What you say is true. But what you don't add is a point I constantly made in the threads on the intellectual institutions that help to perpetuate the isolation of the intellectuals in their own priestly purity. And these are issues that support your case in other threads. In fact the anti-obscurantism thread, the thread on religion, the ideology thread, and the immigrant raid thread, and as far as I am concerned the old thread on scientism, are all pulling from the same piece of cloth.
Look at working class and mass movements of the past, all of them, in this country and in other countries. What you will find is that in order for "working class" movements to become mass movements, a significant section of the intelligentsia will become class traitors and put themselves at the service of the working class movement. For the most part these have been what would now be called "humanities intellectuals."
Also, and in parallel to this, significant numbers of deeply religious people will go against their own religious-institutional hierarchy and also support the working class mass movement. Sometimes in this latter case, the religious intellectuals and other "faithful" will discard many aspects of their religion, and other times, they will simply translate into oppositional working class terms.
Now I am not talking about parties -- socialist, marxist or otherwise here -- only about the movements as a whole.
I am also not talking about cause and effect -- whether intellectuals and religious people are the critical tipping point for the mass movement, etc..... Or whether the "intellectuals" become a bureaucratic aristocracy and work for their own gain as "intellectual labor" from within the movement. These are all different issues from my basic observation.
As far as I can tell, there has never been a mass movement, based on the working class, which didn't attract a significant number of intellectual class traitors and religious "faithful". Further the religious "faithful" always revalue the working class movements with the meaning of their religion. In the thread on the obscurantist institutions of the intelligentsia I regularly pointed out the kinds of intellectuals who were class traitors and many of them were religious or originally from a religious background. It is a simple matter of observation that such people spoke in the dialects and lexicon of "immigrants", whether internal immigrants (from rural country to town, from town to city) or immigrants from other nations.
We don't need a Rieff to agree on this.
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