More than a half-century ago, Noam Chomsky’s seminal essay, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” appeared in a Feb. 23, 1967, special issue of The New York Review of Books. That was then, at the height of the controversial war in Vietnam, when the question was who bore responsibility for speaking truth to power, for holding to task those responsible for prosecuting such an undeclared, unpopular and unwinnable war.
This is now, today, when We the People are enjoined to raise this question anew, in light of the results of the recent presidential election and in anticipation of those who will soon occupy the corridors of power, presuming to do so on our behalf. The United States is not now at war in any traditional sense of the term; but the country is in an acute state of turmoil and drift, at home and abroad, that is every bit as serious and demanding as anything we have faced in recent memory.
The incoming president will have all three ostensibly coequal branches of the federal government in his pocket, staffed with political and personal loyalists who have essentially forsaken their institutional responsibilities for checking and balancing one another in order to secure self-interested presidential favor. It promises to be a heretofore unequaled imperial presidency — unitary executive theory made real, but on steroids.
As it was then in 1967, so it is now: The responsibility of “intellectuals” is, at least arguably, to act as the vanguard of republican democracy by filling the institutional void we have inherited, to serve as a mediating mechanism between government and the people, provide voice for the voiceless, think for the unthinking legions among us and perhaps thereby enable the public to live out the true meaning of popular sovereignty through informed civic engagement.
Two questions that have forever encumbered treatment of intellectual responsibility remain with us. First, who are we talking about? Who are these privileged, specially endowed individuals whose expertise and experience equip them to speak with authority, to those both in and out of power? Are they academics, scholars and scientists, or do they also include those of less elevated standing — technocrats, policy wonks, apparatchiks, pundits, journalists — who command a sizable public audience? The question, unanswerable on its face, assumes special importance when national security is at stake. When all is said and done, virtually every area of public policy is connected in some fashion to national security, robustly defined.
Second, what is the proper function of the intellectual? Is he or she to be an unregenerate mouthpiece for those in power, or a responsible critic? There are those who might argue for the former on unifying patriotic grounds, but the latter is the only defensible, self-respecting and indeed ethical posture, especially given present circumstances. The regime soon to enter office will be populated by a new cadre of national security mandarins, all largely devoid of visionary ideas, certainly nothing we could call progressive, much less transformative. They will almost assuredly will be captive of warmed-over doctrinal verities, underwritten by arrogant conviction. It will therefore be incumbent on intellectuals, whoever they are, to serve as a kind of shadow government, offering the kinds of independent checks and balances that have otherwise been lost.
What is the proper function of the intellectual? Is he or she to be an unregenerate mouthpiece for those in power, or a responsible critic? The latter is the only defensible, self-respecting and indeed ethical posture.
Come January, the newly anointed national security mandarins of the incoming administration will undoubtedly fashion themselves as tough-minded, hard-nosed, steely-eyed realists — not as the result of thoughtful philosophical reflection, but as a counterpoise to anything that smacks of weak, naïve, altruistic idealism or (still worse) liberalism. They will come to office convinced that they see the world as it is and forever has been — a dog-eat-dog, kill-or-be-killed, survival-of-the-fittest jungle filled with threats that are objectively discernible to the vigilant and discerning among us. Their answer to this state of affairs will be the steady, unremitting accretion and employment of power — defined predominantly in military terms — to serve narrowly defined national interests.
They will uncritically embrace and revivify the assertions expressed in the 2017 National Security Strategy and 2018 National Defense Strategy documents, which can be summarized this way: We face a world characterized by so-called Great Power competition, in which resurgent adversaries hostile to the established rules-based international order — read China and Russia — seek to unseat the United States from its position of international primacy. In that world, only the character of war, not its fundamental underlying nature (organized violence for political purposes), is subject to change, and the preferred line of effort in confronting such a state of affairs is to make the military ever more “lethal.”
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In the same vein, they will continue to employ the tired, chest-thumping, muscle-flexing rhetoric of “warfighting” as the supernal essence of the military, and will depict “warfighters” — all who serve in uniform, whether trigger pullers or paper pushers — as the human instrumentality for this purpose. This will be a willful surrender to the age-old, patently illogical dictum that preparing for war is the necessary precondition for peace. It will provide partisan political justification for eternal increases in an already gluttonous, strategically distorted defense budget, and it will thereby ensure that such wimpy, frivolous distractions as peacemaking, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance and disaster response will never be defining raisons d’être of the U.S. military.
This new mandarin caste will feel fully justified and largely uninhibited in turning their backs (make that our backs) on heretofore valued allies — Ukraine for sure, and quite possibly Taiwan and South Korea.
Rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, these new mandarins will stay resolutely wedded to the necessity of American unilateralism, their guiding precept being “unilateralism whenever possible, multilateralism only when necessary.” This will supposedly guarantee that the United States forever remains the pre-eminent global superpower, and that a self-serving conception of the “national interest” will always take precedence over ill-defined or illusory global concerns.
All available evidence indicates that this new mandarin caste will be fully willing to place unqualified, inexperienced, character-challenged, norm-busting loyalists in the highest positions of public trust. They will assuredly favor withdrawing from, undermining and hindering the authority of existing international agreements, international organizations, and established alliances and partnerships that impose entangling obligations on the U.S. and inhibit its freedom of action. They will feel fully justified and largely uninhibited in turning their backs (make that our backs) on heretofore valued allies — Ukraine for sure, and quite possibly Taiwan and South Korea. They will feel unconstrained in expanding government secrecy and domestic surveillance and will not hesitate to fire career public service professionals who stand up to them and get in their way.
It’s already clear that these new mandarins represent a clear and present danger to sound civil-military relations: the threatened wholesale firings of “woke,” deep-state generals and admirals for political disloyalty and ideological impurity; the unlawful and unethical misuse of the military for such tasks as rounding up immigrants, countering domestic dissent — cast as the work of insurrectionists or enemies within — and other forms of covert action against political “enemies”; the planned discrediting, undermining and possible elimination of essential social responsibility initiatives, such as diversity, equity and inclusion programs or the prohibition against women serving in combat; and the prospect of uniformed war criminals being exempted from prosecution for battlefield atrocities.
It’s entirely too fitting here to invoke a key passage from Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1966 treatise on “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” which alludes to the historical tendency of malcontented “Know-Nothings” to seek out scapegoats for their own ignorant prejudices, including among those scapegoats contrarian intellectuals (the intelligentsia):
There has always been in our national experience a type of mind which elevates hatred to a kind of creed; for this mind, group hatreds take a place in politics similar to the class struggle in some other modern societies. Filled with obscure and ill-directed grievances and frustrations, with elaborate hallucinations about secrets and conspiracies, groups of malcontents have found scapegoats at various times in Masons or abolitionists, Catholics, Mormons, or Jews, Negroes or immigrants, the liquor interests or the international bankers. In the succession of scapegoats chosen by the followers of this tradition of Know-Nothingism, the intelligentsia have at last in our time found a place.
“Anyone who has begun to think,” philosopher and educator John Dewey observed, “places some portion of the world in jeopardy.” It is actually the blinkered thinking, or rather non-thinking of the new national security mandarins about to ascend to the highest levels of government that most promises to place America’s future in jeopardy. It is We must look to those who live in the world of thought and ideas — yes, the intellectuals — that we must now look, in hopes that they will step up to the task of relentlessly and responsibly scrutinizing and criticizing those in power on our behalf, and perhaps thereby lighting the way through the darkness ahead.
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from Gregory D. Foster on power, politics and history
