Donald Trump’s biggest fight during his transition to the presidency is with an unusual foe, the Central Intelligence Agency. Responding to a CIA assessment that the Russian government interfered in the U.S. election, Trump’s transition team bluntly dismissed the agency as “the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, has long seen the CIA as a biased political enemy. As The New York Times reports, “Mr. Flynn’s assessment that the C.I.A. is a political arm of the Obama administration is not widely shared by Republicans or Democrats in Washington. But it has appeared to have been internalized by the one person who matters most right now: Mr. Trump.” As a result, there has emerged “an extraordinary rift between the president-elect and the nation’s intelligence community that is unlikely to be bridged anytime soon.”

It’s true that the “rift” between the incoming administration and the intelligence community is astonishing, but as with so much else about Trump, it also has deep roots in the history of the American right. From the earliest days of the Cold War, right-wing populists have distrusted the CIA and the broader intelligence community, believing that its allegiance to professionalism covered up a liberal bias. This hostility has flared up time and again, starting with the controversies around McCarthyism in the early 1950s, resurfacing during assessments of Soviet military capabilities in the 1970s, and appearing again in disputes over whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. In each of these cases, the right organized to challenge the CIA’s claim of expertise and tried to replace the agency’s consensus with a much more politicized and ideological view of reality.

These conflicts over the professionalism of the intelligence community are part of a larger conflict between the right and expert knowledge—one that traces back to Willmoore Kendall, a mid-twentieth-century intellectual from Oklahoma who played a crucial role in creating right-wing populism. A liberal in his early adulthood, in the 1930s, he supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt and developed arguments against elite institutions like the Supreme Court, which was trying to thwart the New Deal. Kendall was also critical of academic economists who tried to use their professional expertise to fight popular reforms. In a 1939 essay for The Southern Review, he attacked the “typical modern intellectual” for wanting to “perpetuate the situation in which political discussion is a monopoly of the scientific elite.” Noting the class bias inherent in claims of expert knowledge, Kendall argued that “the claims of the majority principal cannot get a fair hearing from an educated minority whose real religion is Science.”

In casting the debate as a battle between an arrogant scientific elite fighting against democracy, Kendall laid the basis for a politics of anti-professionalism. He also steered it to the other side of the political spectrum. As a Yale professor and CIA consultant in the late 1940s, he broadened his attacks from then-conservative institutions like the Court to the academy, federal bureaucracy, and intelligence community, which he considered predominately liberal. A contrarian with a lifelong penchant for quarreling with whatever social circle he was in, Kendall became a gadfly within this East Coast milieu, and in assailing these new targets he moved increasingly to the right.

Much of Kendall’s criticism of liberalism grew out of his work in the intelligence field. He felt that the CIA was dominated by liberals who focused on the minute problems of each individual country or region they studied, had no broader sense of geo-politics, and were too inclined to fight communism by pushing American allies to adopt social democratic reforms. He thought these Ivy League blue bloods lacked ideological imagination and had too empiricist an understanding of the world. They failed to see the danger posed by Soviet communism and its international spy network. To Kendall, it was crucial that policymakers recognize that America’s adversaries were Kremlin-directed ideologues conspiring to destroy democracy on a global scale.