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8 1 t h e c u r i o u s c u l t o f r e l i g i o u s p r a c t i c a l i t y c h a p t e r t h r e e American intellectuals and American people have traditionally viewed each other with distrust. From the millennial, cultural studies, cultural populist perspective , however, the 1950s were imagined to be an exceptional time: ordinary Americans were imagined to be extraordinarily deferential to intellectuals, and intellectuals were, in turn, condescending but generally well disposed toward the people and the nation. David Brooks and Andrew Ross both imagined that during the opening years of the Cold War, American society was dominated by “arrogant highbrows” who took advantage of popular trust in experts in order to cement positions of power in the liberal establishment. By 2000, Brooks had described the propitious transformation of a distinct intellectual class that valued its separateness into a hybrid entity, the bourgeois-bohemian, a new, welleducatedclassofeliteswhohadfusedhardheaded ,high-achievingpragmatism with aesthetic education and consumerist sophistication. Their high standardized test scores and fine palates did not, however, prevent them from indulging in the mass cultural pleasures of popular consumption. Thus did Brooks distinguish the cosmopolitan values and tastes of this new meritocratic elite from those of Nicholas Lemann’s reform-minded but parochial Episcopacy. Following in the footsteps of John Dewey and William James, Brooks urged intellectuals lagging behind to join the rest of the world: immersion in the unpredictable currents of everyday life and ordinary struggles could only benefit the thinking classes. Intellectuals had entered the fray of commercial activity and the market; they had abandoned their volumes of Freud and left the “book-stuffed studio” on New York’s Riverside Drive. Brooks writes: “We are right to be involved in the world, to climb and strive and experience the dumb superficialities of everyday life, just like everybody else.”1 The arrogant, commercial, culture-bashing Partisan Review types received rough treatment in Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There, but as we have seen, 1950s intellectuals had already taken even harder hits in the hands of Left-leaning intellectuals like Andrew Ross. Ross’s NoRespect alleged that American intellectuals of the 1950s were no less than agents of Gramscian hegemony. They worked to extract submission from the masses to the liberal consensus by parading before them c h a p t e r t h r e e 8 2 the benefits of the “postwar settlement.” Ross saw intellectuals primarily as an intermediate class, representing state interests to the people by using their powers of rhetorical persuasion, cultural prestige, and political intimidation. In Ross’s own words, intellectuals participated “in the hegemonic process of winning consent” by performing “operations of containment.”2 By producing distinction and containing irrationality, a group of entitled and empowered intellectuals engineered the liberal consensus. Moreover, according to Ross, they were“attractedtothemandarinprejudicesofhighGermanculture,”asembodied by the exiled thinkers of the Frankfurt School.3 While this representation of the 1950s has become the standard historical narrative in various cultural studies circles, it stands in stark contrast to Hofstadter’s description of the bitterness among intellectuals after Adlai Stevenson’s electoral defeat by Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1952 and 1956 presidential elections. Hofstadter wrote that intellectuals tended to draw an overly pessimistic lesson about their place in American society after that election: “At a time when the McCarthyite pack was in full cry, it was hard to resist the conclusion that Stevenson’s smashing defeat was also a repudiation by plebiscite of American intellectuals and of intellect itself.”4 For Hofstadter, most intellectuals had overreacted to Stevenson’s defeat. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s essay “The Highbrow in Politics” was typical of this hyperbolic sense of public rejection. Schlesinger seemed to accept the conservatives ’ assessment that intellectuals had been repudiated by plebiscite during the 1952 election, and he deplored the results of this reactionary stance. When Schlesinger asserted that “anti-intellectualism has long been the antiSemitism of the businessman,” he was availing himself of the social-psychological critique of fascist tendencies found in Theodor Adorno’s work on prejudice and the authoritarian personality.5 For Schlesinger, the interests of the businessman had fully appropriated the perspective of the “people.” This unlikely and unstable alliance had to find an enemy in order to maintain inner cohesion, and the intellectual proved to be a convenient...

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