I doubt monarchy ever had much appeal to academics/intellectuals.
Before the Enlightenment, maybe. IIRC, many European monarchs became patrons of academic associations like the UK's Royal Society in a somewhat successful attempt to earn their support. That era where you needed the monarchy to sponsor your academic pursuits ended when the monarchies failed to exert control over the unregulated environment of intellectual networking found in the coffeehouses. In China and Japan, up until the 20th century, everyone agreed on the need for an imperial family and limited political change to levels below the emperor, so that could be a more recent instance of monarchist intellectuals.
On the thread topic, evidently, those whining about "leftist indoctrination" have never taken a college history class. The content is taught from a center-right liberal perspective, not from the left. All the standard anti-communist rhetoric is there.
Speaking of the Enlightenment and the Royal Society, my understanding of British politics in the 18th century is that most intellectuals tended to be Whigs, simply because to not be a Whig meant marginalization from centers of power like the Hanoverian court. Hume wrote how he had been "taught by experience, that the Whig party were in possession of bestowing all places, both in the state and in literature". However,
individually many of the greatest politically involved intellectuals like Swift, Pope, and Dr. Johnson were Tories. Perhaps the reason they are so better remembered and esteemed than their Whig contemporaries is precisely because they were so few; their arguments therefore being the more unique and, arguably, more interesting.
It's also interesting to consider how "intellectual" was the appeal of the Whig and Tory parties to their supporters. During the "Rage of Party" (pre-proscription) period, I think the Whigs were clearly the party with a more intellectual appeal to voters. Supporters of the Bank of England, the Whig bourgeoisie used modern mercantilist economics to argue that the Bank would enrich the nation and help the war effort against France, a war being fought in defense of European liberties. They opposed discrimination against Dissenters and championed Lockean natural rights, and they abhorred the Tories' incitement of riotous mobs against nonconformists. The Tories, meanwhile, were generalized as the party of landed country gentlemen, ridiculed as backward and ignorant by the Whigs. They opposed the Bank of England because it threatened their interests and cared little for the cause of European liberty. On religion, they sought to curtail the rights of Dissenters and used mob violence to achieve their ends. Perhaps no one better personifies the lack of intellectualism in the Tory appeal than Henry Sacheverell, the lightning rod of English politics in these years, whose support was based entirely on common Anglican prejudice (as seen in the riots bearing his namesake).
During the Age of Walpole, there is a perceptible change in the intellectual appeal of the parties. The old issues and divisions that had existed during the Rage of Party years still existed, but they were rather less important as the Whigs fully controlled the instrument of government. Effectively blocked from regaining power by proscription, opposition to ministerial corruption became one of, if not the main, Tory issue. The greatest works of political philosophy in this period came from the pen of Tory leader Lord Bolingbroke, who brought together Tories and dissident Whigs in
The Craftsman. These dissident Whigs were the intellectual backbone of the Whig party, men who truly believed in Whiggism and felt it had been betrayed by Walpolian corruption. Since Walpole was firmly ensconced in power, he no longer needed men to make the case for Whiggism, nor to adhere to its principles himself. More important were political operatives and hacks, such as the Duke of Newcastle, who could better sustain ministerial control. No wonder, then, that the more thoughtful among the Whigs decided to go into opposition with the Tories.
However, despite their more cerebral appeal under Bolingbroke, it is important to note that the Tories still clung to base Anglican bigotry like before. During the elections of 1754, one year after the passage of the Whig supported "Jew Bill", Tory candidates used slogans like "No Jews; Christianity and the Constitution" and accused the Whigs of "all sorts of impieties from Judaism down to Quakerism." The Whigs weren't above this sort of thing either but, being Whigs, their target was Catholicism: in 1747 they attacked a Tory candidate for his Irish heritage, accusing him of popery and noting how "these same Tories of ours are always on the Same Side with the French and the Papists." The point being, that no matter how intellectual the appeal of one or the other party was during the 18th century, they always relied on less enlightened sentiments.
