Responding to David Drezner's recitation of the various public intellectuals alive and breathing, Kevin Drum says, "40 years ago there were a small number of what you might call mega-intellectuals — people like Buckley and Chomsky and Galbraith and Friedman — who had a bigger influence on public discourse than any single public intellectual does today. Nobody on Dan's list really seems to compete on quite the same plane as some of those 50s and 60s superstars." I agree with that, and I can't decide if it's to be expected or really weird. In the to-be-expected category, the media is much more fractured than it was 40 or 50 years ago. When you had only a couple networks, and they had only a couple hours of news programming, it's to be expected that the voices they chose to feature would have had an outsized impact on public life. If there are fewer options, then the options left will command more market share. By contrast, today you have 24-hour news networks and blogs and online magazines and print magazines and every op-ed page is internet accessible and people are uploading YouTubes and all the rest. It's no surprise that, within this cacophony, it's harder for a few voices to ring out clearly. The news has so much time to fill that they stock their shows with unknown "strategists" to fill the hours. On the other hand, the amount of media, and its reach, has tended to increase the power and visibility of "superstars." This has been true for CEOs, for actors, for sports stars, and most visible positions. George Clooney has not seen his star dimmed because the world also has cable networks. Kobe Bryant hasn't had trouble getting his name out there. So it's not clear to me why other public professions have seen this reputation inflation while public intellectuals haven't. My sneaking suspicion is that the real answer lies in what the news media rewards: Before there was Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson and Lou Dobbs and Neil Boortz, there was Buckley and Galbraith and Vidal. Where the discourse used to turn to so-called public intellectuals for opinionated commentary, now it seeks out political showmen. And so that's what we get, and those are the names we know. There was never a job of public intellectual, it's just that some intellectuals used to take the job of high profile commentators. Now, there are more commentators, and those that ascend highest are not the ones who write long books about countervailing powers.
