Varn Vlog America’s Battle Over The Intellectual with Daniel Tutt
Pragmatism Shapes US Intellectualism
- American intellectual life blends Puritan moralism, New England liberalism, and pragmatism rather than European positivism.
- That mix explains why theory often gets rejected as impractical or elitist in U.S. culture.
Cold War Builds A New Professional Class
- Post‑WWII technocratic expansion created a new professional class with state ties and rentier-style legitimacy.
- That structural shift transformed who counts as an intellectual and how they justify expertise.
Neutral Speech Masks Class Power
- Alvin Gouldner's 'new class' speaks a neutral, universal language that hides class origins and reproduces exclusion.
- That 'neutrality' functions as a class code that alienates working-class speech and experience.
What if America’s “anti-intellectualism” isn’t a decline in smarts but a culture built to distrust theory? We trace that paradox from Puritan moral rigor and pragmatist “cash value” truths to the postwar professional class that speaks in a neutral tone while hiding its class origins. With Hofstadter, Lasch, and Gouldner as our guides, we unpack how speech codes, funding models, and media ecosystems shape who gets to be an “intellectual” and whose knowledge counts.
We dig into Lasch’s portraits of turn‑of‑the‑century radicals—Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, Lincoln Steffens—showing how bohemia, policy reform, and romantic revolt often masked a middle‑class distance from worker life. Hofstadter helps explain why theory gets cast as elitist, how evangelical charisma and “common sense” produce a populism that can slip into conspiracy, and why so many bright people end up suspicious of abstraction. Then Gouldner reframes the post‑WWII landscape: a technical‑professional new class whose legitimacy depends on universality, even as its language quietly excludes working‑class speech and experience.
From there, we get practical. We compare elite “neutrality” to the hard realities of endowments and medical revenue, and we explore what counter‑publics look like now: labor clubs that teach Robert’s Rules and strike strategy alongside Marx, Bourdieu, and Joe Burns. We talk code‑switching without erasing origins, and we sketch ways to build worker‑centered study that doesn’t pander—spaces where rigor and relevance live together. Gramsci’s “organic intellectual” still matters here: every worker thinks and theorizes, with or without credentials.
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These are the primary readings we discuss:
-The American Intellectual Elite by Charles Kadushin
- Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
- The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as Social Type by Christopher Lasch
- The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class by Alvin Gouldner
- The Missing Generation: Academics and the Communist Party from the
Depression to the Cold War by Ellen Schrecker
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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