To be an intellectual is to be an apostate.

In our neoliberal milieu, where everything has been commodified, intellectual thought, discourse and opinion has lost any of the verve that makes it precious and has thus become debased.

Therefore, intellectualism is only possible in a market-based society as apostasy.

The people we think of as public intellectuals in America have signed a pact with the devil, for when they attach themselves to wealth and power they surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance as political or moral actors. They are not critical thinkers, they are simply hired-hands, providing intellectual justification for greed.

As Irving Howe pointed out in his 1954 essay This Age of Conformity, “For it is crucial to the history of the American intellectuals in the past few decades — as well as to the relationship between ‘wealth’ and ‘intellect’ — that whenever they become absorbed into the accredited institutions of society they not only lose their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another they cease to function as intellectuals.”

That was 70 years ago. Today, try and name a famous intellectual who is not a hired shill. Furthermore, why does someone like Thomas Friedman still has a perch on the New York Times, Op-Ed page? To ask is to answer.

Ideas, as they say, have consequences. The Republicans and Democrats sold the con of neoliberalism to deindustrialize the country, impose punishing austerity, eradicate the freedoms to organize and gut regulations to protect the public from exploitation. They empowered corporations to pillage and consolidate their wealth and power, giving rise to monopoly capitalism and some of the greatest levels of income inequality and wealth inequality in American history.

All of this was justified and cheered on by the bought-and-paid-for economic intellectuals.

Meanwhile, as funding for the arts dried up, artists and public broadcasting which was designed to give a voice to those not tethered to corporate interests, were left searching for grants and corporate sponsors. The result has been a withering away of artistic and journalistic integrity.

The banks, communications, oil, weapons, agricultural and food industries that sit astride our economy guarantee profits by fixing prices, skirting or even abolishing financial, health and environmental protections, and abusing their workers. This assault on New Deal regulations, soon to be entirely obliterated under Trump, disenfranchised the working class that in desperation voted in a demagogue to save them.

This is a crisis decades in the making but as I’ve noted before, Trump is simply an accelerant to the process. And now the neoliberal economists in Trump administration view every crisis as an opportunity to implement their far-right, “shock doctrine” theories about shrinking government, lowering taxes, and further strengthening the US oligarchy. 

If we are to make America great again, we must make markets competitive and where they can’t be, in natural monopolies like energy and water and so on, we must have regulations that directly control prices. This isn’t really a hard problem, conceptually. We know how to create competitive markets, and regulate non-competitive markets. We’ve done it before.

It is entirely a political issue, because the plutocrats with tons of money have massive political power. Unfortunately, they also have the resources to purchase the economic intellectuals who formulate policies justifying the pillaging of the commons, in the name of “efficiency”. The DOGE-bags are just the latest itineration of this process.

This is why I am dead set against neoliberalism, with its commodification of all aspects of life. Rather than a marketplace of ideas stimulating intellectual discourse, neoliberalism curtails and channels intellectual discourse into an acceptable product. You can witness this in the sorts of economic thoughts and ideas that are acceptable and which one are not. Orthodox economists like Larry Summers, who’s ideas justified the financialization, globalization and off-shoring that have produced the vast inequalities plaguing America, is lauded, while heterodox economist Michael Hudson, who accurately predicted the carnage of neoliberalism, is marginalized.

Update: This won’t end well.

“After spending the better part of the past two years grading AI-generated papers, Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.” That future may arrive sooner than expected when you consider what a short window college really is. Already, roughly half of all undergrads have never experienced college without easy access to generative AI. “We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here…It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”