progressivism, individualism, and the public ... - Telmarc Group

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PROGRESSIVISM, INDIVIDUALISM, AND THE PUBLIC
INTELLECTUAL
The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian
Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when
Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that
Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the
indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those
with whom you disagree.
Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable,
because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the
liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long
last proud of America. "
But if Will has discovered a nexus, a nexus of substantial value, then one must say that
Hofstadter and the prejudice and near hatred of rubes and Irish Catholics may still live
on. Will sees the pervasive influence of Hofstadter. Indeed there is the view that only the
Intellectual on Morningside Heights sees the truth and that the rubes and Catholics below
need guidance for the response from this underclass is their almost animalistic and
unguided d responses.
His dismissal of those with whom you disagree is in many ways a result also of the
influence of Herbert Marcuse in his work The One Dimensional Man. For it was
Marcuse who gave structure to what Hofstadter and Bell and others were saying in that
he argued that the society had through its advertising, preaching and the like reduced
people to sheep, to followers. Marcuse became the prophet for the 60s generation of
protesters, especially at Columbia. In fact, Marcuse was saying in a more elegant can
compelling manner what Galbraith had popularized in The Affluent Society, namely that
society was manipulated to "buy" what corporate institutions wanted them to buy, that
individual choice was being ripped away, and that society had only one path and that was
the path laid out by the capitalists.
This underclass needs direction and guidance, says Hofstadter, and whatever they may
think, whatever opinion they may have is uninformed because they just have not listened,
they do not understand, and in some cases they do not have the capability of even
understanding. They have in the mind of many of these intellectuals become the
"untouchables", they are there but they just should be forgotten. If one reads between the
lines of the letter to me from Barr in 1960 that view is pervasive. I had been inculcated
and Columbia was just beyond me. Somehow MIT thought differently. Also I was a
Professor in 1996 at Columbia in the Business School. Frankly the students were some of
the least intelligent I have ever seen in my forty plus years of teaching 161 .
161 I taught in the 1995-1996 year at Columbia Business School. I was uniquely unimpressed by the students. They
were in an Executive Program and one would have expected some understanding. They were lacking in any
mathematical skills, and had de minimis knowledge of common business principles. In contrast in the late 1980 and
early 1990s I was a Professor at the Polytechnic University, now NYU's Engineering School in Brooklyn. The students
were for the most part first or second generation Americans from everywhere. They were bright and hard working,
eager to learn, street smart, open, and lacking in the arrogance of the Columbia students. My MIT doctoral students are
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