Should-Read: Patrick Iber: On Twitter: “.@davidsess has a phenomenal review/essay

Should-Read: Patrick Iber: On Twitter: “.@davidsess has a phenomenal review/essay of @dandrezner’s The Ideas Industry in the latest @NewRepublic… https://twitter.com/PatrickIber/status/874438806287659008

…Whatever comes next, I think there’s a good chance people will use this essay for years to describe our era’s climate for intellectual work… https://newrepublic.com/article/143004

David Sessions**: The Rise of the Thought Leader: “Daniel W. Drezner… argues that… the evaporation of public trust… the polarization of American society, and growing economic inequality… the last of these as the most important… https://newrepublic.com/article/143004/rise-thought-leader-how-superrich-funded-new-class-intellectual

…have… empowered a new kind of thinker—the “thought leader”—at the expense of the much-fretted-over “public intellectual.”… While public intellectuals traffic in complexity and criticism, thought leaders burst with the evangelist’s desire to “change the world.”… The case against thought leaders, The Ideas Industry shows, is damning… some of the marquee names in thought leadership are distinguished by their facile thinking and transparent servility to the wealthy… Thomas Friedman…. Parag and Ayesha Khanna… Khanna’s Connectography… “globaloney”… “a TED talk on a recursive loop.” Drezner traces how the pursuit of money in the new corporate ideas industry—through television shows, high-dollar speeches, and lavish book advances—pushes thought leaders to bloat their expertise and hustle in so many markets that they end up selling fakes….

Despite Drezner’s impatience with the delusions of thought leaders, he shrinks from the darker implications of his evidence. When it comes time to render a verdict on whether the Ideas Industry is “working,” he conjures an economic metaphor: “For good and ill, the modern marketplace of ideas strongly resembles modern financial markets. Usually, the system works. On occasion, however, there can be asset bubbles.”… The evidence in Drezner’s book contributes to a startling picture of a country in which the superrich actively seek to sabotage institutions that have formed the backbone of consensus and public trust for a large part of the twentieth century…. Surveying this new landscape, it is clear that the true role of the thought leader is to serve as the organic intellectual of the one percent—the figure who, as Gramsci put it, gives the emerging class “an awareness of its own function” in society. The purpose of the thought leader is to mirror, systematize, and popularize the delusions of the superrich: that they have earned their fortunes on merit, that social protections need to be further eviscerated to make everyone more flexible for “the future,” and that local attachments and alternative ways of living should be replaced by an aspirational consumerism….

An opening—albeit a very slim one—for a different kind of organic intellectual. The one percent’s attempts to disrupt the media and universities have had the unintended consequence of radicalizing a generation of young writers and academics on the left—those recently dubbed “the new public intellectuals” in The Chronicle for Higher Education…. Already these new intellectuals on the left have begun to emerge as editors, authors, organizers, and gadflies in the new social media ecosystem. They have a greater presence in the public sphere than at any point in the last half century, and have shown themselves willing to expose the prattle of thought leaders, to attack the rhetorical smoke screens of the liberal center, and to defend working-class voters against accusations of incurable racism and mindless populism…. We are finally getting clear about who its enemies are.