I’m going to disagree with Mr. Scialabba on whether intellectuals had anything to do with the Iraq War. One of the best things I’ve listened to in recent months is this talk by Sam Tanenhaus, presenting a kind of intellectual-historical background on the Bush presidency to the AEI. I’ve listened to it about 6 times, and got more out of it every time. This commentary by Jim Sleeper is a bit breathless, in my opinion, but it usefully highlights an awful lot that Tanenhaus understates in his speech.

This whole thing about “the New Class” is interesting. Irving Kristol described it as:

…scientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their career in the expanding public sector, city planners and the staffs of the larger foundations and upper levels of the government bureaucracy, and so on…

Sounds like it’s not too far a jump from the “New Class” to the “reality based community.”

See also George Packer, David Frum, Susan Jacoby, E. J. Dionne (your brief comment a few months ago about Kevin Phillips being “Nixon’s Intellectual” turned on a lightbulb for me).

Anyway, sadly, I do think there were intellectuals who 1) dumbed down our political discourse, 2) polarized that discourse as well, 3) created manifestos that helped build an excessively adversarial media and think tank infrastructure, and 4) pushed an unrealistic, hawkish and interventionalist foreign policy, especially with regard to the middle east.

Sam Tanenhaus has a book coming out in a few months. You should invite him on your show…

A few quick, hypothetical answers to the question: “What has happened to public intellectuals?” Not saying which answers seem most accurate to me…

* They’re playing music.
* They write in languages other than English.
* They live outside of anti-intellectual milieux, such as many parts of contemporary US.
* They’re off the radar of books and newspaper publishers so they don’t appear on shows.
* They congregate under baobabs.
* They have become entertainers in high-profile conferences.
* They are anonymous.
* They have become celebrities, in some parts of the World, and seem too different from the picture we usually have to be recognizable as public intellectuals.
* They let go of the modernist, nationalist, socialist/capitalist models and do live in a post-modern world.
* They hold positions as academics in institutions which have become quite constraining.
* They simply disappeared.
* They became hermits.
* They participate in a large number of low-profile conversations.
* They went online.
* They host thought-provoking podcasts.