John F. Harris has a lovely article in the Washington Post on the friendship between the late John Kenneth Galbraith and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
There was a time — it’s been decades now — when politicians or pundits would call people “liberal intellectuals” and not mean it as an insult.
The phrase carried no sarcasm or disdain. Nor was it an abstraction. There were specific individuals who answered by the name….
… How to convey the way public intellectuals such as Galbraith and Schlesinger loomed over American politics and ideas for the quarter-century following World War II?
The easiest way would be to point to their latter-day equivalents. But there simply is no one these days who does what they did.
Maha, thanks for the link.
John F. Harris said that Krugman has such an intellect and ideas, but is likely to just spark partisanship with his writings. There is something defeating for our whole nation when ideas are met with party-line dismissive ‘talking points’ rather than with the deeper reflection and discourse which could get us unstuck.
Schlesinger and Galbraith both grew up and developed their intellectual prowess before we nuked Japan. The yet unprocessed guilty truth that has seared and changed America is the reality of our nation dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese cities and killing some 160,000 civilians rather than choosing to drop those bombs on Japanese military installations.
IMHO……the ugly and emotional partisan divide which developed in America arose with that horrific decision to target citizens rather than target military……one side wants to [forever]counter that horror, and reclaim honor by intently pursuing what is ‘good for all people’……one side wants to [forever] counter that horror by ‘them and us’ rhetoric that, of course, always asserts that ‘we’ are the good guys who can do no wrong [and therefore never lost our honor].
The emotional partisan divide developed with talk radio and the likes of Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and other hate mongers.