Candidate on a High Horse

George Will absolutely nails it with Candidate on a High Horse. At the end he mentions the Lynds' famous studies of Muncie, Indiana. In that connection it would be worth noting that the Lynds were subsequently viciously attacked and vilified by the academic Left for not supporting the required Marxian view of an oppressed working class. That sort of experience has been recapitulated many times, Sidney Hook's being just one other famous case. Will also takes on the Marxist notion of False Consciousness, and rightly so. It is hard to imagine a more pernicious doctrine; it gives a putatively enlightened elite license to do absolutely anything it wants to do, by any means it finds expedient. This was the Marcuse-inspired ethos of the New Left, an elitist movement to its core. (So was Lenin's.) Wannabe Pol Pots with pony tails and paid-up tuition, drinking herbal tea in the campus snack bar, seeking a cultural apocalypse. For a thorough intellectual demolition of this nonsense, see Lezek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, Vol 3, The Breakdown.

Byron