The death of Nathan Glazer in January, a month before his 96th birthday, has been rightly noted as the end of an era in American political and intellectual life. Nat Glazer was the last exemplar of what historian Christopher Lasch would refer to as a “social type”: the New York intellectuals, the sons and daughters of impoverished, almost exclusively Jewish immigrants who took advantage of the city's public education system and then thrived in the cultural and political ferment that from the 1930's into the 1960's made New York the leading metropolis of the free world. As Glazer once noted, the Marxist polemics that he and his fellow students at City College engaged in afforded them unique insights into, and unanticipated opportunities to interpret, Soviet communism to the rest of America during the Cold War.
Over time, postwar economic growth and political change resulted in the relative decline of New York and the emergence of Washington as the center of power and even glamor in American life. Nevertheless, Glazer and his fellow New York intellectuals, relocated either to major universities around the country or to Washington think tanks, continued to exert remarkable influence over both domestic and foreign affairs. The improbability of all this was driven home to me in the mid-1980's, when I was living in Washington. While hosting some friends from South Texas (where they were deeply enmeshed in local Democratic politics), I asked a neoconservative colleague working in the Reagan White House to arrange a VIP tour. My Texas friends were delighted but also quite baffled to hear that their Reaganite tour guide was a former socialist. (I didn't have the heart to tell them that my friend had been not just any socialist, but a Shachtmanite!)
But I am getting ahead of my story. Not all New York intellectuals were neoconservatives. Nor for that matter were all neoconservatives New York intellectuals. And of course, since 9/11 and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, neoconservatism has been identified almost exclusively with a particular foreign policy perspective advanced by a younger generation of intellectuals and policy entrepreneurs, not with critiques of Great Society domestic programs that originally defined the term. As for Nathan Glazer, over the years he explicitly declined many opportunities to identify himself as any kind of neoconservative. Indeed, in 1972 he voted for George McGovern for president, and in 1980 for Jimmy Carter.
Yet Nathan Glazer's passing is much more than an occasion to reflect on shifting political currents and alliances in twentieth century America. In fact, Nat Glazer was not a very political person. Still, his life and career do shed light on important developments in our political life and institutions over the past several decades, especially the role our cultural and intellectual elites have come to play in contemporary politics. This then points to critical changes in the institution where Glazer ultimately found a home and made his career—the university. And however much the emerging scandal over rigged admissions raises troubling questions about higher education's priorities, the ensuing outrage should also remind us how central the university and its meritocratic values have become in twenty-first century America.
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