Not a few among today’s intellectuals, both inside and outside the ivy-towered temples of higher learning, sound like modern-day Jeremiahs who lament the false promise of America and capitalism while genuflecting before the prospect of a brave new world. Self-styled secular prophets, they gravitate to what Lewis S. Feuer called “the ideological mode of thought.”1 But there is one crucial difference: unlike their putative Hebrew predecessors, argues Feuer, “as ideologists, [they claim] to know the plan of God in history and His long-term purposes.” Ideology is not merely a replacement religion for most of its adherents. It also provides a lofty political mission: building the City of Man. The promise of a utopian “higher society” inebriates its proponents, who embrace the new political religion with pious devotion.
The anti-liberalism pervading the academy today can best be understood with this
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