In an essay at Brussels Journal, Joshua Trevino laments the vacuum where the modern American public intellectual might be. Interesting read for us middlebrow types. Read it all, but here Trevino has a little something for most everyone, all in one paragraph.
The first thing that must be said of American public intellectuals of the present day is they are mostly pretenders to the title. There are many ideologues, but few thinkers. Our academic class yields some of the most shrill, shallow, and vicious participants in the public square. The flagship journals of American ideology are uniquely devoid of powerful intellects of any stripe. On the right, the two publications of note are the National Review and The Weekly Standard. The former holds its primacy by dint of history rather than any accomplishment now; and the latter is a creature of the moment that will recede to a purely niche publication as its wars are slowly lost. On the left, The New Republic, The Nation, and The American Prospect function mostly as partisan publications, and therefore participate with alacrity in partisan dogfights. (The eschewing of TNR in particular is a showcase of the costs of insufficient party loyalty.) This is not useless work; nor it is not distinguishing or demanding work. We thus see that the putative fountainheads of ideas and values on left and right run dry. They are publications of tactics and means rather than objectives and ends. Advocates of the new media declare that blogs have taken over the intellectual-leadership role that the old journals have abdicated. This is nonsense: if the flap over Marcotte and McEwan demonstrated anything, it is that the chief proponents of the “netroots†are far more interested in defending any fool with a laptop who shares their politics, than in an assessment of ideas and values. There is rational self-interest in this — therein lie jobs, power, and the self-actualization inherent in swaying the masses — but we should not dignify it with more. However you look at it, online or off, in the space where the American public intellectual would be, there is mostly vacuum.Posted by dan at February 15, 2007 11:57 PM