Solitary reader ...

... Working Man Blues | The Weekly Standard. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

America, as Hoffer rightly understood, was exceptional: “Only here, in America,” he wrote, “were the common folk of the Old World given a chance to show what they could do on their own, without a master to push and order them about.” It was the practicality of working people, untutored by intellectuals, that was integral to America’s success. “Scribe-dominated” societies, he argued, derived “a rare satisfaction from tearing tangible things out of the hands of practical people. .  .  . America is the only country where the masses have impressed their tastes and values on the whole of the country.”

It was precisely this egalitarianism that alienated intellectuals, who felt they weren’t given their due in the land of the common man. Intellectuals thrived, he noted, in social orders dominated by autocracies and aristocracies. But “one cannot escape the impression that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses.”