The remarkable fact about humanities professors isn't how slavishly left-wing their politics are but how smart the smart ones are, and how dumb the dumb ones are.

...When I entered grad school, in the late '80s, literary (and later cultural) theory was still the primary venue for public intellectual life. One no longer wanted to be incisive, direct, widely read; one wanted to be elliptical, shimmering, and widely feared. By the time I exited grad school, the pseudo-profundities and outré politics of the academic left had devolved into frivolity.

"By and large, however, the state now stands in such naked, brutal relation to all but the most pleasure-domed of our eminent bourgeois that the chief executive is now less representative than, in a multi-mediated, fictional sense, representational: the imagined or invented persona of a no less simulacral people whose condition[s] of existence are thereby occluded."

[The author] believes that the consensus leftism of the '90s set itself up too explicitly against identity politics and thus wrote off "the way blacks, Latinos, women, queers, and others have transformed utterly the very category and meaning of 'the poor' or 'the left' on behalf of whom they write." To this sentence—with its inverted commas ("the poor," "the left," the graphic equivalent of up-speak), vacuous intensifiers ("utterly," "very"), and tongue-tied syntax ("on behalf of whom they write," instead of "on whose behalf they write")—one cannot be kind….Juvenile sneer words (Jefferson is the country's "ur-cracker") share space with stale lit-crit jargon ("subtended"), and all attempts at wit are downright puzzling. "Nixon's Deep Throat told reporters to follow the money; Clinton's deep throats say follow the money shot." Come again?