Proudly ignorant politicians have often held sway. Defending one of Richard Nixon’s spectacularly unqualified Supreme Court nominees in 1970, Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska famously asked, “So what if he is mediocre? There are a lot of mediocre people and judges and lawyers. They’re entitled to a little representation, aren’t they?”

But lately, the world’s oldest democracy has been plagued by a different — and arguably more disturbing — malady: Highly educated, obviously intelligent politicians who only pretend to be dumb, and ask us to believe them, for political effect.

Thus we have Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri (a graduate of Stanford University and Yale Law School) raising his fist to cheer on the insurrectionists at the U.S. Capitol who claimed Joe Biden’s election was stolen. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas (Princeton and Harvard Law) accusing the Biden administration of turning the U.S. Army into “a bunch of pansies” for creating a recruitment ad featuring a female soldier raised by two mothers.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida (Yale and Harvard Law) defending his state’s passage of a new law fining media companies who seek to bar politicians from their platforms by likening them to the current treatment of Jews by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who actually died in 1989.

Populist posing by politicians with elite educational pedigrees is not entirely new, of course. The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York witheringly dismissed the 1990s effort by Bill Clinton (Georgetown University and Yale Law) to overhaul the nation’s welfare laws as “boob bait for the bubbas,” a colorful way to describe a pandering move designed to lure working-class white voters. In the fall of 2000, I had a sinking feeling that the self-consciously brainy Al Gore (Harvard) would lose to the presidential election to the ostentatiously folksy George W. Bush (Yale) when I saw a bumper sticker on a car in posh Beverly Hills that bragged, “My son beat up your honor student.”

And there is no shortage of genuine dolts among contemporary American politicians. The newly elected Republican conspiracy theorist Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia comes to mind. She once blamed California wildfires on space lasers controlled by the Rothschild banking family, and dismissed mass school shootings as “false flags” staged to curb gun rights.

Donald Trump’s ascendancy, and his stranglehold over the Republican Party’s electoral base, has elevated the art of playing dumb to a fine art. Witness Representative Elise Stefanik (Harvard), who has willingly transformed herself from an anti-Trump Republican in 2016 to such a loyal acolyte that she displaced the Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a fierce critic of Trump’s refusal to concede the election, as the No. 3 official in the House of Representatives Republican leadership team.

Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, a former Democrat (and a graduate of Vanderbilt University, Oxford and the University of Virginia Law School) is so given to colorful, plebian turns of phrase that a New Orleans newspaper once ran a quiz asking whether he or a 1940’s-era Warner Bros. cartoon satire of a rooster politician named “Foghorn Leghorn” had uttered a particular backwoods epigram. “The American people are busy,” Kennedy told the website BuzzFeed News in his own defense. “They don’t read Aristotle every day.”

In a sense, Hofstadter anticipated just this reality. As the journalist Nicholas Lemman has written, Hofstadter did not equate intellectualism with intelligence, but defined it instead as the searching, distinctive, skeptical habit of mind that forbids “the kind of complete self-assurance that we often associate with very smart or committed people.” Intelligence itself is no bar to rigidity – or to slavish fidelity to cynical political posturing.

So it should really be no surprise that Ted Cruz can deploy the passionate sophistries of the fierce college debater he once was, reducing them to dumbed-down soundbites, while remaining deliberately heedless of the complexities of government policy and the human nuances that animate real life. Thus Cruz could entertain his appreciative audience at the Conservative Political Action Committee conference in February with an unhinged rant against wearing masks to slow the spread of the Covid-19 virus.

”Now they’re saying, everybody can get immunized, we can have herd immunity everywhere, and we’re going to wear masks for the next 300 years,” Cruz told the crowd. ”And by the way, not just one mask, two, three, four. You can’t have too many masks. How much virtue do you want to signal? This is just dumb.”

Yes, it is, but not in the way Cruz meant. No scientific or medical expert has recommended any such thing.

Harder to square is how the renowned Stanford University historian David Kennedy could have considered Josh Hawley perhaps the most gifted student he’d mentored in 50 years of teaching, and a “thoughtful, deeply analytical person.” Kennedy has since said he blames himself for boosting Hawley’s academic career, while Hawley’s political mentor, former Missouri Senator John Danforth, says that working to elect Hawley was “the worst mistake I ever made in my life.”

Such declination of devotion to the life of the mind was by no means always routine in American public life, especially among Republicans. Martha Taft, the wife of the longtime Ohio Senator Robert Taft (son of President William Howard Taft) was once asked at a rally whether her husband was a common man. “Oh, no,” she replied, “he is not that at all. He was first in his class at Yale and first in his class at Harvard Law School. I think it would be wrong to present a common man as a representative of the people of Ohio.”

Still, suspicion of the smarty-pants runs deep in the American character, to the point that politicians go out of the way to present themselves as less educated or intelligent than they really are.

In the 1970s, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina -- a segregationist Southern Democrat and a constitutional scholar who had deployed his erudition for years to defend America’s apartheid Jim Crow racial laws -- suddenly became a liberal folk hero for his dogged investigations of Richard Nixon and Watergate. He took to calling himself “just a country lawyer.” When his Republican Senate colleague Howard Baker took pains to point out that Ervin had actually graduated from Harvard Law School with honors, Ervin pled guilty, but with a demurrer.

“I would like to say a word in my own defense on that point,” Ervin insisted. “I had a friend introduce me to a South Carolina audience. He said he understood that I was a graduate of Harvard Law School, but by God, nobody would ever suspect it.”

Todd S. Purdum is a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Politico and The Atlantic. He is the author of Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution.