“Only 35 percent of wealthy Americans support spending what is necessary to ensure good public schools,” Daniel W. Drezner notes [from The Ideas Industry], “a sharp contrast to 87-percent support from the general public.” The wealthy also support cuts to government spending and social programs much more strongly than the rest of the public—which fits with their compulsion to spend millions on trying to buy academic legitimacy for unregulated capitalism."
See The New Republic story for more:
The Rise of the Thought Leader, by David Sessions.
The Thought Leader replaces the Public Intellectual. The TL has a big platform on a major media outlet, social media, a popular substack page, etc, and, the point, is sponsored at least in part by plutocratic money that wants to propagate the ideas and values of unfettered capitalism. The Public Intellectual, in the past, was more independent, protected by academic freedoms in a university or educational settings, and/or by popular free press platforms more viable before the rise of Google and social media. Sessions might be overstating the relative independence of former PI's but the plutocratic tilt (spending supports) for ideas that protect private equity/corporate profit seeking interests and refute, or more often obfuscate, criticism of these economic arrangements is obvious and troubling.
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