AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT
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new intellectual bureaucracy, still disoriented and divided, but ready
to challenge the authority of the old elite, and with far greater re–
sources for dispensing its own values-which are really mixed with
highbrow values-to an ever growing audience. And it is ironically the
growth of this audience that is triumphantly cited as evidence of in–
tellectual progress.
It should be clear that the ideas and values of this country are ac–
tually in the hands of a cultural minority, an elite, but it is a new
kind of elite, adapted to the needs of an industrial and egalitarian so–
ciety. The old elite is only one small part of this new intellectual class,
the rest of it being made up of middlebrow writers and thinkers, aca–
demic experts who are ignorant in most areas, cultural custodians who
are dedicated to the classics but uncertain in their relation to new
works, and that amorphous body of professional people who inhale
and exhale the prevailing cultural modes. This, in short, is the Ameri–
can "establishment," and its character is seen most clearly in comparison
with its counterpart
in
England. The English establishment, so long the
envy of American intellectuals, is relatively homogeneous, centered in
London, the intellectual capital, and takes for granted both its relation
to tradition and the need for breaking new ground. The establishment
in England has, to be sure, been criticized for being too stuffy, mostly
by its own rebels, themselves very much a part of it, who are stimulated
by the great energy and exoticism they find in America. Obviously, the
English have their own problems, in their own way perhaps as great
as ours, but the fact remains that England has not yet succumbed to
the confusion, anti-intellectualism, and sheer vulgarity of the modern
variety of plebianism that has discovered the possibility of getting cul–
tured and rich by tl1e same process. One of the most obvious benefits
of such an establishment is intelligent government. In contrast to the
situation
in
this country, English intellectuals have both a personal and
a professional relation to the men who wield political power: indeed,
they are all drawn from the same group, and however great their
po–
litical and intellectual disagreements, they have a common sense of
urgency and relevance. The proper question, as I see it, then, has to
do not with the manner in which culture is spread-as in the old sense–
less argument over whether a man who listens to popular tunes has
taken the first step toward Schoenberg-but with the makeup, the
values, and the role of the American establishment.
The most significant and most provocative approach to the prob–
lems of American culture I have seen in the last decade is Richard
