The latest Super Bowl offers the most recent opportunity to reflect on the terminal state of our national culture, held together chiefly by a distractive and unhealthy mania for commercial sports and perfectly exemplified by the infantile yet aggressively transgressive nihilism of a brainless showoff calling himself Bad Bunny and dressed all in white, suggestive perhaps of an anti-Easter Bunny. Why, one wonders, has no political theorist from Hobbes forward posited the ideal human community as one which would combine political democracy with cultural and intellectual aristocracy – as, indeed, America at the time of her founding and for several generations thereafter did? Such an arrangement might satisfy critics of democratic society on the anti-egalitarian right, such as T.S. Eliot, and those on the egalitarian left, like John Rawls, for whom democracy can never be inclusive and participatory enough. 

The likely answer is that the thing is a theoretical as well as a practical impossibility, like a scientifically advanced society that combines modern dentistry with pre-industrial technology. The principal enemy of the supremacy of the intellect in a civilized society is not, as anti-democratic critics over the past 200 years have argued, democratic systems of government. It is, rather, industrial economies which destroyed aristocratical governments and cultures by creating the mass societies which emerged from the industrial ones and on which the latter depend, as high culture depended on agricultural societies and........

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