MARK LILLA
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conservatives refuse to draw this obvious conclusion from what they see.
Stung by the "blame America first" attitude they believe dominates
American intellectual life, they have convinced themselves that a political
defense of American liberal democracy can be reconciled with a defense
of high culture -
iI/deed, that the two are really the same thing.
This ex–
traordinary assertion rests on two presuppositions, both of which are
mistaken. The first is the nativist belief that Europeans themselves are to
blame for our culture wars, since they exported the ideas which are
thought to lie behind PC and multiculturalism. There is indeed a story
to be told here, but it is an American story, not a European one. The
French thinkers who inspired the various schools of "post-structuralism"
never drew the leveling, democratic conclusions regarding culture which
their American disciples have.
The second, and more revealing, presupposition is that the attacks
on intellectual and cultural distinctions over the past twenty-five years
represent a sharp historical deviation from traditional American practice.
These attacks are said to be led by a "cultural elite" against "the
American people," who, we are repeatedly assured, are "basically all
right." Of course, nothing could be further from the historical truth, as
we learn by turning back to the bible on these matters, Richard
Hofstadter's
Anti-InteliectualislI1 in American Life.
Reading Hofstadter's
thirty-year-old book today is certainly the best antidote I know to the
fevers brought on by our present culture wars. Not that the book gives
comfort; it does not.
It
focuses attention instead on our real problems,
which are the cultural consequences of the American democratic project
itself.
As Hofstadter's earlier readers will remember, the book was written
out of the McCarthy experience and the political attacks on "eggheads"
in the 1950s. Hofstadter refused to accept that American intellectuals
were destined to remain forever alienated from their country. The bulk
of his book documents the development of that alienation by focusing
on four different sources of the American anti-intellectual impulse: reli–
gion, democratic politics, business, and democratic education. But in the
conclusion, titled "The Intellectual: Alienation and Conformity,"
Hofstadter ends on a somewhat upbeat note.
It
is true that "intellectuals
in the twentieth century have found themselves engaged in incompatible
efforts : to be good and believing citizens of a democratic society and to
resist the vulgarization of culture which that society constantly pro–
duces." Yet that effort was getting easier, not harder. Whereas American
intellectuals near the turn of the century fled our native provincialism for
spiritual liberty on the Continent, this migration had reversed direction
with the rise of European fascism in the thirties, making America the
