Trump, the Gallup List, and America’s Intellectual Elite

When I was a budding libertarian college student in the early 1970s one of my monthly delights was receiving my latest copy of Libertarian Review mailed to me each month. This was long before the Internet, Social Media, and such. People actually corresponded and received printed publications via mail. This newsletter was basically a service to obtain libertarian related books and audio cassettes originally called Books for Libertarians, expanded into including more reviews and commentary. Later it was again transformed into a monthly magazine, and eventually Libertarian Review was consolidated with the Cato Institute’s monthly magazine, Inquiry, forming Inquiry: a Libertarian Review, which ceased publication in 1984. I was with the founding editor of Inquiry, Williamson Evers (Bill Evers) the day it died. Very sad day.

All the hubbub and manufactured controversy surrounding Donald Trump being chosen 2020’s The Most Admired Man in America by the Gallup Poll organization reminded me of a very memorable book review in the March 1975 edition of Libertarian Review by the great Robert Sherrill, an independent and curmudgeonly investigative reporter and commentator (think of an early version of today’s Glenn Greenwald). Sherrill was reviewing Charles Kadushin’s book The American Intellectual Elite in a very trenchant yet sardonic manner. His review lists the top 70 intellectuals which were self-selected as representing the cream of the crop (actually in Sherrill’s estimation more like the cream of the crap (to use an incisive expression the wonderful iconoclastic Nicholas von Hoffman used in a later lecture at a libertarian convention I attended in San Francisco in 1977. )  Here is one key passage from from Sherrill’s review that stood out in my memory:

It is very much like the “10 Most Admired” list that Gallup cranks out periodically; the Top 10 are simply the first 10 famous names that the man in the street can remember, which accounts for the constant scoring, even in disgrace, of Billy Graham and Richard Nixon. The Top 70 list has the same deficiency.

In other words, don’t put too much in store from polling the deferential sheeple who compose what Gore Vidal described as the United States of Amnesia.

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9:09 am on December 30, 2020