America's Political Class Under Fire

While the clash between what has been called the modern and undeveloped worlds has led to America's military involvement in the Middle East and other places, few people realize the tension between the modern and the traditional within the United States. Beginning in the 1920's, professional intellectuals and academics began influencing the nation's public policy on matters as diverse as education, economics, and public health. In this thoughtful work, David A. Horowitz analyzes the tension between the so-called New Class of knowledge professionals and their critics, who accused them of being out of touch with the common sense of everyday people, strangers to the American Way, even Communists. America's Political Class Under Fire is organized over nine periods of 20th-century history, providing a window into everything from the Scopes evolution trial and McCarthyism to affirmative action and the Clinton health care fiasco. Along the way, the book explores the New Left, populist conservatism, and the mid-90's reaction to political liberalism, which saw Newt Gingrich rise to the top post in the House of Representatives. In telling these stories, Horowitz seeks to encourage a more balanced and fair-minded assessment of the consequences of expertise and applied intellect to democratic existence in the United States.

"The American political system, as devised by the Federalist authors, the architects of the Constitution, was structured so as not to rely upon intellectuals. The "machinery of government" would operate on its own, and America had little possibility of becoming "a nation of philosophers." Yet, as David A. Horowitz has demonstrated, intellectuals as a political class have been at center of numerous public controversies throughout American history. Horowitz probes the problem of our own varying mandarin class with thorough research, lucid writing, and thoughtful reflection. Should the "brains trust" be trusted? That is the question." -- John Patrick Diggins, Distinguished Professor of History, Graduate Center, CUNY"David A. Horowitz mounts a vigorous challenge in this book to the conventional wisdom of political historians, both on the left and right. Rebels against the rule of the "best and the brightest" have often altered the outcome of elections and the shape of government policies. Now, at last, they have a full and empathetic treatment of what they believed and what they accomplished." -- Michael Kazin, author of The PopulistPersuasion: An American History and Professor of History, Georgetown University

David A. Horowitz is Professor of History at Portland State University. He is the co-author of Beyond Left andRight: Insurgency and the Establishment (1997).