This is obviously a "simply phrased" question, so I will try to give a similarly "simple," broad-strokes answer. I am no expert on this, by any means, but I have read some interesting tidbits here and there.
I recently watched a great YouTube video that phrased (IMO) left wing and right wing thinking pretty perfectly (again, in a very general sense):
Conservatives have historically defend hierarchy, and this leads to them celebrating people who can succeed within a system that fits what they view as the natural order. Whether that's supporting a monarch because monarchy is the natural, God-ordained way of governing or supporting free market capitalism because those who succeed under it are simply doing what it takes to become rich in the best economic system yet shown to man, conservatives like order and stability. (This of course doesn't mean conservatives cannot support reform or change, but they will often take a more measured approach than left wingers and prefer to retain more elements of the old system ... "conservatives resist change" is a very problematic way to look at political history, IMO.) Intellectuals don't exactly thrive in this way of thinking. Their value to society is not overly "concrete," instead offering the more abstract value of their minds and all the great ideas they could fix society if only they would be given the right power/platform. We think of "intellects" as some well-to-do Harvard professor who votes Democratic because he or she is just so smart and GOP = dumb dumb, but for much of history they were struggling to get by and spent their time in cafes telling their other intellectual friends their ideas. Such a person is not likely to support a system that has led to them being lower class and sitting in a café with enough to complain about in the first place!
Yes, the GOP cleaned up with well-educated people in the 1930s or whatever, but being a college graduate was something largely restricted to rich, White Protestants at the time ... and those people were conservative for other reasons. I think this quote from H.P. Lovecraft - spoken at a time where looking at an electoral map might make you envision the Democrats as a coalition of yokels and ~populists~ if you were an average Atlas poster - illustrates that there has always been a very intellectually elitist strain in the Democratic Party (going back to Jefferson, quite obviously):
"As for the Republicans - how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."
Excellent post; thanks for this. I think that intellectuals have tended to the left (good definition above) because, IMO, left wing or simply "change"-minded ideas which tend to come from the left implicitly assume that human nature can almost be redesigned; that there are rationally discoverable flaws which we can get rid of by changing the political order. Naturally intellectuals will like this - they are the ones to discover these flaws. The one academic who comes to mind who eschewed this was Hayek - his big idea was effectively that we don't know very much. Not a coincidence he was a rather solitary figure in the intellectual world.
