Intellectuals in Politics

...Is it unlikely that the agencies and Congress would have taken action by the end of that year...

...I agree with the novelist Edmund White that because of internal bureaucratic squabbles over precedence, tenure and grants, "progressive" academics are more eager to denounce less "politically correct" colleagues than to turn their attention to late century ills—poverty, urban decay, volence, health care, drug addiction, crime, child care in the ghetto, etc...

...My first example suggests that there is something wrong with our journalists and with our professors of law, business, and economics— with the intellectuals who are supposed to tell the voters the facts...

...As a recent article in the Journal of Philosophy by David Gruber put it: "Rather than fight again and again to preserve the dismal, futile hope of our liberal individuality, transgressive thinking would renounce our liberal individuality, declining to be caught in its vortex...

...We assume that if the schools were better and if the media were forced to provide us with free print space and television time, we could do a lot to make democracy work...

...For we professors, like Martz and his fellow journalists, do not see ourselves as having a responsibility to educate the voters—a responsibility to our fellow citizens who are too busy pouring concrete, cooking fast food, selling software, or otherwise sweating through the day, to read up on the economics of banking, or to note the similarities among the Grant, Harding, and Reagan administrations...

...Admitting that this was unfortunate, and offering various reasons (turf battles between political reporters and financial reporters, for example) why so little was done, Martz said that "perhaps reforms can be made to correct these shortcomings...

...sexuality, the unconscious, and so on...

...I want to insist on distinguishing cultural politics from "real actions and events in the political sphere...

...How do journalists know when they are being pushed past "their proper bounds...

...But I am saying that Martz and Ross look a lot alike...

...Such people tend to teach in literature departments and to write articles with titles like "Strategies of Subversion: Discourse, Desire, and the Other in 'Gilligan's Island' " (see Brian Morton, "How Not to Write for Dissent" in Dissent, Summer 1990...

...Those who, like myself, FALL • 1991 • 483 Intellectuals in Politics describe themselves as "liberals" typically tell a somewhat different story—one that spreads the blame more widely...

...If anybody starts complaining about the arrogance of the press, that will show that the press has once again had the impudence to suggest that it knows better than the government or the public what should be done...

...That is the theory...

...Surely it is too soon to give it up...

...As a counterpart to Martz, consider Professor Andrew Ross of the Princeton English department...

...Especially if we have a long, hard recession— one that makes a large part of the middle class realize how fragile their hold on gentility was, how easily a family's income can fall below $20,000, and how little their interests have in common with those of the rich—the secession of the succesful might end...

...But whether it would have made a big difference or not, the point is that the press and the universities are now talking as if the country has learned a useful lesson by losing that half-trillion, while implying that there was unfortunately nothing much anybody could have done any earlier...

...Because these theorists no longer think of themselves as citizens of a functioning democracy, they are producing a generation of radical students who think of "the system" as irredeemable, and who therefore can think of nothing better to do with their sense of moral outrage than to fling themselves into curricular FALL • 1991 • 489 Intellectuals in Politics change...

...One can only escape such aberrations, they think, by doing the same deconstructive job on the entire complex of ideas that make up traditional liberal thought—the ideas common to Mill and Dewey, Norman Thomas and Jawarahal Nehru—as feminism has done on patriarchal institutions...

...We have come to take a kind of perverse satisfaction in our own ineffectuality and futility...

...It would be, he says, "unrealistic to heroicize declarations of immunity to the contagious forms of the commodity world when so much of our social lives are lived as consumers...

...Anybody willing to read the newspapers, this theory says, is able to understand and criticize what happens in Washington and in state and local governments: to know which incumbents have demonstrated their rascality and deserve to be thrown out, to tell which candidates are pandering to hatred and resentment and which have sensible proposals to offer...

...Further, they will find themselves deflected from the "high" culture that Trotsky shared with Dewey and DuBois and discouraged from exhibiting contempt for schlock...

...Everything...

...What is this supposed to have to do with literature...

...Spiegel has recently been running a series of articles about how America is going down the tubes...

...In the course of two hundred years, things changed...

...In effect, the contradiction of postmodernist politics is one that a more traditional ethics on the left cannot easily accommodate if it still insists on a concept of "politics"—real actions and events in the political sphere—that is always above and beyond what continues to be disparaged as the [merely] potentially political effects of cultural transformations...

...But if the second story—a story about selfish indifference rather than about a cynical, omnipotent elite—gets at the crucial problem, then maybe reform has a chance...

...We pin what hopes we can muster on resurgent labor unions and community organizations, a vast increase in the percentage of the poor who go to the polls, and a Democratic administration...

...it suggests that things might change, that maybe gradual reform still has a chance...

...Martz's big nondrinking horse is too dumb to have a conscience...

...The whole idea of intellectuals knowing something that nonintellectuals should know but do not is, for Ross, largely a refusal to recognize and respect difference...

...Many who clamor for more aggressive coverage are really asking something else: that the media should actively crusade for just causes that nobody in government wants to push and the voters haven't cared about...

...You have to change the language in which to talk about these things...

...The more such students are told that the most useful thing they can do is to unmask ideological aberrations, or to celebrate difference, the more likely they are to dismiss proposals for reform legislation, or movements to elect reform candidates, as mere distractions...

...Professor Ross presents himself and his fellow transgressors as deepening and intensifying the Marxist critique of contemporary society...

...But we well-educated people, the intellectuals, the people who read magazines like Dissent, usually take no blame on ourselves...

...The average suburbanite admits that we have to give these people small welfare checks and surplus cheese occasionally, but feels that their interests have little to do with the interests of the country as a whole...

...In contrast, I see these transformations as altogether welcome but unlikely to help provide such solutions...

...I find the linkage that Ross takes for granted very obscure...

...Any such media crusade would trigger a backlash—not asking who's to blame for inaction, but assailing media conspiracies and the arrogance of the selfrighteous press...

...Far be it from the press to think of itself as educating the electorate...

...If we American intellectuals are to be of any political use, we ought to be able to help end this secession...

...Just suppose, for a moment, that a few hundred outraged professors of economics and banking, joined by a few hundred scandalized professors of commercial law, had, in 1984, picked up on Newsweek's remark that a "lot of thrifts are shooting craps with federally insured money...

...If a conspiracy theory is the whole story—if Richard Condon's novels about the interlocking power of the media lords, the politicians, the military-industrial complex, and the underworld give a reasonably accurate account of what is going on—then nothing short of a violent, and probably impossible, revolution could change America...

...Both are redefining the scope of their own professional activity and their relation to democratic politics so as to legitimize this hopelessness...

...nothing is off-limits...

...Suppose that they had offered to serve as a brain-trust, a constant unpaid source of data and argument, for Newsweek, on condition that Newsweek mount a systematic campaign—that it publish a weekly update on what the S&Ls were up to, and assign lots of reporters to keep up day-to-day pressure on the relevant regulatory agencies, insisting that the agencies answer the hard questions about what was going on...

...Apart from the sheer difficulty (does anybody really think voters who were bored with Iran-contra could have been excited by the S&L scandal...

...Ross thinks, reject popular culture merely because it is sexist, racist, and militarist, for to do so is to fail to understand the healthy disrespect for authority (and, in particular, for the authority of the educated) that underlies such attitudes...

...We ought to be able to convince our fellow middle class "symbolic analysts" that their interests are not identical with those of the rich, and to help them think of people who live in rusty mobile homes as fellow citizens...

...The American white middle class has come to view the blacks in the ghettos, the homeless on the streets, and the people who live on food stamps in rusting mobile homes along the back roads of West Virginia as creatures who have to be kept under control...

...He questions the very idea of "educating our masters," the idea that the educated should try to drag the uneducated away from popular culture by introducing them to terminologies, historical perspectives, and political hopes for which that culture has little room...

...Maybe something like a new New Deal is still a realistic goal...

...It restricts itself to cultural politics, while losing any relevance to the attempt to use the institutions of a democratic society —the vote, the newspapers, the community organizations— to help the poor resist the rich...

...Is it unlikely that Newsweek would have covered itself with honor—would have become the paragon of American journalism—and that those outraged professors would have been carried about on the shoulders of their students...

...To raise what advanced literary theorists call "issues of race, class, and gender," it is not enough to cite statistics about rape, wifebeating, gaybashing, income differences, and differences in per-pupil expenditure in various school districts...

...There is considerable truth, I think, in both stories...

...Because both men are unable to function as citizens of a democracy, both are in danger of falling into the role of cynical outsider— someone who always knew, deep down inside, that democracy was not going to work...

...This flexible Stalinist term has recently come into serious, unironic use on American campuses— chilling the blood of old-timers like myself...

...Although nonpoor women and gays will profit enormously from the cultural changes Ross and his colleagues are helping to bring about, I see little reason to think that the poor will, and considerable reason to think that they are going to get considerably less help from the intellectuals than they once did (even as their culture gets more respect...

...If I incline to the latter, it is only because it allows for a bit of hope...

...My second suggests that there is something wrong with the sort of intellectuals who are supposed to remind the voters of their ideals, expand their imaginations, quicken their sensibilities...

...In targeting these two examples, I am not saying that American journalists and professors are of no use to American public life...

...We have not been very successful at doing either lately—not so much because our access to the electorate has been blocked as because we seem to have lost track of our functions...

...Advanced literary theory" means the sort of thing that postmodernist professors say about literature's nature and function...

...Ross presumably sees the increasing importance of feminists in English departments and the increasing ability of gay and lesbian students to live uncloseted and unharassed on university campuses as cultural transformations that will eventually, somehow, link up with 488 • DISSENT Intellectuals in Politics solutions to the problems of the "structurally" unemployed factory workers in the Rust Belt, the stoop laborers along the Rio Grande, and the children in the ghettos...

...Some of the blame is attached to the media, and in particular to television...

...The popular culture Ross celebrates is too intent on differences and on defiance of authority to allow space for the unifying force of shared moral indignation...

...it represents attitudes that are widespread in American literature departments...

...So if you haven't studied a lot of literature and essayed a lot of literary interpetation, thereby getting clued into the linguistics of literariness, your chances of sucessfully subverting the racist, sexist, and colonialist institutions of bourgeois society, of being appropriately transgressive, are pretty slim...

...The rank and file of the media no longer, apparently, feel any need to do so—or, at least, to continue to shove the public's noses in it once boredom has been evinced...

...Easy: just watch out for signs of a backlash...

...A similar sense of outrage once drove the best and brightest young people, the ones most disturbed by inequalities of life chances, to read Rousseau and Voltaire and Paine...

...The articles recite the usual charges: violent cities, structural unemployment, useless schools, bought legislators, cheap handguns, middle-class contempt for the poor, selfish unwillingness to be taxed, and so on...

...Both men imply that intellectuals can no longer hope to do what they once hoped to do: use the mechanisms of democratic government to help prevent the rich from ripping off the poor, the strong from trampling on the weak...

...The only possible rejoinder is neither confrontation nor destruction, but only theft: fragment the old text of culture, science, literature, and change its features according to formulae of disguise, as one disguises stolen goods...

...iconoclastic newspapers flourished...

...I take the term "real" here not to assign a metaphysical status but to be an abbreviation for "likely to redress the balance of power between the rich and the poor...

...The only problem, it seems, is that that big dumb horse, the one who won't drink even when led to water—the American electorate— has a short attention span...

...Don't expect the universities to do it either...

...In response to legislation that invited the most brazen rip-off of public funds in the history of the world—the result of a harmonious bipartisan agreement to eliminate the risks of a free market in investment capital in order to make potential PAC-contributors richer faster—neither the American press nor the American academy saw any need to bestir itself...

...Transgressive thinkers like Professor Ross are creating a left that spends much more time thinking about the undergraduate curriculum than it does thinking about structural unemployment or health insurance or tax bases or PACs—a left with no time for old-fashioned meat-and-potatoes proposals for reform...

...Both have given up the hope that any constitutional democracy with a literate electorate, a free press, and free universities will be able, eventually, to pull itself together and transform itself into a proud, confident, egalitarian, cooperative commonwealth...

...What is beginning to seem like a permanent majority of the voters has ceased to think of any member of a family whose income is less than $20,000 a year as a fellow citizen, a fellow American...

...So he hoped to be admitted to graduate study in English...

...I am quite aware that, if it were not for the newspapers rubbing our noses in the lives of ghetto children and academics like Robert Reich deploying the statistics of selfishness, our country would become even more heartless than it is...

...Where the poor are not cheated out of a chance to vote by voter-registration rules and hard-to-get-to polling places, they are cheated out of the information necessary to vote by PAC-financed media blitzes, endlessly repeated big lies...

...These theorists tend to agree that the whole tradition of liberal reform—for example, the sort of thing I was saying about the need for a revivification of the unions and of the Democratic party—is so caught up in these ideological aberrations as to be useless...

...Local newshounds, noticing what the S&Ls in their localities were up to, had written exposés...

...As Paul de Man said: What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism...

...Larry Martz, a contributing editor, on a page headed "S&Ls: Blaming the Media" (Newsweek, June 25, 1990), wrote, "Now, inevitably, anger is building at the media for failing to sound clear warnings about the worst financial mess in the nation's history...

...Ross warns them against a puritanical disdain for the world of consumer commodities, against viewing this world as one suitable only for the lumpen, a distraction from political struggle...

...So much for my two examples of futile intellectuals—the people who could have warned us that the S&Ls were ripping us off and didn't, and the people who rise above petty Matters like Congress's decision to insure crapshooters and instead criticize the "liberal individualism" supposedly common to the Keating Five and the Five's victimized constituents...

...For all the Watergate legends, journalism can't solve problems that courts, legislatures and presidents refuse to deal with...

...The first is the lack of public outcry about the legislation that enabled the savings and loan (S&L) owners to loot the federal treasury...

...Is it likely that anybody would have complained, for very long, about "crusading arrogance...

...More generally, Professor Ross wants his students to stop assuming that they, as prospective intellectuals, will be in a position to teach the uneducated what it is they really need and to suggest to them how they might get it...

...reporters are no wiser than anyone else about what should be done...

...Writers like Ross put words like "freedom," "independence," and "autonomy" in shudder quotes...

...Unlike Ross, I do not want to redefine politics...

...It is hard to understand how the editors of our best mass-circulation weekly could have offered them as Newsweek's conception of the role of the press in the American political process...

...state universities and community colleges took in more and more students...

...Irrationalism" is a charge that has been flung at everybody from Socrates to William James, at every thinker who challenged familiar pieties...

...and no outcomes are guaranteed...

...Later it drove them to read Marx, Lenin, and Franz Fanon...

...Both Martz and Ross seem to have abandoned the idea that leftist intellectuals can appeal to the national conscience, can use their access to print and podiums to function as fellow citizens...

...An English professor I know got a letter from a young man who described himself as writing from a shelter for the homeless, where he had been helping out for some months...

...After all, who are the journalists to think that they can tell a "just cause" when they see one...

...We must not, for example, be too hard on sadomasochistic pornography, for we should recognize that "violence and aggressivity are likely to remain constitutive elements of our sexuality...

...He says: A postmodernist politics must complete the FALL • 1991 • 487 Intellectuals in Politics Gramscian move to extend the political into all spheres, domains and practices of our culture . . . . Everything is contestable...

...Suppose that this campaign had been kept up for a solid year, and that more and more local newspapers were incited to run articles on local S&Ls by economics and law professors at local colleges and universities...

...How does the press decide whether it has led us far enough...

...They have no use for the vocabulary that was used by both the bourgeois liberals and the Marxists to express their common hopes...

...My complaint is not that the postmodernists have "abandoned reason" nor that they are staining the purity of hitherto innocent academic disciplines and thereby destroying the universities...

...The current theory of American government is that education has made the mob versus elite distinction obsolete...

...Suppose that they had chipped in $50 apiece and taken a couple of full-page ads in the Washington Post spelling out some of the details of this crap shooting, backing up Newsweek's claim that this "could ultimately cost the government billions of dollars...

...many theorists whose approach to politics parallels Ross's suggest that what the left needs now is a postmodern successor to Marxism, a general theory of oppression—one that can bring issues of race, class, and gender together in an insightful synthesis, burrow under the deepest infrastructures of our present language, and unmask all ideological aberrations at once...

...But when thinking gets as "transgressive" as Gruber and Ross would like it to be, it loses contact with the leftist tradition that often, in the past, brought social democrats and Marxists together in common political initiatives...

...The people who live on food stamps are not "the mob" —they are too weak and pitiful for that...

...I turn now from the press to my colleagues: my fellow professors...

...Martz suggests that the journalists must work within the confines of the circulation figures and the ratings, realize that it is worse to bore or antagonize your audience than to let them continue hurting themselves and others...

...Any literary theorist whose work does not call for the total transformation of our society is thought insufficiently advanced...

...To subvert the language of our sexist, racist, colonialist culture—to burrow underneath the language of bourgeois ideology, or to steal and disguise bits of it—we have to write in devious ways...

...This is a story about what Robert Reich calls "the secession of the successful...

...If they said anything, they did not manage to make the rest of us aware of it...

...They are just irrelevant, lumpen, a tediously expensive nuisance...

...In the six years (198288) before the scandal broke, the six years after Congress decided that the S&Ls could invest in anything they pleased with federally insured money—a decision that Charles Keating said he found unbelievable when he first heard FALL • 1991 • 485 Intellectuals in Politics about it—what did the professors of economics, the professors of banking, the deans of the business schools and the law schools say about this decision...

...That introduction gives a good account of the rationale for the switch of attention from electoral to cultural politics that is characteristic of the contemporary American academic left...

...Martz's article suggests that we need not postulate, as a conspiracy theory would, ruthless media barons preventing courageous investigative reporters from raking muck...

...Ross justifies this change in direction by rejecting the distinction I should like to draw between real, electoral politics and cultural or academic politics: [W]hat is at stake here is a redefinition of politics itself...

...He made clear, however, that he and his colleagues in journalism were not about to accept what he regarded as a bum rap...

...Newsweek had, as early as 1984, 484 • DISSENT Intellectuals in Politics informed its readers that a "lot of thrifts are shooting craps with federally insured money" and that the taxpayers might have to ante up billions of dollars to cover their debts...

...Some of the blame is attached to the high schools, from which people can graduate without any sense of how how the system is supposed to work, much less of how it actually works...

...People who do not hang around universities have been made aware of the existence of these professors by reading denunciations of them in the press...

...Mark 486 • DISSENT Intellectuals in Politics Edmundson (in "The Will to Cultural Power," Harper's, Spring 1989) has noted the enduring hostility of "the critical establishment at the New York Times, Newsweek, and the Washington Post" to "advanced literary theory...

...redefined, for example, to account for those arrangements of power that devolve upon the body...

...We might cease to be two nations...

...Our bills are still coming in...

...It is lucky that Spiegel did not pick up on Martz's apologia, or it might have added "and a whiny, defensive, self-involved press...

...That hope inspired ten earlier generations of American leftist intellectuals...

...But," Martz continued, "lacking political fireworks, the national media were slow to pick up the theme...

...This is why the literature departments—rather than the economics, political science, or sociology departments— have become the red-hot centers of political "radicalism" on the campuses...

...Surely the cynical rippers-off could wish for nothing better than that all the journalists should agree with Martz about the need to avoid "arrogance" and that all the professors should agree with Professor Ross about the need for a redefinition of politics...

...At each stage of this process, the educated, the people who read and wrote books, assured each other that mob rule could still be avoided as long as we continued to "educate our masters" —made sure that the ordinary voter had enough education to understand what the government was up to...

...The practice, everybody admits, falls short...

...As I see it, the usual Washington Post–style denunciation of the advanced literary theorists as "irrationalist" —as "betraying the traditions of reasoned discourse" —is not to the point...

...As far as I am aware, no other newspaper or magazine took the trouble to distance itself from Newsweek's view of the matter...

...This is usually along the lines of the following quotation from Roland Barthes: In fact, today, there is no language site outside bourgeois ideology: our language comes from it, returns to it, remains closed up in it...

...I turn now to a very different sort of intellectual...

...The press and the professoriate are acting as if both believed not only that democracy has not been working lately but that there is no longer any point in trying to make it work...

...The horse has to decide whether to drink...

...It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry, including economics, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations, as well as a determining factor in accounting for their occurrence...

...The closest thing to an opposite number Newsweek has in Europe is Der Spiegel, a magazine that has built its circulation (a circulation as large, proportionately, as Newsweek's) around crusading, muckraking, and the arrogant insistence that it knows a just cause when it sees one...

...Postmodernists think that because bourgeois ideology (not to mention phallogocentrism, the traditional male claim to an organ called "reason," an organ rudimentary in the female, which can penetrate through appearance to reality) has permeated all of our language and all of our culture, there is no point in trying to offer straightforward political arguments or proposals...

...As Martz says, we shouldn't "expect the media to take the lead in the next big crisis...

...That the taxpayers would have lost only a quarter-trillion dollars instead of a half-trillion, on the deal...

...We have to go about in disguise: be indirect, sneaky, complex...

...Reading Ross usually sends students off into academic politics rather than real politics—into getting a course on racism and sexism made compulsory for freshmen, making homophobia grounds for expulsion from the university, and making sure that new appointees to the faculty meet standards of "political correctness...

...On this account, the big problem is that white people whose family income is over $20,000 a year have come to think of themselves as having nothing in common with the weak and the poor (especially the black and brown poor...

...Leftist intellectuals who think of themselves as "radicals" hold some variant or another of this first theory...

...The press can lead the horse to water...

...Nowadays participatory democracy is everybody's explicit aim rather than a danger to be forestalled...

...They are directed to what Ross calls "a politics of difference" —one that is concerned more with differences in race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation than with the fact that the rich are continuing to rip off the poor...

...He wants to redefine politics so that the campuses are where the real political action is...

...One suspects that if they had said anything they would now be reminding us of the fact, and they are not...

...I have two examples to offer in support of this last claim...

...It is that they have given up on the idea of democratic politics, of mobilizing moral outrage in defense of the weak, of drawing upon a moral vocabulary common to the well educated and the badly educated, to those who get paid for analyzing symbols and those who get paid for pouring concrete or dishing up cheeseburgers...

...This man explained that he was utterly discouraged with piecemeal remedies for misery, and had resolved to study the roots of social injustice...

...A well-known analyst and theorist of popular culture (rock and movie stars, television series, and the like), the author of No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture, Ross has also written an introduction to a collection of essays called Universal Abandon: The Politics of Postmodernism (the first in a new series called "Cultural Politics...

...The more these thinkers tell their students that the root cause of the suffering they see around them is "Western technological thinking" or "phallogocentrism" or "liberal individualism" rather than old-fashioned greed and selfishness, the more likely those students are to think that by detecting sexism in a soap opera (or Tudor agrarian policies beneath the surface of an Elizabethan pastoral or homophobia lurking behind Kant's Critiques) they are striking a blow for human freedom...

...While waiting, we tell each other two sorts of stories about what has gone wrong: about why a country with functioning democratic procedures, a largely literate electorate, and universal adult suffrage is being systematically looted by the rich...

...The rank-and-file state of mind, the one that still has a sense of a fixed ethical horizon, feels outrage when it sees the strong depriving the weak of hope...

...The second is the curious behavior of many American professors of literature—members of the academic disciplines that contain the most vociferous political radicals...

...Ross suggests that academics stick to what they do best—trashing the work of previous academics, improvising new professional jargon, building up networks among young scholars in order to change the selfimages of academic disciplines...

...These are the conditions of a "philosophy of praxis," which demands of its disciples that they put aside, for the time being, the rank-and-file state of mind—in other words, their willing suspension of disbelief in a fixed ethical horizon...

...Here are the last nine sentences of Martz's apologia, sentences that will, I hope, cause his dreams to be haunted by the angry ghosts of Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair: But don't expect the media to take the lead in the next big crisis...

...We can no longer usefully do the sort of thing Charles Dickens, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, and Norman Thomas did: help incite political change by spelling out the details of what the strong and rich are currently doing to the weak and poor...

...After all, you never know when that last little quarter-trillion may break an economy's back...

...It could have made a big difference...

...Last year Newsweek published a remarkably frank, horribly discouraging, account of the role of the journalist in a democratic society...

...It is now driving them to study Barthes, de Man, and Ross...

...490 • DISSENT...

...If you have not suspended disbelief in such a horizon you will be inclined to say, for example, "Nothing is clearer or more certain than that the rest of us should not take advantage of the weakness of children in the ghetto in order to keep our taxes low...

...that would be arrogant...

...This is the kind who thinks of himself or herself as "poststructuralist" or "postmodern," as "transgressive" and "subversive...

...The belief that democracy has not been working lately, that the ordinary voter is being tricked day and night, is almost universal among us...

...If you don't, anything you say will be complicit with that ubiquitous, insensibly corrupting, bourgeois ideology...

...That's a seductive idea, but it pushes journalism past its proper bounds...

...Once they have read Ross, however, they find themselves shunted off the traditional Marxist track...

...Certainly there is no suggestion that we—the well educated, the intellectuals—are doing anything wrong...

...Easy: just ask whether one is likely to be accused of being a "crusader" or of being "self-righteous...

...In the end, voters have their own responsibility...

...Writing a Constitution for a country in which few men, and fewer women, were educated well enough to understand the words in which that Constitution was written, the Founders did their best to ensure that the new republic would not degenerate into a participatory democracy—into what they called "mob rule...

...I find it hard to believe that an American journalist could have written those sentences for publication...

...The first embodies a conspiracy theory: on this account, the rich have gotten control of all our institutions—the media, the universities, the political parties—and have made it impossible for the poor and weak to be heard...

...He set himself the task of showing that the media had done their job as well as we had any right to expect but that the public—us, the electorate, the voters—had not fulfilled its responsibilities...

...As the suffrage was extended, literacy spread...

...We educated people must not...

...There had been, Martz told us, 2,500 newpaper and magazine stories about the S&Ls since 1982...