Was not that a reaction to the rise of Nazi populism? Anyone with half a brain who saw the Nuremberg rallies would certainly loose his/her faith in people's ability to make rational political choices. Ditto for the last electoral debacle in California.
Add to it the long history of mob violence - pogroms in Europe, lynchings in the US, religious violence in India - and you will easily why the detachment and apparent rationality of the professional class gains its appeal.
Another thought. I realized long time ago that much of the philosophical writing, especially in the European tradition, is way too deep for me. Either I am lacking patience to digest the extraordinarily thick, poorly written, and obtuse text, or the writers lacked a good editor, or perhaps both (btw, one of the few things that I genuinely like abut the US culture is the concise and clear writing style). I discovered, however, that knowing the biography of the author and the material conditions that affected his mental output can be much more useful in deciphering that output than struggling with the poorly written record of that output.
Take, for example Karl Marx. His father was a sycophantic Jewish lawyer sucking up the Prussian powers that be. Than certainly made Karl sick in the stomach (I certainly would make me sick) and prompted him to question the status quo. Dealing with arrogant anti-semitic, pro-monarchy jocks at the university certainly exacerbated that feeling and made one feel really under-appreciated. Marrying a Westphalian aristocrat may infuse some sense of self-esteem, but also leaves one with a feeling of being a whore. In that situation, reading a book written by a sycophant extolling the glory of the Prussian state would make anyone puke. So you start ranting about His Highness, His Highness gets pissed and kicks you out of the country. If language is the main tool of your trade, that really is a low blow. Everybody would be pissed in that situation. And then you read more books written by sycophants extolling the dubious virtues of the received social-economic order, worse yet, arguing that this is the best of all possible worlds. That would make anyone really mad. So what do you do if language is the only tool that you have? Subvert these sycophants and use their own arguments to show that the opposite is true and the status quo is the worst possible world. That is not only really smart ("a fool tries to convince me with arguments, a wise man - with my own") but also pisses off your enemies and gives intellectual ammunition to their enemies, which pisses your enemies even more - and that gives you a feeling of schadenfreude that is the only revenge that you, a poor immigrant burning midnight oil in the halls of the British Museum, can have.
Strauss, in a sense, is an obverse of this process - an academic expelled from his own country by an angry book burning mob manipulated by a shrewd demagogue and arriving in a country where mob is also ostensibly elevated to the rank of decision makers but in fact manipulated by demagogues. I do not need to struggle with his thick text to get a gist of what the guy must have felt. In fact, I do not feel much different when being insulate, directly or indirectly, by jingoistic rednecks, listening to pseudo-populist political speeches of Bush and his likes, or for that matter, watching a collective madness of putting a move idol in the governor's office.
It is, however, an altogether different question why the ruling class intellectuals, or those being groomed for those positions, espouse rants of disgruntled immigrants? My hunch is that it is an upper class version of neo-nazism or hip-hop. The main value of neo-nazsim of hip hop is its shock effect created by their in-you-face obnoxiousness and raw aggression. Teenagers and young adults adopt as a form of passive aggression, a virtual power trip against their parents and the status quo - as a sort of "I cannot fuck with you directly as I would like to, because that would get me into trouble, but I can blast that shit in your face to piss you off, and there is little you can do about it" attitude. Rush Limbaugh belong to the same genre, but directed at the downwardly mobile and somewhat older white males.
The ruling class intellectuals and those groomed for such positions do more or less the same thing - they want to fuck with what they see as the "liberal orthodoxy" but find neo-nazism, hip-hop or Rush Limbaugh too vulgar to their elite tastes. Therefore, they select more high-brow cultural expressions of obnoxiousness and shock treatment and rub that into the faces of their intellectual foes.
Wojtek