There used to be something called the public intellectual. There was a public intellectual in the U.S.. There’s still a long history of such things.

A class of thinkers – mostly writers with prestigious degrees and academics with a knack for writing – set the discourse. From there, the educated and those who wanted to be seen as educated would pick and choose the opinions they wished to align themselves with. This was part of what it meant to participate in the public sphere.

I used to be told, in all seriousness, to read the opinion sections of major newspapers as an edifying activity. By the time I was in my mid-20s, words like’think piece’ were already jokes at the expense of the opinionating class.

It was cheaper – and faster – to write opinion pieces than to do reporting, and anyone could create a blog. It became a broader trend in media, thanks to the economic pressures exerted first by Craigslist and Facebook.

Social media and opinion writing fed off each other. Opinions were written about whatever the writer had seen on social media the other day.

The size of the opinionating class was once constrained by the physical size of a newspaper page. Now, anyone with a cellphone can roast anointed opinionator into a corncob.

The fall of the opinion class mirrors the rise of the democratized, secular press at the expense of the church. After the enlightenment, Western public life moved toward a set of secular institutions.

William Bennett: Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press existed for centuries. He says it undermines religion’s monopoly on public life. Bennett: our current cultural moment is happening against a background.

The production of the French libelles would not have been possible without Movable type. The protests of 2020 and the sudden shift in public opinion around policing and race would n’t have happened without social media and the mass adoption of smartphones.

Opinionators are not in danger of an actual guillotining – except maybe metaphorically. But they’ll be less important – not least because they’ll no longer be setting the Overton window window.

We will no longer pretend that they persuade others in a free marketplace of ideas. We have long conflated civic life with’engaging with ideas’ or’participating in debate’. But with the fall of the opinion class, the mask rips off, revealing politics as little but clashes between rival cults of information.

Most Internet fandoms behave more responsibly than at least one of America’s major political parties. This is not as dire as it sounds.

The letter was signed by a number of opinionators, and then J.K. Rowling for some reason. It decries the’intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism’.

The meaning behind the letter are subject to multiple interpretations. Signatories were unaware of the identities of all their fellow signatories.

‘illiberalism’ is a’fancy stand-in’ for what opinionators have called’campus culture,”’cancel culture,’ and’FR wokeness’.

The term is n’t actually a concrete ideology but an inchoate social force with the hallmarks of religious revival. Conservative commentators such as Ross Douthat and Andrew Sullivan have taken up the term.

Douthat, a devout Catholic, is able to put his finger on the aspect of’spiritual renewal’ sought by Americans. But he also senses what I sense, as someone raised in an evangelical Christian family.

Matthew Yglesias, a signatory of the letter, has referred to this cultural moment as’the great awokening’. He compared it to the 19th century religious revival that fed into the fire of the movement to abolish slavery. Yglesias: our current era has been largely defined by the pretense that religious fervor and emotional sentiment are incidental to politics.

‘we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed – in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet’ we all sound like absolute morons trying to talk about it.

Part of this has to do with the various fallacies deployed by people who decry’cancel culture’. Part of the fallacies include those who decry:’you cancel culture.’.

This is roughly defined as the idea that white supremacy and patriarchy permeate our society. According to an editor at New York magazine, neither springs from nor necessitates the other.

Is someone canceled because they have been vigorously criticized?. Does this rule also apply to prominent figures who have been formally or informal designated as representatives of public opinion?.

anti-woke commentariat are working with old tools that are crumbling in their hands and in an old workspace that is disappearing into thin air.

The opinionators are not afraid of being silenced. They wish to take up column inches without a pack of nobodies telling them how wrong they are.

The opinionators frequently circulated debunked or faulty science. They treated dehumanization as a difference of opinion. They were – despite being held as the paragons of rational discourse – never particularly rational.

Mark Twain: chaos is not the same thing as evil. He says the terrors wrought by the system that preceded it were far greater.