[The Free Press] In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—"The Treason of the Intellectuals"—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics. Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in "the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds." And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.
A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place.
| No. Back then fascists were creatures of the left. National Socialists are only of the right when viewed from the perspective of International Socialists competing in the same political space. Though otherwise the point stands. |