“This king, to say no more of him, and this queen, and their infant children (who once would have been the pride and hope of a great people) were then forced to abandon the sanctuary of the most splendid palace in the world, which they left swimming in blood, polluted by massacre, and strewed with scattered limbs and mutilated carcasses.”

In an age of screenshots and cherry-picked quotes, podcasts are largely immune: it’s difficult to take an audio clip out of context and cancel it; you’d have to listen all the way through and transcribe. Maybe this is why podcasts tend to be freer than magazine articles—looser with facts and opinions. But it’s also partly because their hosts tend not to take themselves too seriously.

On the decline of the public intellectual and the rise of something else.

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” published in Harper’searlier this month, contains 151 signatures and is 532 words long.

seeking to reorient public discourse to its original principles of “free exchange of information and ideas” against an increasing “zeal in agreement” that leads to the former’s suppression.

As with any brief statement, it is the seed from which whole vines of verbiage for and against it grow.

The divisions in the responses are entirely predictable.

Critics pounced at the document to deny the reality of “cancel culture,” while a more detailed responsorial letter offered context on the original letter’s vague allegations, showing how cancel culture exists on a case-by-case basis.

Others saw it as a tribalist gesture of pampered authors grasping at their privileges and platforms. Those condemning the condemnations, on the other hand, saw only sour grapes.

Still others very publicly feigned detachment from the letter entirely. And so on and so forth.

My own response to the piece was initially general approval.

First being that, while the insinuation of platform-hoarding is too crude, the letter nonetheless placed a premium on the “public intellectual” as an institutional reality.

What at first read like advocacy of universal ideals for all citizens of a healthy society began to read more and more like a covenant for cerebral warriors. By virtue of placing the greatest belief upon these principles, the letter suggests, we deem ourselves the elect of the American mind and the knights errant of free expression.

Public intellectual

By virtue of placing the greatest belief upon these principles, the letter suggests, we deem ourselves the elect of the American mind and the knights errant of free expression.

The privileges you complain of are not, in fact, privileges but the spoils of battles well-fought, and which are always won because in free debate there are no winners as such.

This point was difficult to argue until Thomas Chatterton Williams, the letter’s prime spokesman, admitted that Glenn Greenwald’s name was kept offthe letter at the insistence of other signatories.

This is evidenced as much by the signatories as by the letter’s contents itself. The furor has focused on current lightning rods like Williams, Matthew Yglesias, Bari Weiss, and J.K. Rowling.

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It’s a model that leaves a strong, intimidating impression upon all who come in its immediate wake, but one that has recently found itself in a state of flux amidst a more chaotic media atmosphere.

The advent of the 20th century American intellectual culture unfolds like a creation myth.

Victory in World War II put the United States in a position of unprecedented global influence.

Having split the atom and made a weapon out of it, we now had both the power to level entire cities and the time to debate the ethics of doing so.

The New Republic and Partisan Reviewgave way to Politics and Encounter, Esquire and Playboy, The Liberal Imagination and The End of Ideology, Invisible Man and Lolita, James Baldwin owning William F. Buckley at Cambridge, and William F. Buckley calling Gore Vidal a “queer” on live television.

The United States had entered what was, in essence, its Victorian era. Ideas had power, and people who had ideas were given, relatively speaking, as much prominence as movie stars and politicians.

It was a model based on magazine work, roundtable appearances, book parties, essay collections, occasional professorships, and public feuds.

The model’s glamor proved compelling. People who were not “creative” or “attractive” or who lacked “adequate social graces” in the conventional sense could move to New York City, Washington, DC, or, God forbid, Los Angeles and make something of themselves with a savage book review of an old guard member on the way out as a calling card. It was hardly a secret society, but it was not the bar from Cheers either.

This was an age when the editor was as much of a powerbroker as a lobbyist or a lawyer.

Their magazines were gateways to prominence without the need for hard credentials.

Few remember Francis’s forceful but narrow “Junius” letters. Burke’s Reflections on the other hand refuses to go away for all of its enduringly human attributes: not the sobriety of judgement, steadfastness of morality, or mastery of logic but for their failures in the face of upheaval. It is a work that cannot contain its fear. But sometimes writing truthfully means unlearning English.

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Second being that the model of “public intellectual” espoused in the letter is a very specific kind born out of specific circumstances.

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