Politics & Power Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia’s line is a grenade lobbed into two institutions that flatter themselves as reality’s custodians: the university and the press. The trick is in the sly equation at the center: “mass media, which is our culture.” She’s not just describing a gap; she’s redefining the terrain so that any humanist who dismisses TV, tabloids, pop music, or talk radio isn’t above culture but outside it. That move instantly demotes “academe” from high priesthood to a gated enclave with bad reception.

The rhetoric is classic Paglia: anticlerical, anti-pious, impatient with credentialed abstraction. “Leftist fantasies” isn’t an argument so much as a moral diagnosis, a way of framing certain academic commitments as theatrical - performative virtue with no lived cost. It’s also a provocation aimed at a particular late-20th-century moment, when culture wars made humanities departments synonymous (fairly or not) with theory-heavy politics and when media consolidation turned “public conversation” into something increasingly produced by entertainment logic.

Her subtext is a demand for proximity: if you want to speak about “American life,” you should have to touch it, not just interpret it. The sting comes from “no impact whatever on public policy,” an absolute that dares professors to name their wins - and implies that if they can’t, they’ve traded influence for posture. Even critics of her caricature have to contend with the uncomfortable mirror she holds up: a class of experts fluent in critique, oddly powerless in the arenas where decisions get made, while the supposedly “low” media sets the national mood and vocabulary.