Lee Seigel brilliantly articulates how Irving Kristol's quest for power created an intellectual vacuum ultimately filled by the Limbaughs and Becks of the right:
An intellectual who constantly put down the vocation of being an intellectual, a gifted wisecracker who reduced complex social problems to glib one-liners—“a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality”—a circular reasoner who seemed to care more about the motions of his mind than the moral or political conclusions he reached, Kristol used thinking to discredit the act of thinking. […] As a result, he gave up on principled thinking and became a kind of intellectual tummler—the Yiddish term for a mischief-maker, whose power lies in creating prankish distractions. But Kristol had a motive for his tummling: the acquisition of power unavailable to intellectuals.
The Dish 