decline of conservative intellectualism

WSJ has an article about how Palin represents the Republicans' 20 (40?) -year slide into anti-intellectual populism. What once was a movement of ideas and exchange has (long) become about denigrating knowledge, the people who have it, and the institutions that produce it:

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on "The New American Right" that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter's influential "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963). But over the next decade and a half all that changed.

He chronicles the rise of conservative intelligentsia, and describes it as a refreshing alternative to then-ascendent liberalism and the post-60s craziness of leftist politics. But then, in the 80s, "leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an 'adversary culture of intellectuals.'"

Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

And with Palin they reached their apotheosis. The question is where it goes from here.