The attached article is well-worth reading although it places, in my opinion, too much emphasis on academia as the pivot point of all thought. Buried in the article is a key insight - people confuse credentials with evidence. That an advocate has credentials is not evidence for the advocate's argument. Most of us recognize this error as the Appeal to Authority. Unfortunately the replacement of education by credentialism has become a general argument that we should no longer think, and instead merely accept what we are told by those who are credentialed. Immediate examples are not hard to identify.
This is similar to the media's repeated claim "there is no widespread evidence of fraud", which is predicated on the judiciary's refusal to consider the evidence that does actually exist. The indictment here is of the media for perpetuating a non-sequitur, not of the courts for failing to operate on behalf of the American people.
The author here cites Richard Weaver. Weaver is best known for "Ideas Have Consequences", in which he argues that Western thought has been corrupted by specialization and has lost its overall integrity as a result. He traces this to William of Occam's rejection of the doctrine of Transcendentals, the idea that things we see and directly experience are merely representations of things we don't see and directly experience. Occam's idea has been boiled down over the years to Occam's Razor, perhaps best expressed as "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity." Less know is Weaver's "The Ethics of Rhetoric", to which the author alludes. Weaver argued in "The Ethics of Rhetoric" that Lincoln was the model for Conservatives because he was a principled man. As much as I admire the late Weaver (who was a native Southerner and is now reviled as a Confederate apologist) I don't agree about Lincoln.
Personally I believe much of the reason our culture is off the rails politically, ethically, and philosophically, is because people confuse sympathy with reason. The rank-and-file on the left conclude that the sympathetic thing to do for an individual is the right thing to do for society as a whole; the leaders on the left simply want power and they exploit this pathetic fallacy as a basis for their pursuit of it. Conservatives argue instead that a particular set of principles and ideas is best both for society as a whole and for each individual. Sometimes these ideas are more difficult for a given individual in a given set of circumstances, but they are still best. The left argues that we are evil precisely because we do not use an individual's comfort or ease or happiness as the test of our thinking, and they turn viciously against people who adopt our ideas in the midst of challenging life circumstances like poverty because those people are the most effective advocates for our ideas.
