Because modern American conservatism is strongly aligned with anti-intellectual sentiments: the pathos of nationalism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, &quot;traditional views&quot; on religion and the role of science, and a craving for simple categorization into Manichean good or bad, male or female, okay-to-say or not-okay-to-say, us or them, yours or mine.  Onto this we lay a matrix of Ayn Randian property-rights-fetishists and aging anticommunists &amp; libertarians (the previous generation&#x27;s right-wing intellectuals, now bought off or shouted down), as well as the remnants of the the-Confederacy-should-have-won enthusiasts, dressed up in strict constructionist clothing.  Driving the parade is an endless stream of corporate lobbyists trying to get a return on investment in the simplest way possible.<p>These sorts of stereotypes are observations about the net behavior of large groups of conservatives rather than being ubiquitous in individuals, but occasionally I talk to a certain flavor of conservative friends about such topics, while taking care to avoid being dismissive of their chosen tribe.  They become <i>viscerally infuriated</i> not so much at the positions, but at acknowledgement of the nuances (&quot;But they&#x27;re Muslim.  They&#x27;re at war with us.  They say they&#x27;re at war with us.&quot;) and the notion that improving everyone&#x27;s situation (&quot;How the hell can you say it doesn&#x27;t matter whether they deserve it&quot;) could be a goal of all of us.  They are looking for politics to simplify, not to complicate, their thinking.  It&#x27;s not complete ignorance of the tricky bits, it&#x27;s a desire to disregard them.<p>This is not the stuff that a career as a lifetime thinker is made of.  The letters &#x27;PhD&#x27; stand for &#x27;Doctor of Philosophy&#x27;, and appreciating complexity has to be a part of extended research in any field.  An explicit disavowel of &#x27;experts&#x27; or or &#x27;academics&#x27; or &#x27;scientists&#x27; is quite common on the right, usually with airquotes to indicate that the speaker disbelieves these people&#x27;s expertise and doesn&#x27;t consider them worth the speaker&#x27;s time, because the speaker is busy Doing things (necessarily simplifying reality) and they merely Think about things.<p>The best of the GWB Administration:<p>&quot;The aide said that guys like me were &quot;in what we call the reality-based community,&quot; which he defined as people who &quot;believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.&quot; I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. &quot;That&#x27;s not the way the world really works anymore.&quot; He continued &quot;We&#x27;re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you&#x27;re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we&#x27;ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that&#x27;s how things will sort out. We&#x27;re history&#x27;s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.&quot;&quot;