MARTIN FELDSTEIN, OR TRAHISON DE CLERCS

I saw that Feldstein had an op-ed in the neo-con Washington Post and I decided not to read it because Feldstein is just another right-wing ideologue who's really not much better than Mark Levin. I was correct to do so, as Krugman and others have noted, but Feldstein's hackery brings up another problem we liberals have been puzzling over for some time: is Feldstein (or any of the many other conservative intellectuals) a liar or is he just stupid?

The second part of this post's title gives us one answer: Feldstein and the others are traitors to the Enlightenment, the great modern Western intellectual tradition. This line came from a book published in 1927 by the French novelist and philosopher Julien Benda and is usually translated as "The Treason of the Intellectuals."

Benda was originally referring to the political agit-prop of right-wing intellectuals in France¹, notably Charles Maurras, who was "a major intellectual influence in early 20th-century Europe whose “integral nationalism” anticipated some of the ideas of fascism" and a supporter of the Petain government.

¹Dictionary of Political Thought. 3rd Edition. Roger Scruton. Page 700.