I am no happier that the term "intellectual" has been poisoned by the behavior of modern intellectuals than you are. There was also a time when "liberal" meant someone who believed in individualism, and did not mean someone who believes that centralized government and authority is the source of the solutions to our problems.

I get no glee out of the fact that many of the people who guide our culture in Europe and America are largely anti-capitalistic, anti-Western, and have contempt for many of the values that made our nation great. These are the people the article was discussing. And while I don't think everyone who disagrees with me is crazy, I submit that anyone who spits on America as oppressive while glorifying creatures like Fidel Castro has something wrong with their mind.

Good you mentioned Rand...it brought something to mind. A good analysis of the problem is in Ayn Rand's article "For the New Intellectual":

In any given period of history, a culture is to be judged by its dominant philosophy, by the prevalent trend of its intellectual life as expressed in morality, in politics, in economics, in art. Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards. America's intellectual leadership has collapsed.

Her virtues, her values, her enormous power are scattered in a silent underground and will remain private, subjective, historically impotent if left without intellectual expression. America is a country without voice or defense—a country sold out and abandoned by her intellectual bodyguards.

Bankruptcy is defined as the state of being at the end of one's resources. What are the intellectual values or resources offered to us by the present guardians of our culture?

In philosophy, we are taught that man's mind is impotent, that reality is unknowable, that knowledge is an illusion, and reason a superstition. In psychology, we are told that man is a helpless automaton, determined by forces beyond his control, motivated by innate depravity. In literature, we are shown a line-up of murderers, dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, neurotics and psychotics as representatives of man's soul—and are invited to identify our own among them—with the belligerent assertions that life is a sewer, a foxhole or a rat race, with the whining injunctions that we must love everything, except virtue, and forgive everything, except greatness.

In politics, we are told that America, the greatest, noblest, freest country on earth, is politically and morally inferior to Soviet Russia, the bloodiest dictatorship in history—and that our wealth should be given away to the savages of Asia and Africa, with apologies for the fact that we have produced it while they haven't.

If we look at modem intellectuals, we are confronted with the grotesque spectacle of such characteristics as militant uncertainty, crusading cynicism, dogmatic agnosticism, boastful self-abasement and self-righteous depravity—in an atmosphere of guilt, of panic, of despair, of boredom and of all-pervasive evasion. If this is not the state of being at the end of one's resources, there is no further place to go.

The rest of the article is good too. That it was written over 40 years ago makes you think.

BTW, I not only have a hardcover of Bronowski's masterpiece (check the used book stores...no home should be without one), but scored the DVD collection as well!