ALAN WOLFE
487
The intellectuals of the cold war may have had their failings, but
among them was not self-hatred. Intellectuals were defined by their re–
spect for intellect. The one intellectual usually faulted for his ready
enthusiasm to join in attacks on American society, Dwight Macdonald,
was second to none in his distaste for the culture produced by non–
intellectuals. (He knew, having worked for them.) Underneath the in–
creasingly tenuous commitment to socialism on the part of these
intellectuals was a nightmare worse than capitalism: a society in which the
masses would have no respect for the life of the mind.
Cultural studies takes as its premise not the culture's lack of respect
for intellectuality but intellectuality's lack of respect for the culture. Cold
War intellectuals may have moved away from the "neo-aristocratic cri–
tique of mass culture" associated with Eliot or Ortega, Andrew Ross
writes, but they nonetheless retained a strong fear that the popular culture
"would lend itself to ever greater forms of social control and an increasing
monopolization of all channels of opinion and information." This one–
sided view, Ross continues, overlooks the "resentments born of subordi–
nation and exclusion" usually embodied in the products of popular
culture. There is no secret why intellectuals make this mistake; they like
the world to be rational and purposeful. The popular, by contrast, "is
perhaps the one field in which intellectuals are least likely to be experts."
Respect for the culture inevitably brings with it a certain disrespect
for the mind. This is not only acceptable, it can even be an advantage.
The left must, above all else, be popular, writes Berube: "a preachy left
that situates itself safely above stupid, reactionary movies and their stupid,
reactionary meanings, can be - and has been - very easily lampooned as a
'politically correct' left of somber, humorless moralizers." Andrew Ross is
even more explicit in attempting to reposition the left's attitude toward
the stupid. A new generation of left-wing intellectuals faces a new, and
contradictory, task: "encouraging resistance to the privileges of
'smartness'," even if in so doing "they find themselves lined up against the
order of cultural capital which is the basis of their own authority as con–
testants in the social world."
In this campaign against smartness, nothing is too dumb for cultural
studies. Romance novels,
Star Trek,
heavy metal, Disneyland, punk rock,
wrestling, Malcolm X,
Dallas
-
the enterprise is premised upon demon–
strating that anything the cultural elite despises is potentially subversive.
"Roll Over Beethoven" is the anthem; whatever the literati once de–
nounced, cultural studies will uphold. If the Rosenberg letters represented
for Leslie Fiedler and Robert W orshaw an irresistible combination of
Marxist cliches and cultural kitsch, then it is important to stress, as
An–
drew Ross does, that these letters "challenge the assumption that effective
