Reagan Aide Relates Reagan/Orwell Disdain of Leftist Intel..

Will to Truth and Leftist Academia? And the great leftist tradition from
1900-1990
Thanks to Peggy Noonan and WSJ

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He did not dislike intellectuals--his heroes often were intellectuals, from the
Founders straight through Milton Friedman and Hayek and Solzhenitsyn. But he
did not favor the intellectuals of his own day, because he thought they were in
general thick-headed. He thought that many of the 20th century's intellectuals
were high-IQ dimwits. He had an instinctive agreement with Orwell's putdown
that a particular idea was so stupid that only an intellectual would believe
it.

He thought that intellectuals, like the great liberal academics of the latter
half of the 20th century, tended to tie themselves in great webs of complexity,
webs they'd often spun themselves--great complicated things that they'd get
stuck in, and finally get out of, only to go on and construct a new web for
mankind to get caught in. The busy little spiders from Marx through
Bloomsbury--some of whom, such as the Webbs, were truly the stupidest brilliant
people who ever lived--through Harvard and Yale and the American left circa
1900-90.
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