ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN AMERICA

Anti-intellectualism is a term that in one sense describes a hostility towards, or mistrust of, those who call themselves intellectuals, and intellectual pursuits. This may be expressed in various ways, such as an attack on the merits of science, education, or literature.
Anti-intellectuals seek to frame themselves as champions of the self-styled "ordinary people", and as advocates of egalitarianism against elitism, especially what they perceive as academic elitism. These critics argue from a perception that educated people form a social class by virtue of their education: that members of this social class tend to talk chiefly to one another, and as such are remote from other points of view, and that members of this social class tend to dominate political discourse about social and other issues.
Anti-intellectualism is also a term used to criticize an educational system's placing little emphasis on academic and intellectual accomplishment or a government's tendency to formulate policies without consultation with authoritative scholarly study on the issues in question.

Richard Hofstadter 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism