and passed into American political discourse in the sixties and seventies, when Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Lewis Feuer, and Norman Podhoretz, among others, began to attack the new left as the latest expression of the "adversary culture" of intellectuals.

Neoconservative intellectuals' restatement of these well-established traditions of speculation—in which the new class was described variously as practical and efficient, domineering and repressive, alienated and adversarial—represented these intellectuals' most important contribution to the rise of the new right. New-class theory enabled the right to attack "elites" without attacking big business. Businessmen, it appeared, were responsible and public-spirited: they were accountable to the consumers to whom they sold their products, just as practical politicians were accountable to the voters; and the market thus limited any power they could hope to exercise. The new class, on the other hand, was accountable to no one, and its control of higher education and the mass media gave it almost unlimited power over the public mind. Yet the members of this class still felt marginal and isolated: the more power they achieved, the more they resented their lack of power.

Some descriptions of the new class simply transferred the old "authoritarian syndrome" from the workers, now welcomed as allies in the struggle against the adversary culture, to the intellectuals. Feuer spoke of the "intellectuals' acute authoritarianism, arising from frustrated desire for power." Commentary caricatured the "radicalized professor" as a "man who has wandered through life, never testing himself outside the university," "envious, resentful," unable to bear his exclusion from the "magic circle where power, glory, and virtue reside." Like the "working-class authoritarians" and the populist "pseudo-conservatives" of the fifties, the new-class intellectuals of the sixties and seventies displayed all the classic symptoms of status anxiety. Analysis of the authoritarian personality, it turned out, could be applied indiscriminately to any group that came under political suspicion—one more indication of its intellectual bankruptcy.

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