Something I read today reminded me about how the Cultural Revolution in the People's Republic of China included a great push against "the bourgeois", which seemed to include "intellectuals" and "intellectualism". The result was that doctors, engineers, teachers, professors, writers, and other professionals and artists were forced out of their professions and into peasant farm labour.
There is also an ongoing thread of anti-intellectualism throughout US history, of whom Richard Hofstadter seems to be the pre-eminent documentarian. While it certainly persists to the present day, I'm quite happy to let it go as of, say, 1985, to comply with subreddit rules. (Not to mention that it dates back to 1642 and John Cotton.) There appears to have been a brief push-back with "the Sputnik scare", when it became actually fashionable, for a brief period, to be a STEM nerd, but that was rare.
Anyhow, have any historians or other researchers found any parallels, or any common threads, in these two threads of anti-intellectualism? (Or, for that matter, in other cases, the most egregious being Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and "the killing fields" in Cambodia?)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the question, but are you trying to find parallels between a very specific event in China, and a supposed trend throughout all of US history? Or are you just asking if the US has ever followed anti-intellectual policies for the same reason that China did during the Cultural Revolution?
I am not a China expert, but I think you're asking your question in a somewhat difficult-to-answer fashion. If your question is 'do historians or sociologists perceive similarities between the Cultural Revolution and anti-intellectual trends in US history,' that would be an appropriate question for this sub. If you wanted to ask other redditors their opinions on the subject of anti-intellectual political movements, I suspect this wouldn't be an appropriate sub.
That said, my understanding of the Cultural Revolution is that it largely stemmed from Mao's fear (justified or not) of bourgeois and 'rightist' elements consolidating any lingering power they commanded in the PRC. The CR, therefore, comes from Mao's interpretation of Marxist theory, so whether or not it shares some underlying factors with US anti-intellectualism, I would argue that simply by dint of the lack of serious Marxist influence on US politics, the two don't appear to be closely related.