From reading Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, there’s a pretty unmistakable relationship between democratic sentiment and anti-intellectualism. In pretty much all social conflicts he presents in the book, the intellectuals are from the upper-class, are seen as effeminate and alien, more akin to decadent Europe than practical America. And the ones that have the most invective against pursuits of the mind often do so from the vantage of populism.
Some examples:
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In the Great Awakening, the evangelicals (e.g. Methodists and Baptists) were seen as democratic because they cared little for doctrine and emphasized over it the subjective experience of religious feeling; and instead of leaving proselytizing to the clergy, they allowed anyone willing to preach.
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The pushback against civil service reformers from introducing entrance exams (like those in Prussia or China) to positions in the governmental bureaucracy
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Farmers resisting (and resenting) the experiments and new techniques by scientists, and resisting the formation of agricultural and technical colleges (e.g. against Morrill’s land grants for such institutions)
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Within the labor movement, the rank-and-file’s uneasy partnership with professionals (e.g. lawyers and economists) and their desire to procure their leaders from promotions within the rank-and-file.
The simplest and most obvious explanation for this division is that in the past education was mainly in the purview of the wealthy only, so that pushback against intellectualism is part and parcel of class struggle. It’s not so obvious that’s what is happening now in contemporary American culture, where attending college is no longer the privilege of just the wealthy, and is no longer associated with just classical liberal arts. The modern university has many schools and fulfills myriad social functions, and for good or ill a large fraction of young Americans passes through its gates. Yet while for the most part college attendance and class are divorced (though being a WASP graduating from Philips Exeter still helps with Harvard admissions), anti-intellectualism continues unabated, if not fed by the current technological millieu and transmuted into something even worse (e.g. fake news). What gives? Attenuate the focus of the university into non-intellectual pursuits, then it is unclear if the academy is itself a bastion of the mind. (College is for job preparation, didn’t you know?)
And by anti-intellectualism I’m excluding here the industrial-academic complex of the sciences. As long as the sciences bear useful things the public supports them at least in the abstract if not the specifics of funding. It’s mostly the liberal arts and the humanities that bear the brunt of this anti-intellectualism, being scholastic in focus and bearing no fruit other than finger-wagging to the larger culture.
Not to say that finger-wagging is necessarily a bad thing; but it should be easy to see that the average person is more willing to extend warmth to the academic whose work doesn’t involve criticism of his beliefs of his way of life. Talk to an astronomer, and you’ll find out about unbelievable things like supermassive black holes and quasars, awe-inspiring things whose remote existence has nothing to do with your life and therefore cannot threaten it. Talk to a humanities professor and he’ll tell you all the ways that your actions are microaggressions; how you are contributing to the oppression of minorities, no matter your good intentions or morals; how the television shows and movies you watch and the music you listen to are terrible. Is it really then that surprising that anti-intellectualism is still alive, when there are so many within the academy unwilling to detach themselves from the bubble they have ensconced, when those who are in a position to enrich public discourse refuse to do so in the name of keeping their intellectual purity, of keeping their noble, tragic sense that they’re right but perpetually misunderstood or unheard?