Wikipedia on The Frankfurt School (later to become Columbia University), IMO the beginning of the state higher education is now in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School
Academic leftists always delude themselves into thinking these goals can be achieved by mutual consent of the robber and the robbed - rather than by using a man with a gun from the government as a collection agent.
Does a bear honk in the woods?
What amazes me of these elites is that they believe in distribution of wealth except when it comes down to their own.
Academics and media types are wage earners who by and large will never accumlate the wealth and assets that risk takers and business owners do. Smug in their cerebral superiority, they deeply resent industrious, and often less well educated entrepreneurs, who accumulate more than they have. It does not take much of a leap for them to also see those gains as being ill gotten and having resulted from the exploitation of others. Academics and their left wing elitist brethern are not immune from materialistic envy and like the idea of income redistribution. They hate feeling inferior.
Umm... That would make them Commies.
Any more questions?
You don't have to be an intellectual to fit that bill. I don't consider journalists to be intellectuals (perhaps that's an error), but journalists do nothing but talk, and therefore they promote talk above action. To do so they take every opportunity to denigrate people who get things done - police and the military, businessmen, engineers . . .Now Nazi ideals, on the other hand, were pure barbarism; nothing could be said in favor of them."Journalism is just cheap talk, and the cheapest talk of all is the second guess. And sometimes they are caught in outright lies such as the "TANG memos" and the Fauxtogrphs. Democrat voters tend not to internalize responsibility for getting things done and consider themselves victims. But the leaders and wealthy contributors simply promote the same ideas that ooze out of journalism's negativity toward the middle class.
If you start from the question, "Who says journalism is objective," and "What are the justifications for assuming that journalism - uniquely - is objective," you find that the whole liberal project collapses. Journalism selects the stories it will emphasize and the stories it will not report. And since Half the truth is often a great lie. Benjamin Franklin, it can never be proved that journalism is objective. More to the point, the actual perspective of journalism - cynicism toward the people and institutions which actually do necessary things - is in plain sight and that is not only not "objective," is one which profits from bad news and therefore journalism is a special interest. And therefore journalism is arrogant to argue from the assumption that it is objective.
"Liberal" and Progressive" and "Moderate" are simply honors which journalism awards to its acolytes for toeing journalism's party line that criticism of the people who get things done is a higher function than taking risks in the absence of perfect knowledge in order to take necessary action.
. . . In practice, communism is nothing less than sheer barbarism that makes even the horrors of Naziism pale in comparison.
So although "Fascism" (especially National Socialism) is recognized as a dystopia rather than a utopia, people who are desperate that they get credit which actually belongs by right to the entrepreneur (they want to run the government by the "right" of their desire to 'make everyone equal' - but making the government do that redounds to their credit) are unwilling to give up the idea that the doers deserve credit for their deeds.But real, existing Communism is no different than National Socialism - nobody but thugs would be capable of instituting such a barbarous system.
A lot of them are.
Great article.... Bump.
Ping
academic elites are often what i call "limousine commies"-they like ideas that sound utopian,and are unconcerned with and untouched by reality.they have a very nice soft existence-breaks on housing,protection,health care,schooling for their brats,and people listen to them and quote them because many of them are "doctors"-to me a doctor is a physician,dentist,psychologist,or scientist engaged in REAL research(physics,chemistry,etc)NOT an expert in 20th century minority lesbian literature or some similar crap.the irony is that if the real communists ever took power here,or in places where they have,the "intellectual elite"that supported them are the first ones that get turned into mulch.The real world communists are no idiots-they realize how flaky and unreliable these academics are.one can see the appeal of communism(however false)to a guy standing in a dirt field in bangladesh or some other third world craphole whose house gets washed away twice a year along with his crop-if you offer him an extra handful of rice a day,he'd sign up with invaders from mars to get it-he has nothing to lose-but these coddled academics-they make me puke-i hope the next terrorist act happens right in the middle of a faculty conference at one of these hate-America leftist universities,like ward churchill's for example-they'd change their tune fast as soon as heads started rolling-they'd be screaming for the despised police and armed forces to come rescue them-i wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire-i guess i sound hateful-so be it-especially towards people who didn't care an iota for the thousands of ordinary people murdered on 9/11
Since Harvard and the other Ivies are feeder schools for the nation's professoriate, these peculiar prejudices find their way throughout the system. I suspect if state universities could require a significant portion of their faculty to be native residents of their states this would be less of a problem.
Some preach Communism...
but in personal life are smart Capitalist.
See the chapter on Noam Chomsky in Peter Schweizer's "Do As I Say
(Not As I Do); Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy.
The guy is pretty rich for a crusty academic.
“I find that America is fundamentally a Conservative nation. The preponderant judgment of the American people, especially of the young people, is that the radical, or Liberal, approach has not worked and is not working. They yearn for a return to Conservative principles.” – Barry Goldwater, The Conscience Of A Conservative, 1960.
Richard Pipes is being generous. Leftists in general not only are attracted to the utopian ideals [sic] of Communism, they also are attracted to the destruction of family, morality and religion for its own sake. They are worse than he is making them out to be. In general, that is; I suppose there are some pie in the sky idealists, but they're the older ones.
Ping
Surely not all of them. But there are probably more actual out-of-the-closet communists in Academia than in any other sector of the community.