More or less by definition, decadent aristocrats and populists have more in common than they know. Both are excluded groups, doomed to watch helplessly while the military-financial powers relentessly go about their business. This accounts for Remy de Gourmont’s influence in early 20th c. America, and the European interest in blonde beasts like Sherwood Anderson and Nelson Algren. To say nothing of Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

As the university is progressively disassembled and discontinued, this will become more clear to everyone. Intellectuals had been lulled into thinking that they were upper-middle-class professionals and part of the power system, but now they’re finding out. This was a transient effect and they made a big mistake.

Hofstadter pretended to be analyzing and describing the intellectual-populist split, but actually he was working to create it and recruiting the intelligentsia into the post-WWII elite. Our present state is much like that of the 1870-1900 period, when the power was unchallenged and electoral politics was dominated by stupid cultural politics.