Both “public intellectual” and “useful idiot” are terms whose circulation increased in the United States as we got further from the specific conditions, namely the Cold War, which gave rise to the categories of cultural celebrity that they name.
Russell Jacoby is usually credited with coining the term “public intellectual” in a book, The Last Intellectuals (1987), which lamented their disappearance. “Useful idiot” entered the American vernacular as a translation from Balkan newspapers in the immediate postwar period but did not show any major uptake in usage until the late 1980s, at the end of the Cold War, as more candid analyses of how it had been waged entered popular culture.
According to Google Ngram, the usage of both phrases increased consistently from the early 1990s to the late 2010s. “Useful idiot” quadrupled in frequency during this period, while the appearance of “public intellectual” in the Google “American English” corpus increased by more than sevenfold. And yet, these iterations are overwhelmingly involved in historicizing; in the case of “public intellectual,” they are often nostalgic. To apply either term to a contemporary figure is anachronistic almost to the point of incoherence.
Consider, for instance, Ted Gioia, in early 2026, describing Jeffrey Epstein and Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced financiers convicted of major crimes, as “public intellectuals,” despite both being notoriously reclusive and famously untelegenic. Or, in 2025, leftish publications like Foreign Policy, Mother Jones, and Project Syndicate labeling Elon Musk and Donald Trump, two of the most powerful men on earth, as “useful idiots,” a categorization which seems to have implied simply that they were part of a quid pro quo alliance with Vladimir Putin and each other.
The most rigorous users of these terms always connect them to the historical epoch of the Cold War, as well as to specific economic and technological developments in mass media during that period.
The rise of the public intellectual is inseparable from the broadcast era. While many mid-century public intellectuals could attribute their prestige and credibility to print media—fiction writers, literary journalists, magazine editors, newspaper columnists, academic popularizers, etc.—they would not have been recognizable as public intellectuals had they not also been making regular appearances on radio and, especially, television. Televised debates with William F. Buckley, talk shows hosted by Dick Cavett and Alan Burke, the launch of PBS and NPR, and the integration of political punditry into news programming combine to place peak public intellectualism in the US in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
While useful idiots undoubtedly found their way to television as well, the most consistent usage of the term has been to describe writers, reporters, editors, or even publishers associated with periodicals which, without their knowledge, were allegedly (and sometimes confirmedly) funded and/or promoted by intelligence agencies, government officials, or political parties. Useful idiots were not professional propagandists, but rather producers of content perceived as complementary to propaganda operations, even though sometimes the useful idiot perceived himself as anti-government, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, or otherwise in opposition to the source of his financial support.
William Safire, the New York Times “On Language” columnist, traced the proliferation of the epithet in and towards the press during late 1970s and 1980s. The origin of the phrase was almost always attributed, apocryphally, to Lenin. Following the revelations by the Church Committee (after numerous journalistic investigations) of the extent of intelligence agency spending on domestic propaganda, it was more tempting to both accuse rivals of being unwittingly funded by nefarious interests, and to reflect fearfully on one’s own structures of support. As recently as 2020, Kurt Anderson, a long-time writer and editor for US periodicals like Time and The New Yorker, confessed in The Atlantic that he had come to see himself, as well as many of his peers and employers, as “useful idiots” naively underwriting the upward redistribution of wealth since the 1970s, even as they claimed solidarity with the American working class. Another self-described “useful idiot” from Anderson’s generation of professional journalists is Susan Lindauer, who was arrested in 2004, accused of espionage, but never convicted. She claims she was unwittingly being handled by government agents from the American CIA and the Iraqi ISS during the Iraq War.
Accounting for how these categories of ideologue emerge from historically specific systems of mediation reveals, first of all, that as corporate media consolidated, the categories increasingly overlapped. To be, knowingly or unknowingly, useful to state-private networks was increasingly the price a culture worker paid for entry into the celebrated order of public intellectuals. That entry came with tremendous advantages in terms of publicity and potential financial gain, but a decreasing expectation that one might use that position for advocacy that might sway public opinion against the power elite.
In more conservative terms, this is the decline narrative that Richard Posner charts in his close-of-the-American-century jeremiad Public Intellectuals (2002). Late-capitalist public intellectuals were expected to perform charismatic intellectualism—to edutain—within the narrowly demarcated “Overton window” of Washington Consensus politics. In exchange, they could expect bestseller royalties, fat speaking fees, and maybe plum appointments to think tanks or para-academic centers.
Posner’s devolving late-capitalist public intellectual became accustomed to adulation served up in environs which were kept antiseptically free of dissent. On the rare occasions protestors managed to invade a television studio, a press conference, or a keynote address, they were nevertheless kept from messaging to the broader audience except via the broadest means (as, for instance, when millennial protestors, unable to disrupt carefully protected public appearances for more than a few seconds, revived the Yippie tradition of pelting public intellectuals—like Ann Coulter, Thomas Friedman, and Ralph Nadar—with cream pies). The physical bubble built around public figures has grown so secure over the course of the twenty-first century that there is rarely any danger of them encountering the multitudes who are repulsed by their ideas, giving them the false sense they are speaking for the majority.
But this impoverished species of useful idiots has not survived—could not survive—the Web 2.0 revolution. Their protection from hearing dissent collapsed with the expansion of digital publishing and the normalization of Google alerts and Twitter mentions. The Posner generation of public intellectuals discovered they were not as universally admired as the conference rooms of hedge funds and ballrooms of political action committees made it seem. Many of them did not take this discovery well. So many men of a certain age during the late 2000s and early 2010s theatrically quit and rejoined Twitter at regular intervals between episodes of being “ratio’d.” Thomas Friedman comically stated the predicament in 2025: “Because I consume no social media everyone in my world likes me.”
These late-capitalist public intellectuals were rendered useless in the platform era, in part because their commitment to civil discourse was often sincere, even though idiotic. They could not fulfill their roles as popular apologists for neoliberalism if they could not tolerate hundreds of trolls in their replies. So, as the giants of twentieth-century public intellectualism fall with the years, saplings of a different seed are found growing in the underbrush. They are the technocrats of the attention economy. What they know is how to max their engagement metrics. And often very little else.
It is counterproductive to know things when one’s usefulness is determined by the capacity to wrap each passing whim of oligarchy in a posture of intellectualism that will nonetheless garner views and likes. When attention is the end in itself, and the platforms are programmed, in some cases and for some duration, to reward rage-bait, the stuff of mid-century public intellectualism—Gore Vidal’s knowledge of history and high society, James Baldwin’s hard-earned belief in love and secular humanism, even Hunter S. Thompson’s masculinist moral certitude—creates a hard limit on one’s platform aptitude.
The doses of serotonin as the notification counter ticks upwards are value neutral, sweet naifs.
What more could we crave.
This is abundance.