Is the Neoconservative “New Class” New?

Last week, I took issue with Kevin Mattson’s view that neoconservatives didn’t offer anything very new in their critique of intellectuals. Mattson’s argument pivots from his belief that the neoconservative use of the sociological concept of the “new class” was an unoriginal adaptation of conservative anti-intellectualism that had already been well established by William Buckley and his stable of writers at the National Review. Mattson writes the following about the neoconservative version of anti-intellectualism, perhaps best enunciated by Irving Kristol: “their criticism of the ‘new class’ [was not] all that different from the previous [old right] critique of the ‘liberal establishment’… Kristol defined the new class as ‘an intelligentsia which so despises the ethos of bourgeois society, and which is so guilt-ridden at being implicated in the life of this society.’ Nothing new there.”

Perhaps there is “nothing new there,” at least in this particular Kristol quote, or in Mattson’s very brief historical analysis of neoconservative “new class” thought (in his Rebels All!). Certainly Buckley and a host of other conservative thinkers made a career of lambasting liberal intellectuals well before Kristol and his ilk made their fateful turn to the right. As I argue at length in Education and the Cold War, the longstanding conservative critique of John Dewey set the tone of conservative anti-intellectualism during the Cold War. Taking his cues from traditionalists like Richard Weaver, Buckley played a big part in this. His 1950 treatise against Yale professors, God and Man at Yale, was a lamentation that “the teachings of John Dewey have borne fruit, as there is surely not a department at Yale that is uncontaminated with the absolute that there are no absolutes, no intrinsic rights, no ultimate truths.” His mission was to convince the Yale Board of Trustees and alumni to retake the university from the professors who subverted the curriculum to their “secularist and collectivist” ends. Buckley, ever the humorist, peppered his later writings with delightful anti-intellectual ripostes. “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” (You gotta admit that’s funny.)

So Mattson is correct that neoconservatives were not the first American intellectuals to paradoxically find American intellectual life rotten. That said, neoconservative anti-intellectualism was different. Context matters here. Unlike Old Right thinkers like Weaver and Buckley, most neoconservatives considered themselves left of center in the early sixties. Some, like former Trotskyist Irving Kristol, were garden-variety Cold War liberals. But many others were New Leftists, or at least, fellow travelers of the sixties left. This included Norman Podhoretz, the Commentary editor who published some of the classic expressions of the New Left, most famously, Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. By turning on the New Left in the late sixties after being so close to it—Podhoretz’s influential Commentarybecame the magazine most critical of the New Left—neoconservatives best articulated the anti-New Left conservative reaction, which was best expressed in neoconservative “new class” thought. This strain of thought also helps us make sense of the culture wars.

“New class” thought, which neoconservatives reformulated out of older left-wing, anti-Stalinist trope (that we have discussed at length at this blog here and here), was premised on the contention that acquisition of knowledge had become more crucial to the workings of power than accumulation of property. But more important to neoconservatives, who took their cues from Lionel Trilling’s famous examination of the avant-garde revolt against bourgeois society—what Trilling termed the “adversary culture”—“new class” theorizing was a way to understand the apparent anti-American turn taken by intellectuals and students during the 1960s. Trilling’s formulation, in turn, also helped neoconservatives explain the culture wars that grew out of that polarizing decade. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this framework: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

New Class thought was different from previous strains of conservative anti-intellectualism because it was specifically formulated to understand the New Left; the older right never took such an interest in trying to get inside the mind of the New Left. Take novelist Saul Bellow as an example. Stephen Schryer, author of the excellent Fantasies of the New Class, considers Bellow’s 1970 Mr. Sammler’s Planet the neoconservative novel par excellence. (My thanks to Andrew Seal, who suggested I read Schryer in his comment on my earlier post about Bellow’s Ravelstein.) Having recently read Mr. Sammler’s Planet, I am inclined to agree. Furthermore, the portrait Bellow paints of the “new class” type reveals a new texture of anti-intellectualism.

In the opening scene of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, the protagonist says the following: “intellectual man has become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul explained.” But Mr. Artur Sammler, despite being an explainer himself, is uncomfortable with this age of humanity because he believes that most explanations contradict the “natural knowledge” innate to the human soul. Having fun with Hegel’s “Owl of Minerva,” which only takes flight at dusk—an allusion to Hegel’s theory that philosophy is only right after phenomena—Sammler says that the soul rests “unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.”

Echoing the neoconservative thought of Kristol, Podhoretz, Midge Dector, John Q. Wilson, and a host of others, Bellow (through Sammler) argued that much of intellectual life was dedicated to intellectualizing, rationalizing, and apologizing for increasingly bad behavior. As Schryer writes: “The history of western thought”—far from the moral apex imagined by Hegel—“has culminated in a cultural nihilism that, Sammler believes, finds expression in the social and political chaos of 1960s New York.” Sammler says, in a not so veiled critique of the sexual revolution, black power, and the sixties ethos in general: “the labor of Puritanism was now ending, the dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, London.”

It’s not as if declension narratives were new. Weaver, for instance, perfected such an approach in Ideas Have Consequences (1948). But whereas old right conservatives believed the sixties were merely more of the same, the logical culmination of modernism, neoconservatives believed that the sixties represented a break: the break that later thinkers would mark between modernism and postmodernism. As neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmefarb (Kristol’s spouse) has written: “Where modernism tolerates relativism, postmodernism celebrates it. Where modernism, aware of the obstacles in the way of objectivity, regards this as a challenge and makes strenuous efforts to attain as much objectivity and unbiased truth as possible, postmodernism takes the rejection of absolute truth as a deliverance from all truth and from the obligation to maintain any degree of objectivity.”

Something else new to neoconservative new class thought was the ways in which the critique of the sixties movements became a way to lament the collapse of the Protestant work ethic—to look on with horror at the onset of Charles Reich’s “Consciousness III.” Dector (Podhoretz’s spouse) forcefully articulated such a theory in her two anti-feminist books, The Liberated Woman and Other Americans (1971) and The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation(1972). Decter’s overarching contention was that American women had it better than ever. For example, women had newfound abilities to secure gainful employment and control pregnancy through birth control. And yet, as she sought to show, even with such advances, or perhaps because of them, feminists blindly lurched against patriarchal strictures. Decter argued that women joined the “women’s liberation” movement not out of a desire for new freedoms, but rather out of fear that with brand-new freedoms came brand-new responsibilities. “Women’s Liberation does not embody a new wave of demand for equal rights. Nor does its preoccupation with oppression signal a yearning for freedom,” she complained. Rather, it emerged from “the difficulties women are experiencing with the rights and freedoms they already enjoy.” For instance, if women were going to enter the workplace like men, Decter reasoned, they had to be prepared to compete in the cutthroat capitalist labor market that men had long grown accustomed to. In short, Decter believed that feminists were adversarial to the discipline enshrined in American traditions, such as the Protestant work ethic that the mostly Jewish neoconservatives came to adore.

The notion that feminists revolted against American traditions was consistent with so-called “new class” thought. The new class, as such, rationalized the New Left and countercultural expressions that had settled into the fabric of American culture. This was an innovative approach that came to define the ways conservatives fought the culture wars.

Of course, I am usually willing to admit that I might be wrong. And many of you, dear readers, are usually more than willing to show me where I might be wrong.

Occupy Wall Street: The Culture Wars of the “New Class”?

In January of 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration, I gave my first public talk on the culture wars, research that was relatively new to me at that stage. In the talk, I discussed the politics of higher education in the 1990s through the lens of conservatives like Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, and Lynne Cheney. In the Q&A that followed, an audience member whom I will call Liberal Academic Superstar asked me some version of the following question: “In light of Obama’s historic victory, which ushers in a new era of liberalism, and in light of the financial meltdown, which ushers in new intellectual priorities, isn’t all this talk about conservatives and culture wars quaint, even outdated?” Flabbergasted, my response was something to the following effect: “Just wait.”

At the time, I believed Liberal Academic Superstar’s question was incredibly stupid. I still do, and my guess is that if Liberal Academic Superstar could actually be persuaded that he or she in fact asked that incredibly stupid question, say, if he or she was caught on video and made to watch his or her performance, then Liberal Academic Superstar would be quite embarrassed, given all that has since transpired. And yet, despite its stupidity, I have given a great deal of thought to that question. So, if nothing else, it was a productive question and I am glad to have been asked it. (Granting him or her the benefit of the doubt, perhaps this was Liberal Academic Superstar’s purpose? Na…) It has forced me to think about what has changed since the heyday of the culture wars (the early 1990s), and what remains of the culture wars. It has given me time to reflect on the “Passover Question”: Why are the culture wars important as a topic of historical research? I had assumed their importance went without saying. But nothing that serves as the subject of a book, especially a history book, should go without saying.

Conservative reactions to the Obama presidency and the economic crisis brought discussion of the culture wars back into fashion. The Birthers and the Tea Party screamed, “don’t forget about us culture warriors,” even if the coordinates of the Obama-era culture wars did not map neatly onto the Reagan- or Clinton-era culture wars. But I want to argue that another phenomenon, even more recent, and from the opposite end of the political spectrum, can also be understood through the lens of the culture wars. Or, at least, the culture wars help us understand the varied responses to the phenomenon. I’m talking, of course, about the riveting and important Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS).

A few weeks ago, ubiquitous blogger Matthew Yglesias wrote a short post, titled, “The Economy as Culture War,” where, in tantalizingly brief fashion, he made the case that “economic policy debate in the United States is in part just another culture war issue.” On the one hand, Yglesias contends that a genuine clash of economic interests drives the divide between the private-sector business class and the public-sector knowledge class. He describes this as “a kind of bitter feud between businessmen and the kids they went to college with who didn’t go on to become businessmen. What did they do instead? They became teachers or doctors or nurses or professors or lawyers or scientists or nonprofit workers. And they fight with each other in part because of genuine economic clashes of interest. The businessmen tend to be targeted for tax hikes, while the people they went to college with tend to actually capture some of the public sector expenditure streams.”

But on the other hand, Yglesias qualifies his analysis of the economics behind the clash that is driving OWS with the type of insight that is often used to explain the culture wars. He argues that if either side were objective in their pursuit of rational economic interests, they would realize that a healthy economy needs both profit and non-profit enterprises. But people tend to be irrational: “Layered on top [of rational economic interest politics], I think, is a raw gut-level dislike — both kinds of people think the other kind of people are clueless about what really matters in life.” “The business coalition sees the service coalition as composed of useless moochers, and the service coalition sees the business coalition as greedy bastards.” So Yglesias is extrapolating from the Thomas Frank “what’s the matter with Kansas” model of understanding the culture wars. Frank’s well known thesis, oft critiqued, goes as follows: cultural or religious conservatives often voted against their own economic interests due to their irrational obsession with the culture wars, to which Republican politicians cynically lent rhetorical support as they attended to more important matters, such as rewriting the tax codes in favor of the economic royalists. To his credit, Yglesias does not merely think conservatives are irrational. He seems to be painting everyone involved in the great economic debates as somewhat irrational. But more to my point, the reason Yglesias seems to think economic debates play out in culture war terms is because they emit elements of the irrational. Culture wars equals irrational.

Beyond trading on recent punditry tropes, Yglesias’s understanding of the culture wars, whether he knows it or not, also echoes the “new class” analysis innovated for a post-1960s American context by early neoconservatives such as Irving Kristol, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Midge Decter, among many others. Moynihan first used the term “new class” in writing about the “education lobby” in a 1972 Public Interest article (prefiguring Yglesias): “The social legislation of the middle third of the century created ‘social space’ for a new class whose privilege (or obligation) it is to disperse services to populations that are in various ways wards of the state.” Similarly, take notice of the following long quotes from an Irving Kristol article, titled, “Business and ‘the New Class’,” published in the Wall Street Journal in 1975:

What is commonly called a “bias” or an “animus” against business is really a byproduct of larger purposiveness. There are people “out there” who find it convenient to believe the worst about business because they have certain adverse intentions toward the business community to begin with… These people constitute what one may simply call, for lack of a better name “the new class.”

This “new class” is not easily defined but may be vaguely described. It consists of a goodly portion of those college educated people whose skills and vocations proliferate in a “post-industrial society (to use Daniel Bell’s convenient term)… It is, by now, a quite numerous class; it is an indispensable class for our kind of society; it is a disproportionately powerful class; it is also an ambitious and frustrated class.

The “new class”—intelligent, educated, energetic—has little respect for such a commonplace (business) civilization. It wishes to see its “ideals” more effectual than the market is likely to permit them to be. And so it tries always to supersede economics by politics—an activity in which it is most competent, since it has the talents and the implicit authority to shape public opinion on all larger issues.

Based on a reading of Kristol, it’s clear that some early neoconservative “new class” thought was strictly a way to express anti-anti-capitalism. It was obliquely in this context that Lewis Powell wrote his infamous 1971 memo where he argued that the business class must meet the threat posed by anti-capitalist academics on their terms, by creating a sort of counter-academy under the auspices of the Chamber of Commerce, which “should consider establishing a staff of highly qualified scholars in the social sciences who do believe in the system.” I trace Yglesias’s characterization of the contemporary clash between the businessman and his critic—both of which display a “gut-level dislike” for the other—to this mode of “new class” analysis.

But most “new class” thought extended far beyond an analysis of any particular clash of economic interests. Much of it was rooted in Lionel Trilling’s famous examination of an “adversary culture,” mostly about avant-garde modernists—the lens through which the neocons read the 1960s. A private memorandum written by Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified how “new class” thought was shaping the coming culture wars, as refracted through the 1960s: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.” Nixon lapped up this type of rhetoric because he saw himself as the leader of the silent majority that stood toe-to-toe with 1960s adversarial types. The neocons saw Nixon in this light as well, which explained why a Democrat like Moynihan saw fit to work for him. As Podhoretz wrote (not long after Watergate, no less): “The 1960s ended… not with a revolution but with the election of Richard Nixon: Richard Nixon, who better than any single figure in American public life seemed to epitomize everything in opposition to which the adversary culture had always defined itself.”

Midge Decter nicely captured the 1960s “adversary culture” of the neoconservative imagination in her harsh 1972 rebuke of feminism, The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation. Decter argued that women had it better than ever, for example, in their newfound abilities to secure gainful employment and control pregnancy through birth control. And yet, even with such advances, or perhaps because of them, the “women’s liberation” movement objected that women were subjected to patriarchal strictures. Decter contended that women feared their newfound freedoms, because with such new freedoms came new responsibilities. For instance, if women were going to enter the workplace like men, then they had to be prepared to compete alongside men in a dog-eat-dog world that men had long grown accustomed to. In short, Decter believed that feminists wanted to shirk the responsibilities of living in capitalist America. They were adversarial to the discipline enshrined in American traditions, such as the Protestant work ethic that the mostly Jewish neoconservatives came to adore.

The importance of work ethic, Protestant or otherwise, informed neoconservative new class thinking. In this, neoconservatives led the conservative movement more generally to the type of colorblind rhetoric of individual merit that now shapes its discourse. For example, Podhoretz claimed that the new class was anti-liberal because it supported quotas to its favored groups as opposed to equality of opportunity. This “could be understood, then, as an extension into concrete social policy of the adversary culture’s assault on the ‘Protestant ethic.’” Similarly, Gertrude Himmelfarb, historian and big fan of Victorian-era values, wrote: “In its denigration of ‘bourgeois values’ and the ‘Puritan ethic,’ the new class has legitimized, as it were, the values of the underclass and illegitimized those of the working class, who are still committed to bourgeois values, the Puritan ethic, and other such benighted ideas.” Alarm over the death of the Protestant work ethic is not merely leveled against the baby boomers who violently rejected society in the 1960s. Now, the so-called millennial generation seems not to have the proper attitude towards work. Hillary Clinton’s words on the matter, as Bhaskar Sunkara writes in his generational analysis of OWS, “could have been ripped out of National Review”: “A lot of kids don’t know what work is. They think work is a four-letter word. … We’ve got to send a different message to our young people. America didn’t happen by accident. A lot of people worked really hard. They’ve got to do their part too.”

The most common conservative argument made against OWS is that the protestors are lazy, elitist ingrates who want to blame their own deficiencies on Wall Street and are looking for a government handout because they fear the responsibilities that accompany freedom. This is the argument that informs the message-based images against the movement that have gone viral (in an appropriation of a popular movement tactic). Take for instance the 53% guy (pictured just below) who advises OWS protestors to “suck it up you whiners.” His incredible sacrifices show that with grit and determination anyone in America can, well, stay afloat, without so much as health insurance, and without whining. In this he continues the fight taken up by the neocons, who vehemently defended American intellectual and political traditions, such as the colorblind rhetoric of equal opportunity, which they believed had served them well. Most neoconservatives were from Jewish immigrant families and felt the sting of discrimination growing up. Yet, such biographical barriers did not inhibit them from “making it,” as Podhoretz titled his 1967 memoir. In this context, the wide-ranging demands made by rowdy campus protestors on campuses across the country in the 1960s, such as for affirmative action, struck the neoconservatives as brazenly anti-American. Many view the OWS protestors through the same lens. This is a culture wars lens, even if not precisely in the way Yglesias maintains.

Although Yglesias probably thinks conflating economic debate with the culture wars is a way of not being an economic determinist, he is repeating the vulgar determinism of Thomas Frank by maintaining that people who don’t act in their obvious economic interests, people who act on “gut” instincts, or worse, in identity-based ways, are irrational. To argue, as I do, that the culture wars were not epiphenomenal, is not to deny the importance of economics, but rather, to point to what Marx called a “social formation” (analyzed with much skill recently by David Harvey), where culture, ideas, and economics interact in complex and unpredictable ways. As large historical forces, such as the deindustrialization of the economy that disempowered labor unions while empowering those who worked in the information economy, shaped the culture wars, the culture wars in turn reshaped the social formation in dialectical fashion. The tribal clashes that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, as brilliantly told by Village Voice journalist Paul Cowan—whose excellent 1979 collection of essays, The Tribes of America, was recently re-released with an introduction by Rick Perlstein—polarized into two great camps by the 1980s and 1990s: James Davison Hunter’s “secular-progressives” and “orthodox-traditionalists.” Even those who sought to transcend the culture wars, for example Christopher Lasch, whose work often defended traditionalism as a means to ward of the evils of capitalism, were sucked into the culture wars vortex, as feminists like Susan Faludi lumped Lasch with anti-feminists like George Gilder. As part of this polarization process, cultural conservatives or traditionalists often came around to conservative economic or anti-statist positions that would have shocked their forebears. As Leo Ribuffo shows, pro-family activists in the early twentieth century most often blamed the market for disrupting traditional life. But by the 1970s, the state was to blame, situating the Christian Right smack dab in a Republican coalition that sought to dismantle the New Deal Order.

As Robert Putnam and David Campbell argue by way of sociological analysis of poll data, in their new book American Grace, religious and political positioning are more inextricable than ever. Whereas the degree to which a person was religious in the 1950s had little bearing on whether they identified as Democrat or Republican, today it matters greatly, as the more religious someone is the more likely they are to vote Republican. Conversely, people who are conservative but not religious gravitate towards religion because they find likeminded people in churches. And the same goes for liberals who are quitting church, or atheists who are quitting the Republican Party. This polarization is a microcosm of the culture wars.

The polarization of the culture wars, I suggest, helps us to understand the response to OWS, or perhaps more compellingly, the differences between the Tea Party and OWS, both of which were nominally anti-Wall Street. The popularity of the Tea Party could initially be partly explained by the antipathy to the Wall Street bailouts. But the Tea Party became a political force more as a conglomerate of conservative positions that tended towards austerity—towards the notion that the state could not help us out of this mess, that if anything it would make matters worse. Furthermore, the Tea Party’s anti-tax messages evinced opposition to laziness and government handouts, the sort of anti-“loser” rhetoric that fired up the traders who surrounded Rick Santelli when he lashed out at a plan to relieve foreclosed upon homeowners. Polarization also shapes the style or aesthetics of the two movements, as James Livingston has been arguing about OWS in several compelling blog posts. Tea Party activists dressed up as 18th century patriots and often talked as much about God and Country as about Taxes. OWS activists look like hippies, smoke weed, and often talk as much about the spiritual evils of consumerism as they do about anti-austerity. Style, identity, and culture: these things seem to matter to both sides as much as politics (which is not to argue that these things can replace politics, if reform or revolution be the goals). Style, identity, and culture: these things are as polarized as politics. This is the legacy of the culture wars that helps shape our understanding of the great debate taking place right now.

Love Letters to Limbaugh

The legendary right-wing radio jockey Rush Limbaugh never lacks for attention. But it’s rare for him to be the center of intellectual history discourse. And it’s even less common for him to be the subject of a sonnet written by a respected intellectual historian. But that’s what happened this week when Wilfred McClay, the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, friend of USIH, and author of the award winning The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, offered up an unqualified defense of the (in)famous radio jockey in this month’s edition of Commentary. McClay’s essay, “How to Understand Rush Limbaugh,” has gained wide attention among liberal intellectuals thanks to Jonathan Chait’s response over at The New Republic, where he charges McClay with ignoring inconvenient facts that might complicate his “ode to the goodness of Rush Limbaugh.”

Although I largely agree with Chait’s rather harsh assessment, let me begin with where I think McClay is right. He argues that liberal intellectuals schizophrenically charge Limbaugh with being a conservative puppet master and with being a drug-addled “big fat idiot.” I think McClay is right here. Most liberals don’t get Limbaugh’s appeal, in part because they never listen to him and generally lack curiosity about him. As someone who listens to Limbaugh’s radio program semi-regularly, I understand why he’s the most popular radio host in the nation. Limbaugh is a comedian who doubles as a political judo master in that he almost always successfully turns the tables on his liberal detractors. Take last year when the Obama administration thought it strategically wise, not to mention subtly comedic, to use Limbaugh as its whipping boy, to tie Obama’s congressional opponents to the polemical radio host, as if Limbaugh would act as an albatross on the Republican Party. Well, as Limbaugh might ask, who’s laughing now?

But though McClay accurately analyzes liberal myopia regarding Limbaugh, his understanding of Limbaugh’s place in the larger political and cultural context is equally myopic. Here’s a taste:

Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.

More constructive? Chait documents some of the ways in which Limbaugh has been less than constructive, such as hyping up conspiracies that Obama is a foreigner out to destroy the United States from within:

All right, little Barry is back in Indonesia, and they're all happy over there. Little Barry Soetoro is back and they're all happy over there in Indonesia. In fact, he was someplace in India, he was introduced by somebody from Kenya, and the woman says, “As a fellow Kenyan, Mr. President,” of course everybody looked the other way, “What do you mean fellow Kenyan, we don't want to hear this,” and now little Barry is back.

Chait also addresses Limbaugh’s very real record of race baiting, of stroking the egos and stoking the anxieties of whites in the manner of George Wallace. This has been an easy sell with a black man occupying the Oval Office. A recent tidbit:

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

By ignoring Limbaugh’s less than constructive provocations, McClay’s Commentary article positions him as a conservative culture warrior, rather than a dispassionate, scholarly chronicler. Which is fine for several reasons. First, I’m not one of those rah-rah objectivity types. Objectivity is overrated. Second, McClay obviously brackets off his serious scholarship, on display in his books and at the most recent USIH conference, from his political commentary (or, at least, I bracket them off in my mind). And third, I would not begrudge McClay the larger audience he will gain by writing for Commentary, or from being “heartily” endorsed by Limbaugh over the air (which he was).

That said, some intellectual contradictions need exploration. McClay concludes his Commentary essay as follows:

The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.

McClay thus thinks of Limbaugh as a champion of those who would take on the despised “new class,” putting McClay in the same camp of neoconservative thinkers such as Daniel Bell (“new class” thought is discussed here, here, and here). Let’s return to Rush. Here’s what he had to say on his program in 1994 during the dust-up over the National History Standards, in part authored by UCLA historian Gary Nash, who defended interpretation and exploration as the goals of history education:

What? History is an exploration? Let me tell you something folks. History is real simple. You know what history is? It’s what happened. It’s no more. The problem you get into is when guys like Gary Nash try to skew history by saying, "Well, let's interpret what happened because maybe we don’t find the truth in the facts, or at least we don’t like the truth as it’s presented. So let’s change the interpretation a little bit so that it will be the way we wished it were." Well, that's not what history is. History is what happened, and history ought to be nothing more than the quest to find out what happened.

McClay obviously can’t endorse such simplistic anti-intellectualism. (Hell, if Limbaugh were honest, he wouldn’t endorse his own diatribe, since he’s constantly exploring and interpreting the past.) So I conclude with a question for readers: How do neoconservative intellectuals who lambaste the “new class” reconcile what appears to be anti-intellectualism with the fact that they are intellectuals? (I ask this question fully recognizing its unfairness, given that we’re all riddled with contradiction, especially when we enter the political realm.)

Love Letters to Limbaugh

The legendary right-wing radio jockey Rush Limbaugh never lacks for attention. But it’s rare for him to be the center of intellectual history discourse. And it’s even less common for him to be the subject of a sonnet written by a respected intellectual historian. But that’s what happened this week when Wilfred McClay, the SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, friend of USIH, and author of the award winning The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, offered up an unqualified defense of the (in)famous radio jockey in this month’s edition of Commentary. McClay’s essay, “How to Understand Rush Limbaugh,” has gained wide attention among liberal intellectuals thanks to Jonathan Chait’s response over at The New Republic, where he charges McClay with ignoring inconvenient facts that might complicate his “ode to the goodness of Rush Limbaugh.”

Although I largely agree with Chait’s rather harsh assessment, let me begin with where I think McClay is right. He argues that liberal intellectuals schizophrenically charge Limbaugh with being a conservative puppet master and with being a drug-addled “big fat idiot.” I think McClay is right here. Most liberals don’t get Limbaugh’s appeal, in part because they never listen to him and generally lack curiosity about him. As someone who listens to Limbaugh’s radio program semi-regularly, I understand why he’s the most popular radio host in the nation. Limbaugh is a comedian who doubles as a political judo master in that he almost always successfully turns the tables on his liberal detractors. Take last year when the Obama administration thought it strategically wise, not to mention subtly comedic, to use Limbaugh as its whipping boy, to tie Obama’s congressional opponents to the polemical radio host, as if Limbaugh would act as an albatross on the Republican Party. Well, as Limbaugh might ask, who’s laughing now?

But though McClay accurately analyzes liberal myopia regarding Limbaugh, his understanding of Limbaugh’s place in the larger political and cultural context is equally myopic. Here’s a taste:

Without Limbaugh’s influence, talk radio might well have become a dreary medium of loud voices, relentless anger, and seething resentment, the sort of thing that the New York screamer Joe Pyne had pioneered in the 50s and 60s—“go gargle with razor blades,” he liked to tell his callers as he hung up on them—and that one can still see pop up in some of Limbaugh’s lesser epigones. Or it might have descended to the sometimes amusing but corrosive nonstop vulgarity of a Howard Stern. Limbaugh himself can be edgy, though almost always within PG-rated boundaries. But what he gave talk radio was a sense of sheer fun, of lightness, humor, and wit, whether indulging in his self-parodying Muhammad Ali–like braggadocio, drawing on his vast array of American pop-cultural reference points, or, in moving impromptu mini-sermons, reminding his listeners of the need to stay hopeful, work hard, and count their blessings as Americans. In such moments, and in many other moments besides, he reminds one of the affirmative spirit of Ronald Reagan and, like Reagan, reminds his listeners of the better angels of their nature. He transmutes the anger and frustration of millions of Americans into something more constructive.

More constructive? Chait documents some of the ways in which Limbaugh has been less than constructive, such as hyping up conspiracies that Obama is a foreigner out to destroy the United States from within:

All right, little Barry is back in Indonesia, and they're all happy over there. Little Barry Soetoro is back and they're all happy over there in Indonesia. In fact, he was someplace in India, he was introduced by somebody from Kenya, and the woman says, “As a fellow Kenyan, Mr. President,” of course everybody looked the other way, “What do you mean fellow Kenyan, we don't want to hear this,” and now little Barry is back.

Chait also addresses Limbaugh’s very real record of race baiting, of stroking the egos and stoking the anxieties of whites in the manner of George Wallace. This has been an easy sell with a black man occupying the Oval Office. A recent tidbit:

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety but in Obama's America the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, “Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on,” and, of course, everybody says the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white.

By ignoring Limbaugh’s less than constructive provocations, McClay’s Commentary article positions him as a conservative culture warrior, rather than a dispassionate, scholarly chronicler. Which is fine for several reasons. First, I’m not one of those rah-rah objectivity types. Objectivity is overrated. Second, McClay obviously brackets off his serious scholarship, on display in his books and at the most recent USIH conference, from his political commentary (or, at least, I bracket them off in my mind). And third, I would not begrudge McClay the larger audience he will gain by writing for Commentary, or from being “heartily” endorsed by Limbaugh over the air (which he was).

That said, some intellectual contradictions need exploration. McClay concludes his Commentary essay as follows:

The critics may be correct that the flourishing of talk radio is a sign of something wrong in our culture. But they mistake the effect for the cause. Talk radio is not the cause, but the corrective. In our own time, and in the person of Rush Limbaugh, along with others of his talk-radio brethren, a problem of long-standing in our culture has reached a critical stage: the growing loss of confidence in our elite cultural institutions, including the media, universities, and the agencies of government. The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills that will likely damage the nation and may subvert the Constitution, have brought this distrust to a higher level. The medium of talk radio has played a critical role in giving articulate shape and force to the resistance. If it is at times a crude and bumptious medium, it sometimes has to be, to disarm the false pieties and self-righteous gravitas in which our current elites too often clothe themselves. Genuinely democratic speech tends to be just that way, in case we have forgotten.

McClay thus thinks of Limbaugh as a champion of those who would take on the despised “new class,” putting McClay in the same camp of neoconservative thinkers such as Daniel Bell (“new class” thought is discussed here, here, and here). Let’s return to Rush. Here’s what he had to say on his program in 1994 during the dust-up over the National History Standards, in part authored by UCLA historian Gary Nash, who defended interpretation and exploration as the goals of history education:

What? History is an exploration? Let me tell you something folks. History is real simple. You know what history is? It’s what happened. It’s no more. The problem you get into is when guys like Gary Nash try to skew history by saying, "Well, let's interpret what happened because maybe we don’t find the truth in the facts, or at least we don’t like the truth as it’s presented. So let’s change the interpretation a little bit so that it will be the way we wished it were." Well, that's not what history is. History is what happened, and history ought to be nothing more than the quest to find out what happened.

McClay obviously can’t endorse such simplistic anti-intellectualism. (Hell, if Limbaugh were honest, he wouldn’t endorse his own diatribe, since he’s constantly exploring and interpreting the past.) So I conclude with a question for readers: How do neoconservative intellectuals who lambaste the “new class” reconcile what appears to be anti-intellectualism with the fact that they are intellectuals? (I ask this question fully recognizing its unfairness, given that we’re all riddled with contradiction, especially when we enter the political realm.)

The Neocon Take on the "New Class"

My most recent post on Daniel Bell, and how his form of thinking about the so-called "new class," brought comments, especially from Tim, asking for clarification. Here goes (briefly):

Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) about a so-called “new class” of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Members of this “new class,” so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this withering mode of criticism: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

The central reason the neoconservative “new class” theory was so plausible is because the university credential system had become the principal gateway to the professional world, a sorting mechanism for white-collar hierarchy. The numbers tell the story: in 1960, there were about 3.5 million Americans enrolled in universities; by 1970, this number had more than doubled to around 7.5 million, as the size of faculties grew proportionally. Historian James Livingston nicely relates this demographic explosion on the nation’s college campuses to the culture wars, or to what he generally describes as the “debates about the promise of American life.” “By the 1970s,” Livingston contends, “the principal residence of that promise was widely assumed to be the new ‘meritocracy’ enabled by universal access to higher education.” To this extent, class resentment aimed at intellectuals made sense, in a misplaced sort of way, since intellectuals indeed held the levers to any given individual’s future economic stability.*

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* See James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). (Or my review of that book, and his response.) Eric Hobsbawm also relates the growing importance of a university education to the redirection of class resentment against “toffs of one kind or another—intellectuals, liberal elites, people who are putting it over on us.” Eric Hobsbawm, “Interview: World Distempers,” New Left Review 61 (Jan/Feb 2010), 135.

The Neocon Take on the "New Class"

My most recent post on Daniel Bell, and how his form of thinking about the so-called "new class," brought comments, especially from Tim, asking for clarification. Here goes (briefly):

Out of their political repositioning in the late 1960s and 1970s, neoconservatives developed a critical theory (co-opted from anti-Stalinist thinking) about a so-called “new class” of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Members of this “new class,” so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this withering mode of criticism: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

The central reason the neoconservative “new class” theory was so plausible is because the university credential system had become the principal gateway to the professional world, a sorting mechanism for white-collar hierarchy. The numbers tell the story: in 1960, there were about 3.5 million Americans enrolled in universities; by 1970, this number had more than doubled to around 7.5 million, as the size of faculties grew proportionally. Historian James Livingston nicely relates this demographic explosion on the nation’s college campuses to the culture wars, or to what he generally describes as the “debates about the promise of American life.” “By the 1970s,” Livingston contends, “the principal residence of that promise was widely assumed to be the new ‘meritocracy’ enabled by universal access to higher education.” To this extent, class resentment aimed at intellectuals made sense, in a misplaced sort of way, since intellectuals indeed held the levers to any given individual’s future economic stability.*

----------------------
* See James Livingston, The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). (Or my review of that book, and his response.) Eric Hobsbawm also relates the growing importance of a university education to the redirection of class resentment against “toffs of one kind or another—intellectuals, liberal elites, people who are putting it over on us.” Eric Hobsbawm, “Interview: World Distempers,” New Left Review 61 (Jan/Feb 2010), 135.

R.I.P. Daniel Bell, Culture Wars Theorist/Protagonist

Daniel Bell’s intellectual obituary writers will rightly focus on his three most important books, The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). Scholars from an assortment of disciplines frequently cite these three books not only as intellectual signposts, but also for the theoretical and historical insights that they offer, many of which persist in seeming fresh. But in this post, my small attempt to memorialize Bell, who died at the age of 91 earlier this week, I will focus on a much less famous Wilson Quarterly essay, “The Cultural Wars: American Intellectual Life, 1965-1992” (1992). This essay gives the historian of the culture wars much to ponder. It exemplifies Bell’s qualities as both a theorist and a protagonist of the late twentieth century battles over intellectual position.

The purpose of Bell’s article was to reflect on why the universities were torn by conflict. The year of the essay’s publication, 1992, was the apex of the culture wars in the universities. “Political correctness” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Bell argued that this particular battle represented the decaying of the detached, public intellectual. In short, Bell echoed Russell Jacoby’s famous lament, elaborated in his bestseller, The Last Intellectuals (1987), that large institutions (otherwise known as universities) increasingly dominated the life of intellectuals, sapping them of their critical spirit. Setting aside the important critique of this contention, made by David Hollinger and others—that the ideal of the detached intellectual is a romantic reading of the past—Bell was in a good position to comment on this shift in intellectual life, since he occupied both positions, as one of the celebrated New York intellectuals, and also as a longtime professor at Harvard. For Bell, the institutionalization of intellectual life walled intellectuals off from the rest of America.

Arguing that intellectual life had changed was not to argue that intellectuals lacked influence. Quite to the contrary, intellectuals came to “constitute the institutional life of the society, and their wars—over positions in the institutions, especially the universities—and their conflicts over the definitions of what is salient in the culture (such as feminism and multiculturalism), constitute the ‘cultural wars’ that are taking place in American life today.”

In the passage below, Bell combined theoretical and historical insight with an implicitly partisan take on university intellectuals:

I begin with an arbitrary yet perhaps useful distinction between a culture and a society, the culture being the regnant attitudes and traditions that are the wellsprings of belief, the society denoting common attitudes and interests that define a people.

In this light, Bell thought culture and society diverged in contemporary U.S. history:

The United States today is a bourgeois society but not a bourgeois culture. It is a bourgeois society in its emphasis on individualism and materialism. But it is, at the “advanced” level, a modernist culture in its acceptance of experiment, new design, and complex forms. The culture of the United States today is permissive in its ethos (especially on moral and sexual issues) and modernist in its willingness to accept new and innovative and trendy expressions in the arts and literature. It is, to use the phrase of Lionel Trilling, an “adversary culture,” in its opposition to the prevailing societal attitudes. Yet that adversary culture is increasingly entrenched within the institutions of the society, especially the universities, and enjoys a cozy nonconformity in parading its new snobbishness, often on the pretense of still being persecuted. Inevitably, those attitudes have produced a reaction within the culture of what Sidney Blumenthal has called “the counter-intellectuals,” or, in the political arena, of the “neoconservatives,” men and women who have come forward strongly in defense of “bourgeois society” and its values. And uneasily between the two is a current of “political liberalism,” which, in separating the public and the private realms, defends the permissiveness in culture, but is more concerned to rectify the deficits of “bourgeois society,” especially on the issues of equality and redistributive justice. In effect, we have a new set of “cultural wars,” or Kulturkämpfe which are not the romantic visions of the intellectuals against the society, but intense disputes between—and within—enclaves of intellectuals whose arguments only occasionally (as now with the debate about “political correctness”) reach the larger public.

This passage demonstrated Bell’s mastery of “new class” thinking, perfected by the neoconservatives (which I previously wrote about here). “New class” thinking, I argue, was both theoretically astute, and partisan hackery. Bell’s genius was making such a contradictory combination possible.

R.I.P. Daniel Bell, Culture Wars Theorist/Protagonist

Daniel Bell’s intellectual obituary writers will rightly focus on his three most important books, The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976). Scholars from an assortment of disciplines frequently cite these three books not only as intellectual signposts, but also for the theoretical and historical insights that they offer, many of which persist in seeming fresh. But in this post, my small attempt to memorialize Bell, who died at the age of 91 earlier this week, I will focus on a much less famous Wilson Quarterly essay, “The Cultural Wars: American Intellectual Life, 1965-1992” (1992). This essay gives the historian of the culture wars much to ponder. It exemplifies Bell’s qualities as both a theorist and a protagonist of the late twentieth century battles over intellectual position.

The purpose of Bell’s article was to reflect on why the universities were torn by conflict. The year of the essay’s publication, 1992, was the apex of the culture wars in the universities. “Political correctness” was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Bell argued that this particular battle represented the decaying of the detached, public intellectual. In short, Bell echoed Russell Jacoby’s famous lament, elaborated in his bestseller, The Last Intellectuals (1987), that large institutions (otherwise known as universities) increasingly dominated the life of intellectuals, sapping them of their critical spirit. Setting aside the important critique of this contention, made by David Hollinger and others—that the ideal of the detached intellectual is a romantic reading of the past—Bell was in a good position to comment on this shift in intellectual life, since he occupied both positions, as one of the celebrated New York intellectuals, and also as a longtime professor at Harvard. For Bell, the institutionalization of intellectual life walled intellectuals off from the rest of America.

Arguing that intellectual life had changed was not to argue that intellectuals lacked influence. Quite to the contrary, intellectuals came to “constitute the institutional life of the society, and their wars—over positions in the institutions, especially the universities—and their conflicts over the definitions of what is salient in the culture (such as feminism and multiculturalism), constitute the ‘cultural wars’ that are taking place in American life today.”

In the passage below, Bell combined theoretical and historical insight with an implicitly partisan take on university intellectuals:

I begin with an arbitrary yet perhaps useful distinction between a culture and a society, the culture being the regnant attitudes and traditions that are the wellsprings of belief, the society denoting common attitudes and interests that define a people.

In this light, Bell thought culture and society diverged in contemporary U.S. history:

The United States today is a bourgeois society but not a bourgeois culture. It is a bourgeois society in its emphasis on individualism and materialism. But it is, at the “advanced” level, a modernist culture in its acceptance of experiment, new design, and complex forms. The culture of the United States today is permissive in its ethos (especially on moral and sexual issues) and modernist in its willingness to accept new and innovative and trendy expressions in the arts and literature. It is, to use the phrase of Lionel Trilling, an “adversary culture,” in its opposition to the prevailing societal attitudes. Yet that adversary culture is increasingly entrenched within the institutions of the society, especially the universities, and enjoys a cozy nonconformity in parading its new snobbishness, often on the pretense of still being persecuted. Inevitably, those attitudes have produced a reaction within the culture of what Sidney Blumenthal has called “the counter-intellectuals,” or, in the political arena, of the “neoconservatives,” men and women who have come forward strongly in defense of “bourgeois society” and its values. And uneasily between the two is a current of “political liberalism,” which, in separating the public and the private realms, defends the permissiveness in culture, but is more concerned to rectify the deficits of “bourgeois society,” especially on the issues of equality and redistributive justice. In effect, we have a new set of “cultural wars,” or Kulturkämpfe which are not the romantic visions of the intellectuals against the society, but intense disputes between—and within—enclaves of intellectuals whose arguments only occasionally (as now with the debate about “political correctness”) reach the larger public.

This passage demonstrated Bell’s mastery of “new class” thinking, perfected by the neoconservatives (which I previously wrote about here). “New class” thinking, I argue, was both theoretically astute, and partisan hackery. Bell’s genius was making such a contradictory combination possible.

“New Class” Thinking and Historiography

I am curious what our readers make of “new class” thinking. Is it a legitimate way of theorizing about the place of intellectuals in our postmodern, postindustrial society? Or is it anti-intellectual nonsense, an updated version of Julian Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs?

In my research on the culture wars, I credit the popularization of “new class” thinking to the neoconservatives. Out of their political repositioning, they developed a critical theory about a so-called “new class” of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Most members of this “new class,” so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this withering mode of criticism: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

In this sense, “new class” thinking seems more ideological than analytical, consistent with the anti-intellectual histrionics of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, amusingly portrayed by David Bromwich in his recent New York Review of Books piece, “The Rebel Germ.” Bromwich describes how Limbaugh mockingly portrays Democrats as the party of wimpish intellectuals—updating the egghead label applied to early Cold War era Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and his followers—“composed of superannuated aristocrats [and] pretentious arrivistes...” If this is the sole meaning of the “new class,” then there’s nothing much new about it. But plenty of historians and other intellectuals think the concept analytically useful.

Take Christopher Lasch’s biographer Eric Miller, who buys into Alvin Gouldner’s argument about the “new class,” made in his 1982 book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. In a passage cited by Miller to explain Lasch’s early theories about society, Gouldner writes that a “new class” intellectual “desacralizes authority-claims and facilitates challenges to definitions of social reality made by traditional authorities...” Miller continues, in his own disapproving words:

The unintended effect of this way of seeing was on the one hand to diminish the individual’s sense of agency while on the other to empower the individual to think of herself as subject to no authority beyond the particular, socially constructed, historically contingent institutions of her own circumstance. In the end, social-science-inspired historiography only buttressed a vision of the world in which humans, while shaped by powerful social structures, were morally on their own and finally responsible to no authority higher than their own. The atomizing, antinomian tendencies latent in this individualistic ideology did not bode well for communitarian political hopes—such as those that were fueling Lasch’s nascent historical work and political vision (72-73).


In other words, paradoxically, the early Lasch, and “new class” thinkers like him, laid the groundwork for postmodernism in their dismissal of traditional structures of intellectual authority. I say paradoxically because the later, communitarian Lasch worked so hard to put the pieces of traditional structures of intellectual authority back together. I also say paradoxically because the later Lasch used “new class” thinking in both its political and analytical senses, especially in The True and Only Heaven (1991) and The Revolt of the Elites (1995).

So which is it? (I ask somewhat rhetorically, knowing one does not preclude the other.)

“New Class” Thinking and Historiography

I am curious what our readers make of “new class” thinking. Is it a legitimate way of theorizing about the place of intellectuals in our postmodern, postindustrial society? Or is it anti-intellectual nonsense, an updated version of Julian Benda’s La Trahison des Clercs?

In my research on the culture wars, I credit the popularization of “new class” thinking to the neoconservatives. Out of their political repositioning, they developed a critical theory about a so-called “new class” of intellectuals, broadly defined to include all professionals tasked with manipulating language—although more narrowly applied to humanists and social scientists. Most members of this “new class,” so the theory went, had turned their backs on the society to which they owed their high-ranking status. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this withering mode of criticism: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

In this sense, “new class” thinking seems more ideological than analytical, consistent with the anti-intellectual histrionics of Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, amusingly portrayed by David Bromwich in his recent New York Review of Books piece, “The Rebel Germ.” Bromwich describes how Limbaugh mockingly portrays Democrats as the party of wimpish intellectuals—updating the egghead label applied to early Cold War era Democrats like Adlai Stevenson and his followers—“composed of superannuated aristocrats [and] pretentious arrivistes...” If this is the sole meaning of the “new class,” then there’s nothing much new about it. But plenty of historians and other intellectuals think the concept analytically useful.

Take Christopher Lasch’s biographer Eric Miller, who buys into Alvin Gouldner’s argument about the “new class,” made in his 1982 book, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. In a passage cited by Miller to explain Lasch’s early theories about society, Gouldner writes that a “new class” intellectual “desacralizes authority-claims and facilitates challenges to definitions of social reality made by traditional authorities...” Miller continues, in his own disapproving words:

The unintended effect of this way of seeing was on the one hand to diminish the individual’s sense of agency while on the other to empower the individual to think of herself as subject to no authority beyond the particular, socially constructed, historically contingent institutions of her own circumstance. In the end, social-science-inspired historiography only buttressed a vision of the world in which humans, while shaped by powerful social structures, were morally on their own and finally responsible to no authority higher than their own. The atomizing, antinomian tendencies latent in this individualistic ideology did not bode well for communitarian political hopes—such as those that were fueling Lasch’s nascent historical work and political vision (72-73).


In other words, paradoxically, the early Lasch, and “new class” thinkers like him, laid the groundwork for postmodernism in their dismissal of traditional structures of intellectual authority. I say paradoxically because the later, communitarian Lasch worked so hard to put the pieces of traditional structures of intellectual authority back together. I also say paradoxically because the later Lasch used “new class” thinking in both its political and analytical senses, especially in The True and Only Heaven (1991) and The Revolt of the Elites (1995).

So which is it? (I ask somewhat rhetorically, knowing one does not preclude the other.)