‘The stupid party’: Intellectual repute as a category of ideological analysis

Abstract

This article contends that the notion that some ideologies, usually on the left, are inherently more sophisticated than others has run through the politics of the Anglo-Saxon world over the past two centuries. The famous insult 'the stupid party', almost without exception applied to conservatives, points to the opposing archetypes of the stupid backwoods conservative and the sophisticated metropolitan progressive. In allusion to Veblen's concept of repute, the persistent attribution of intelligence and sophistication to some ideologies, and their denial to others, is named 'intellectual repute'. The article concludes by speculating that notions of intellectual respectability point to the influence of classes which base their self-image and their claims to class power on claims to superior intelligence: repute is, following Veblen, an artefact of class. The phenomenon of intellectual repute therefore speaks of the influence and class character of the intelligentsia.The notion that some political ideologies are more naturally than others the home of intelligent, free-thinking, broad-minded, and culturally sophisticated people runs through our politics. This article argues that the feeling, and sometimes the articulate thought, that conservatives are 'the stupid party' is deeply imbricated in modern politics, as is the obverse idea that the political left is the natural home of intelligence, and it contends that these notions go back to the beginning of the period in which the defining oppositions between conservative and progressive, or right and left, became not merely intelligible but unavoidable and even necessary. The archetype, a term I shall use without Jungian intent, of the stupid conservative, like the opposite figure of the progressive intellectual, permeates our politics. The archetype of 'the stupid party'-this convenient and clichéd epithet, a familiar and well-worn piece of mental furniture, a conventional image, a habitual attribution-is often alluded to, though seldom analyzed. It is the departure point for the speculations that follow.Students of ideologies should have names for the attributes they study, however intangible and at times indistinct those attributes and associated archetypes, opinions,

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