The Left Intellectual in America

Part III of a dialogue between Jon Baskin and David Sessions

This is the final exchange in a dialogue that has been divided into three posts. Here are the first and the second.

David Sessions

Finally, to turn this back to you: I think we share a certain idealism about intellectual life as the pursuit of truth for its own sake and a sense that it can be degraded if it is too narrowly constrained by political instrumentalism. In my perception, you have tended to argue that intellectual life is inherently elitist and, in some sense, incompatible with left political engagement. In “Tired of Winning,” you wrote: “The left intellectual typically advocates for a world that would not include many of the privileges or sensibilities (partly a product of the privileges) on which her status as an intellectual depends.” I agree that the highest levels of cultural production will always be the domain of a relatively small number of people. But I don’t see why a commitment to socialism cannot encompass a vision of democratizing “higher” forms of culture, resisting their elite rarification, and mobilizing the intellectual resources of the humanities against the domination of an idiotic business and tech culture. That sort of idealism certainly motivated me, and I think many other academic socialists, even if it looked on the surface like we were narrowly concerned with politics. I don’t quite understand why you see an irresolvable contradiction there.

In a way, the socialist moment was just the latest episode in a generational arc, which perhaps begins in the late 1990s, and includes the “theory” era, grad student unionization, n+1, Occupy, Jacobin and the Bernie movement, etc. You bring some of that together in your 2018 piece, and Marco Roth did even more in an interesting recent episode of Noah Kumin’s podcast. I had not known that the n+1 group had been close to the earlier Yale grad student union campaign, and had faced that same choice between intellectualism and activism we would continue to face later. One of the things Roth said that struck me was that n+1 embraced politics in part because it was oppositional to the generally anti-political culture of the early 2000s. A suffocatingly anti-political intellectual culture was still my perception even in the early Obama era, and the reason so many of us looked to n+1 as our guide to being an intellectual as late as the early 2010s. But there has apparently always been a tension in our generation—professors or union organizers? mandarins or activists? professionals or bohemians? alienation from the United States or engagement with it?—versions of which run back through the entire twentieth century. We have always basically wanted to be European-style mandarins, but had to reckon with the hostility of American culture. Do we resign ourselves to alienation from America, or try to change it? So I guess my questions for you would be: How do you see this? Is that the contradiction you’re highlighting? What are intellectuals supposed to do about American culture and politics? Was the socialist intellectual answer to that inherently misguided, or a reasonable—if perhaps rearguard or idealistic—attempt to address those questions? What do we do now that we’re being swallowed by a hyperpolitical digital culture?

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Jon Baskin

I’ll start with a brief response to some of your comments in the previous post on wokeness and the millennial left, and then spend most of this final answer on these bigger questions that you ask here about the left-intellectual project and American culture.

You make two points in defense of the millennial left’s attitude toward wokeness in point #2 of your response: one is that there was more criticism of “trendy antiracism discourse” on the left in the late 2010s than I am acknowledging, and two that, to the extent that you did have an anti-anti-wokeness instinct in those years, it was “because anti-wokeness was so clearly a right-wing strategy.” For the first point, I admit that the writers you mention—Karp and Singh, and I’d add one of my favorites, Lauren Michele Jackson—wrote smart and critical pieces about that discourse from the left. I still think these sophisticated critiques were mostly drowned out in the public sphere by the anti-anti-wokeness blasts that would sweep through social media every time someone who didn’t have perfect leftist credentials, like Jonathan Chait or Mark Lilla, would write what looked to me like a perfectly reasonable article about how social justice politics were playing out on college campuses, in school districts, and in the Democratic Party. (It took until 2022 for there to be a real article about something everyone knew was happening years before that in the nonprofit world as well.) And this goes I think to your point about seeing anti-wokeness as a “right-wing strategy”—a corollary of which was that if people brought up the issue on the liberal-left they were probably playing into the hands of or acting as a gateway to the right. There certainly was a right-wing strategy to codify and amplify “wokeness.” But in my view the reason it was an effective strategy was that it picked up on something that a wide range of people were unhappy about in their own lives (whether they called it wokeness or not), and that neither institutional liberals nor the most conspicuous leftists seemed at all interested in addressing. I’m not suggesting socialist intellectuals should have spent all their time trashing social justice politics, which I grant included more serious channels of political energy around antiracism and related social movements up through 2020. And I also am not saying that woke ideas were the only or the most important problem most people were dealing with at the time. But one potential pitfall of seeing every social debate as a propaganda war (or “war of position”) is that it can make it seem like it’s all discourse all the way down, with no room for the judgments people will form independently of any propaganda at all, based on their firsthand experience. And intellectuals should have known first of all, from the experiences we were having in universities, how off-putting it would be to many people to be seen as, among the two available options, the side that always seemed to be defending this censorious, moralizing, and often crudely reductive style of communication and politics.

But as you note, I’ve already admitted that political strategy was not my main concern at the time. I was more concerned with the way that political positioning and propagandizing seemed to me so often to be getting confused with “thinking” in intellectual life. You mention above the tension your generation has felt between their activist and their intellectual sides, and to some extent it was the attempt to “square that circle,” as you describe it, that I think I was reacting to. Does that mean I think being an activist or “left-intellectual” is impossible or always inadvisable? Not exactly. But I do think it’s important to be clear about the different things this conjunction can mean. Obviously someone can be a genuine intellectual and a political activist or organizer at the same time. We are all citizens and political animals and thus inherently have political responsibilities whether or not those inform our intellectual work. (And they may inform our intellectual work in ways we aren’t fully conscious of.) But the conjunction left-intellectual as you articulate it above has usually meant not that one happens to be a leftist and also an intellectual, but that one’s intellectual activity is in some way consciously disciplined by one’s leftist commitments. And maybe this is flat-footed of me, but I do think that to be a genuine—i.e. truth-seeking—intellectual you have to be open to the possibility that you will reach conclusions sometimes that conflict with your preconceived political identity, sometimes fundamentally. And I believe every political intellectual—and especially political intellectuals who work alongside specific political movements, as millennial leftists did in the late 2010s—will at some point be faced with a choice as to which of the two sides of the conjunction to privilege.

I realize from what you said above that you were honest with yourself about the fact that, in your public communication, you were putting your ideas in service of your political project, even if that meant compromising a dispassionate quest for truth. I am sympathetic to the reasons you did this, and why others do it. But I can’t quite talk myself into thinking it is ever a good idea. For one thing, we have no shortage of political propagandists in American society, and I’ve never been given any convincing reason to believe that intellectuals will be better at this work than pollsters or consultants. (There are lots of reasons to think they are worse at it.) More to the point, whatever your private understanding of the choice you were making, you weren’t talking about that conflict publicly, and this is the kind of thing that I think can’t help but have a corrosive effect on the public’s trust in intellectuals, including in their political capacity, eventually. A magazine like Jacobin, which announces its political mission on the front page and grinds forward with it, is very up-front about what it’s doing. It may not have often been the kind of thing I wanted to read in the late 2010s, but I never felt it was deceiving anyone or corroding intellectual life. The situation was different for the group of magazines and academic institutions that claimed to be stewards of our intellectual life in some broader sense, and yet which nevertheless continuously seemed to be narrowing the scope of ideas they judged acceptable in accordance with the reigning wisdom of the current leftist movement. The intellectuals you describe in Russia who realized they had to follow the people even when they disagreed with them are examples to me of intellectuals who have made a clear choice to prioritize the political over the intellectual. I think the choice is defensible. But it’s pretty straightforward to me that if you pretend publicly it isn’t a choice at all—and that those who disagree with you don’t just have a different perspective but are “wrong” in some metaphysical or moral sense—then you are injecting some level of dishonesty into the intellectual conversation.

Before closing I want to address, however inadequately I can do it here, the broader questions you ask about the compatibility of socialist politics and intellectual life, and the future of American culture more generally. And I can start with a point of full agreement. We are both interested in, as you put it, “democratizing ‘higher’ forms of culture, resisting their elite rarification, and mobilizing the intellectual resources of the humanities” to enrich public culture. One of the central objectives of The Point has always been to model a maximally inclusive kind of public intellectual conversation, and I know this is an objective many socialists throughout history have also pursued. When I say that intellectual life is “inherently elitist,” all I mean is that I think geniuses and truly “great” works of art and philosophy exist, and that it is wrong and counterproductive to pretend that there is no hierarchy of value within the humanities. Occasionally, in the wake of postmodernism, people who call themselves socialists or leftists have argued such things, or have attempted to undermine the idea of greatness within the humanities, but I do not take this to be any kind of core socialist tenet. And to the extent that having a socialist approach to intellectual life just means advocating for conditions where the most people can participate in humanistic discussion and reflection, socialism and a more inclusive intellectual life are clearly complementary. What inspired the line that you quote from “Tired of Winning,” about the “contradiction” of socialists often advocating for a world that would not include their current cultural privileges and tastes, was more a sociological than a logical observation, which has been suggested at other points in this discussion. To sum it up I might say that, on social or cultural issues, the leftist intellectual spaces I observed in the late 2010s were not exactly models of tolerance or inclusivity, which made me doubt whether many of the millennial socialist intellectuals would actually be satisfied with the results of the kind of democratized culture they claimed to want. But that was meant as a contingent point about a specific scene, not a perennial one about socialists.

Was it, as you ask, “inherently misguided” for millennial socialist intellectuals to try and change “American culture and politics”? I don’t think it was inherently misguided to try and change American politics. And in fact, I think it’s important now, at a moment when the millennial left is coming in for a lot of criticism (including in this conversation), to acknowledge that it was by many measures, and against tough odds, an extremely successful movement—probably the most successful intellectual-political movement in my lifetime. And American politics do need to change! I think the attempt to change American culture was more questionable, and also was carried out in a clumsier way. Perhaps above all, it was the conflation of the political with the cultural and intellectual battles that, in my view, ended up adding a degree of unnecessary difficulty to the (already quite challenging) political project you were undertaking while at the same time producing what I’ve described as corrosive effects in our intellectual discourse. It’s not that I deny there are connections to be made between politics, culture, and intellectual life. But I don’t think the millennial left ever worked out in a convincing way how all its cultural interventions—say, into how we were supposed to talk about art, or gender, or what books should be on English syllabi—were meant to aid the political project, and this made the militancy with which they tended to comment on such matters all the more frustrating. I share your sense that the early 2000s were a time when culture was depoliticized to a fault. That was definitely part of what made the early n+1, which dared to bring some kind of left-of-liberal political perspective back to culture criticism, so exciting and influential. But by the late 2010s, we were in a very different moment. And I don’t think the drive to politicize everything ended up being any better for culture than the apolitical phase was.

I’m finding it hard to figure out how to end this—there seems like so much more we could explore. I don’t want to conclude though without responding to something that struck me in your last paragraph. That was the line about the desire of the socialist intellectuals to be treated as “European mandarins,” but instead having to contend with the “hostility” of American culture. It struck me because, although in one sense I know what you’re talking about, I’ve never actually felt that the majority of Americans are hostile to intellectuals. Or, maybe more precisely, I’ve never felt that they are hostile to thinking. I know this can sound incredibly naive, and of course there are tons of forces that obstruct vibrant intellectual life in America. There is also an ingrained thread of skepticism about people who inhabit the official role of “intellectual,” of the kind Hofstadter writes about. I’m not denying these things. Still, I’m ultimately sympathetic to Tocqueville’s observation that “America is one of the countries in the world where philosophy is least studied, and where the precepts of Descartes are best applied.” I think there are few places where people are more committed to living in relation to ideas—which of course doesn’t mean they always know where to find good ideas, or how to separate the simulacra of intellectual activity from the genuine thing. But that in itself describes, I think, a natural task for American intellectuals. And in service of this task I guess I see a third option beyond the two you offer of either resigning ourselves to alienation from America, or trying to change it. I think we can accept that we are American intellectuals and not European ones, and take part in the very American tradition of opting out, so to speak, from the structures that we feel are hostile to genuine intellectual life, including the “hyperpoliticized digital sphere.” This doesn’t have to mean going to live alone in the woods (as Thoreau never quite did anyway), or even going fully offline (although some people are doing this)—and it doesn’t mean having to disengage from political commentary, either, although it perhaps mandates caution about some forms of political-intellectual activity. What it means to me is being deliberate about the portion of the public intellectual discourse that we have some control over, and using it to the best of our ability to model a more depthful, adventurous, and pluralistic cultural conversation than what most Americans are exposed to in their day-to-day lives. One aspect of that might be showing what it looks like to have productive dialogues both with ourselves and with others, including those we disagree with—which is something I think our generation of intellectuals could have been better at doing than we all were in the late 2010s. Fortunately we’ve still got some time.

Read parts I and II of this dialogue.