Since I have great sympathy for the activism fetishism, let me note why I think it exists. First, there is the fact that thinking labor is often more pleasurable and comfortable than the often monotonous day-to-day work of organizing and outreach, so there is the suspicion that the intellectuals take the fun jobs and get the most credit in the media - a reasonable resentment with real truth to it.
Secondly, and probably most importantly, most political writing and intellectual work is pretty much useless, and I include a good chunk of my own work in that category. It's the nature of the beast that there is an almost darwinian winner-take-all nature to a lot of intellectual endeavor that, as far as impact, only the very best insights capture the public or activist imaginination in a way that makes it matter at all. On the purely incremental level, every door an activist knocks on and every leaflet handed out has an obvious if sometime tiny gain for the movement, a stark contrast to the sense that 95%+ of intellectual work is just folks in comfy shares entertaining one another with little relevance to one another.
Of course, the tiny fraction of intellectual work that hits the mark is stunningly important and Doug and a number of others on the list hit that mark more often than most. When I've hit it a few times in my life in minor ways, it's an incredible feeling of accomplishment. But despite that, I still always have the suspicion that the times I've spent monotonously knocking on doors was probably, on an hourly basis, a more useful deployment of my time for social change. I'll admit that my drift to law school was based on that constant dream that law is the route to converting thinking into hard action on a more continual basis of activism. I have my skepticism there as well, but have at least a couple of models of lawyers who meet my criterion - one of whom I will hopefully be working for next year (cross fingers as I head for formal interview in January).
What I am deeply suspicious of is the reverse of the activist fetish, namely those who sit in airchairs and accuse activists of "selling out" when such intellectuals' work by its nature is free of the compromises necessary to most day-to-day activist work. The strength of intellectual work may be at times in its uncompromising vision but it becomes perverse when those purist values are imposed in another sphere in a way that impugn's the integrity of those acting without the same lack of constraints. Questioning strategic vision is always legitimate and even the role of the intellectual but the casual questioning of activists' integrity that is all too common among intellectuals is repugnant.
-- Nathan Newman