Brexit and The Death of Public Intellectuals..
Yet another reason for the nation’s descent into failure.
Public intellectuals are dead; a relic of a completely bygone era.
Once upon a time, these rare creatures could be relied upon to speak power to politicians and shape the narrative in society.
Even the Conservatives ones were known to hold the government of the day accountable for their idiocies.
The likes of Michael Oakeshott in the United Kingdom and William Buckley jr. in the United States of America come to mind with the former openly criticizing aspects of Margaret Thatcher’s economic policies in the 1980s and the latter recanting his earlier (racist) views on segregation and civil rights.
On the left and center, you had the likes of Eric Hobsbawm and Alan John Percival Taylor, whose bodies of work were especially instructive to politicians and citizens alike.
But we have come a very long way in the decades following the second world war and it is no hyperbole to state that the leading societies of the anglosphere nations are far less intelligent than they once were.
This phenomenon is entirely responsible for the inexorable and ineluctable second coming of Donald Trump and over here in Blighty, our rupture with the European Union.