Calling well-earned criticism of economics anti-intellectualism is using the composition/division fallacy.
Most people's lives have been affected for decades by Chicago School of Economics voodoo nonsense, that's where much modern criticism is aimed.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt
• https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how-economics-became-a-religion
I think that aphorism is about authority-respect rather than basic-human-decency-respect.
This thread makes me wonder how much contemporary American English is to blame for people being able to exploit ambiguities surreptitiously. Dog whistles have to start somewhere, they don't seem to be prearranged.