Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.

My guest today is Susan Jacoby, an independent scholar specializing in the history of reason,

atheism, secularism, and religious liberty. She's the best-selling author of 12 books,

including Free Thinkers, A History of American Secularism, and The Age of American Unreason, which just came out in a new updated edition

titled The Age of American Unreason in a Culture of Lives.

Susan Jacoby, welcome to the show.

Delighted.

You know, I'd like to start off, not with the age of American unreason,

but with a really important book, another really important book, that actually preceded it by

45 years. And that's Richard Hofstetter's anti-intellectualism in American Life, which was

published back in 1963.

So I was wondering what sort of influence did Hofstadter's work have on you?

Well, it had a strong influence.

First of all, the first edition of the Age of American Unreason, which was published in 2008. It was actually the editor who asked me to write it sort of wanted me, he said, what

would you like to take a crack at bringing Richard Hofstetter's book up to date?

And I thought, boy, that's an interesting idea, because of course, the one thing Richard Hofstetter doesn't write about in anti-intellectualism in American life, because he couldn't write about it then, was the entire digital world we live in, which somebody asked me a question, in fact, at a speech at a Unitarian church the other night about,

about, did I think Hofstetter could have predicted, you know, the current digital world

and its influence on our attention span and our thinking?

And, of course, I said no, because none of us did.

I was alive in 1963, obviously.

And, of course, we didn't, we didn't imagine what the digital

world would be like. The only people who even knew it was coming were people who knew a great

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