that President Barack Obama wasn't born American and is a secret Muslim. The noisy Left is not much better. Its members try to shut down anyone who disagrees with them on issues of taxes, immigration or mosques at Ground Zero by throwing accusations of xenophobia, racism and bigotry. This is tantamount to delegitimizing the political participation of hundreds of thousands of Americans, according to Vancouver Sun. In truth, there's a fair bit of anti-intellectualism on both sides of the ideological divide these days. This is not new in American culture. In 1963, the historian Richard Hofstadter published a book about the phenomenon, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter linked this anti-intellectualism to religion, particularly fundamentalist Protestantism; to the tendency of business to focus on practical concerns at the expense of intellectual effort; and yes, to a populist impulse among the masses and to watch American politics nowadays is to worry, as both the Left and the Right in that country continue to flirt with extremism. This is not good for the United States or, by extension, the western world. The Left largely regards the Tea Party as a circus of the ill-educated and ignorant, and it demeans Tea Party leaders Sarah Palin, for example as little more than hicks. The Left, however, is forgetting the populist roots of its own progressive agenda recall the 1960s' counterculture movement . As reported in the news.
@t sarah palin, anti intellectualism