FLASHBACK: The Secession Of The Intellectuals.

We have already noticed that there has come into being during the last quarter century — through mass education, through the media, through widespread quasi-literacy — a rather large class of people located somewhere between the few who exercise direct responsibility in governing and a large body of others who, though not necessarily stupid, are preoccupied by the immediate and the local. This vast, intermediate and as they say “educated” class is affected at least intermittently by the adversary culture, and sometimes is profoundly affected.

It is also energetic and, in a confused way, anxious to do good. To the individuals in this class, correct opinion, virtuous opinion, is very important, though the opinions they do form lack the anchorage of direct involvement and specific responsibility. The chips are seldom really down, and they are seldom faced with the alternatives of correct judgment or concrete loss. Nevertheless, the educated class — perhaps we should call it merely the Bachelor of Arts class — does succeed in defining the terms in which matters of public importance can be discussed; its views prevail in our public discourse, and though our statesmen often act in contradiction to those views, they do so only with great circumspection.

As Edward C. Banfield, the Harvard urbanologist, has aptly pul it, we once were governed by the smoke-filled room, but now we are increasingly governed by the talk-filled room. And yet, for all its power, the contemporary educated class has succeeded in imposing upon our public discourse a structure of ideas that is suffocating in its narrowness.

Dissidents in the East Bloc referred to this group as the New Class. It was not a compliment.