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AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
restore consumer prosperity through federal expenditures,
reinvigoration of credit, social welfare programs, and legislation
supportive of workers and organized labor. Yet the statist
implications to Roosevelt's programs and the administration’s
alliance with the unions led modernizing intellectuals like
H. L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann to join producer critics
and others in condemning the New Deal as inordinately radical,
even socialist. Another paradox emerged when Republican
adversaries of the Roosevelt administration refashioned populist
rhetoric to suit small business and farming interests during
World War 2, going so far as to argue that consumer-oriented
programs like price controls were elitist.
The contradictory response to the guardian class took
dramatic form during the Cold War when anticollectivist ideo
logues alleged that key governmental and cultural figures
aspired to build an international Communist workers' state
that would elevate intellectuals as a powerful elite. Although
assertions over the foreign ties of the political intelligentsia were
exaggerated, anxieties over the suspect orientation of policy
intellectuals and knowledge professionals resonated deeply with
the public. Such concerns resurfaced in the 1960s controversy
over federal sponsorship of civil rights. When the quest for racial
justice resulted in coercive government mandates such as
affirmative action, civil liberties crusaders such as Sam Ervin
and Paul Fannin viewed Washington bureaucrats as the prob
lem. The paradoxical nature of race politics emerged when the
Nixon administration compensated for an affirmative action
alliance with social interventionists by courting organized labor,
the former ally of 1930s political intellectuals, and called for
moral unity in the Vietnam War against the cultural dissidents
of the upper-middle class.
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush further compli
cated the political landscape by expropriating the critiques of
corporate-funded theorists to espouse a populist conservatism
that marginalized rival policy administrators and social special
ists as fiscally irresponsible and morally decadent. In an added
irony, Bill Clinton sought to avoid the dangers of tax-and-spend
liberalism by proposing a health care package that substituted
government regulation of the private insurance market for huge
Treasury expenditures. Yet distrust of political intellectuals and
interventionist policies was so great the Clinton plan suffered a
humiliating defeat. Positioning himself as a centrist, the Demo
cratic President nevertheless had to contend with pervasive
discomfort with the dissident politics and culture of the 1960s,
of which he remained an unlikely but cogent symbol.
Perhaps the greatest contradiction of the century-long
campaign against America's political class has been the futility
of much of its effort.Critics of social guardians found themselves
opposing a host of decent and plausible causes, including scien
tific teaching in the public schools, improved working conditions
for industrial labor, regulation of the stock market and public
utilities, cooperative experiments by federal youth agencies,
consumer price controls during wartime, assurance of intellect
ual freedom for academics and foundation-sponsored research
ers, adoption of benign public health measures, enactment of
civil rights gains and antibias laws, protection of programs to aid
the poor, and inclusive efforts to spread equality of opportunity.
Furthermore, dangerous portions of anti-intellectual discourse
embraced unwarranted hyperbole, unreasoned argument, banal
half-truths, crude exaggerations, narrow-minded prejudice, and
inelegant conspirational thinking. Indeed, the frequent failure
of those opposing the guardian class cannot be separated from
the cruel excesses associated with such individuals as Father
Charles Coughlin, Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace; and
such phenomena as the Scopes trial, the 1920s Ku Klux Klan,
Depression-era anti-Semitism, antiflouridation paranoia, race
supremacy ideology, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the
rejectionism of the late-century extreme right.
Even when opponents of the intelligentsia discredited
their causes with bigotry, bullying, terror or outright violence,
however, challenges to America’s 20th-century guardians often
touched on central social anxieties. The leading focus of such
efforts appeared to be the perceived erosion of fundamental
values related to individual autonomy, personal empowerment,
family cohesion, religious devotion, community bonding, ethnic
allegiance, and national loyalty. Often representing traditional
producers and members of the old middle class, critics of the
political intelligentsia denounced a social agenda that allegedly
encouraged the erasure of human distinctions and the obliter
ation of cultural differences. They warned that the coercive and
manipulative methods of the intellectual classes threatened
ordinary citizens with mass depersonalization, powerlessness,
and the eradication of vitality and meaning from democratic
political life. Concerns of this nature help to explain why profes
sional elites and knowledge and knowledge experts repeatedly
have been attacked as agents of modern social and cultural
degradation.
For nearly 100 years public discourse in the United
States has been marked by a continuing dispute over a broadly
defined political class whose members have been castigated
as strangers to the American Way. The stranger represented a
cultural renegade, a shadowy suspect who assumed a powerful
inside position and threatened to use the coercions of social
authority and expertise to impose abstract creeds, whether they
be statist, collectivist, internationalist or multiculturist. When
socially involved intellectuals embraced admirable causes such
as freedom of inquiry, support for organized labor, civil rights
A lliance
for
HORACIO FIDEL CARDO
for racial minorities or antimilitarism, their participation, alleged
motives and presumed interests often became the central target
of ideological strife and intergroup conflict. Yet their adversaries
have been frustrated by the perception that social intervention
ists and members of the political class often managed to over
come their detractors and perpetuate and expand the bureau
cratic networks and careers associated with their ideology and
rule.
It may be difficult to ascertain whether service profes
sionals, policy planners and socially oriented intellectuals
constitute members of a New Class that monopolizes govern
ance and opinion in modern society. Yet the troubled response
to the inteverntionist intelligentsia in 20th century America
illustrates the warning of one scholar that “knowledge and
expertise are inherently suspect when they become a basis for
claims of political influence.’’ Bureaucrats, planners, experts and
social service professionals often have compounded the vulner
abilities of their position with condescending attitudes toward
the people they were mandated to serve. As sociologist Alvin
Gouldner noted, upper-middle class practitioners tend to assume
the world should be governed by people such as themselves —
“those possessing superior competence, wisdom and science."
Similar concerns marked the criticism of Christopher Lasch,
who condemned the insularity of educated professionals and
who questioned the tendency of experts and knowledge elites
to equate dissent from their self-serving agenda with emotional
and cultural backwardness.
Given the legitimacy of such objections and the pointed
quality of much of the protests, it nevertheless must be acknow
ledged that no civilization can thrive without affording an import
ant role for educated experts, knowledge professionals, socially
oriented intellectuals, public administrators and human service
practitioners. Certainly, if society is to accomplish more than
assuring persona profit for the wealth and defending vested
economic interests, it must be open to sources of intelligent
social change and reform with the hope of improving and
elevating the human condition and alleviating the impact
of severe social stratification. How, indeed, can important
challenges surrounding medical health, psychological well
being, economic welfare, worker safety, the environment
and international relations be addressed unless trained and
committed practitioners are mobilized to play a role in such
endeavors?
If social guardians and members of the political class
are to retain the confidence of society, however, their efforts
must resonate with broader segments of the public. Although
much of the criticism of their role has come from conservatives
and antistatists, it is important to recognize the culturally signifi
cant sources of such discontent. Service intellectuals must
succeed in lending their expertise to social problems without
necessarily imposing their own needs and sensibilities upon the
rest of the citizenry Knowledge professionals must prove they
can play a genuine role in reforms that curb elites, special
interests and privileged classes of all kinds, including their own.
The sociopolitical sector must demonstrate that it can refashion
itself to serve all segments of society instead of the interest
groups normally aligned with its agenda. In a nation comprised
of individualists as well as participants in common endeavors,
the frequently cited goal of cultural pluralism takes on added
meaning. Indeed, the requirements of diversity may compel
socially committed intellectuals to fuse their own modernizing
cultural values with the more traditional ethics of small business,
the military, the religious world, ethnic subcultures and other
cohesive communities.
Too often, public debate has asked ordinary Americans
to choose between reliance on the goodwill of narrowly focused
business interests or dependence on the judgment of socially
committed intellectuals and reformer immersed in their own
worlds. Although knowledge professionals and elements of the
political class offer liberation from the crueler consequences of
the market, they often appear tainted by self-reflexive concerns
and preferences or commitment to favored protégés. Arguably,
a healthy democracy needs practitioners who serve all elements
of the social structure, not some. Indeed, society cries out for
disinterested healers, reformers and authors of consent, not
ideological monitors or masters. If there are lessons to be
learned from the debates and conflicts, they conceivably rest
on the notion that even the brightest among us require a
balanced perspective on the effects and legacy of our mutual
endeavors. Failure to achieve such vision only can provide
comfort to those elements of society whose intentions are far
from benevolent
David A Horowitz is Professor of History at Portland
State University This article is excerpted from his book
America's Political Class Under Fire: The 20th Century’s Great
Culture War, just published by Routledge Press. He is also
author of Inside the Klavem: The Secret History of a 1920s
Ku Klux Klan and Beyond Left & Right: Insurgency & The
Establishment, as well as coauthor with Peter N Carroll and
David D. Lee of On The Edge A New History of 20th Century
America He is a frequent contributor to the Times Eagle (his
most recent article, “The Iraqi Crisis: What Next" was in the
April/May 2003 issue) and an accomplished jazz pianist
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