The new issue of Chronicle Review contains this letter, effective rebutting Jacoby’s stance that conservatives (and libertarians) must be anti-intellectual:
On “Dreaming of a World With No Intellectuals,” by Russell Jacoby (The Chronicle Review, July 20): There is plenty of intellectual thought on the right. The article is conflating a small faction of Christian conservatives with a broad spectrum of opinion, from libertarians to neoconservatives.All this article does is ignore the existence of any but the least intellectual of its author’s opponents, so he can safely dismiss the entire spectrum of opinion and then pat himself on the back for being superior.
It’s as if conservatives spent all their time pretending that the OWS movement represented the entirety of liberal intellectual culture, and then went around writing articles wondering why liberals are all a bunch of drooling incoherent neo-Marxists.Of course, part of the problem is that this behavior is so pervasive in liberal circles that most liberals are never even exposed to the ideas of libertarians, so they generally don’t even know they exist.
Theresa Klein