Take, as an example, the recent book analyzing the ideological roots of modern conservatism, penned by political science professor Corey Robin. Published by Oxford University Press, The Reactionary Mind would seem to be what passes for quality in contemporary political science--exactly the sort of analysis that liberals might like to receive as they embark on what promises to be a highly contentious campaign season. The book's general thesis--that conservatives defend the interests of the elite at the expense of the weak--likewise would seem to be attractive for partisans in the post-Occupy Wall Street era.

Instead, the Robin book has been panned, in caustic terms, by publications that would seem to be sympathetic to an academic critique of the contemporary right. In the New York Times, Sheri Berman terms Robin's work "a diatribe that preaches to the converted rather than offering much to general readers sincerely trying to under­stand the right's role in contemporary American political dysfunction."

In a brutal takedown of the book's thesis, Berman observes that while right-wing populism formed a critical component of 20^th century conservatism in both the United States and much of Western Europe, "Robin cannot or will not accept this, insisting instead that conservatism is always, at its core, about subjugating society's lower orders. He thus has to explain away right-wing populism as some sort of trick designed to 'harness the energy of the mass in order to reinforce or restore the power of elites.' Suffice it to say that reliance on conspiracy theories and false-consciousness explanations to dispose of inconvenient evidence is always a bad sign."

Or take Mark Lilla's review, in the New York Review of Books. Like Berman, Lilla welcomes the idea of a book analyzing the ideological foundations of contemporary conservatism; defining key political labels is "what renders the political present legible to us."  Yet he fears that Robin's "is a useful book to have--not as an example to follow, but one to avoid."

Lilla describes Robin as "a lumper, an über-lumper, which may please his beleaguered readers on the left, but makes his entire enterprise incoherent." As an example, he cites "the book's most extraordinary paragraph: 'I use the words conservative, reactionary, and counterrevolutionary interchangeably: not all counterrevolutionaries are conservative...but all conservatives are, in one way or another, counterrevolutionary. I seat philosophers, statesmen, slaveholders, scribblers, Catholics, fascists, evangelicals, businessmen, racists, and hacks at the same table: Hobbes next to Hayek, Burke across from Palin, Nietzsche between Ayn Rand and Antonin Scalia, with Adams, Calhoun, Oakeshott, Ronald Reagan, Tocqueville, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Winston Churchill, Phyllis Schlafly, Richard Nixon, Irving Kristol, Francis Fukuyama, and George W. Bush interspersed throughout.'"

As Lilla correctly concludes, "Glenn Beck's blackboard was never half this full."

The Daily Beast's Andrew Sullivan has been a stout defender of President Obama, while his anti-Israel fanaticism might even make him at home in Columbia's Middle East Studies Department, much less in most contemporary political science departments. Yet Sullivan, like Lilla and Berman, dismissed Robin's work, commenting that its "premise--that all conservatism means and can mean is suppression of the downtrodden and that all conservatives are the same underneath--is so crude it beggars belief."

Again, these are comments from figures and publications whose politics would seem to make them sympathetic to a book like Robin's.

It's possible, of course, that even in a more intellectually and pedagogically diverse academy, a book with such a "crude" thesis would have appeared. But--especially on political matters--groupthink has a corrosive effect on the peer-review process upon which effective academic publications depend. While Robin's ideas are quite commonplace in the ideological cocoon that too often defines the academy, few if any Democratic politicians could embrace (or even find useful) such an "incoherent" thesis without alienating not only independents but much of their base.

Fifty years ago, academics frequently migrated in and out political life. Now, with the exceptions of a handful of fields (data-dependent economics; faculty from schools of law, business, or medicine, whose curricula are set in part by forces outside the academy), it's all but inconceivable to imagine professors whose views reflect the basic assumptions of their respective disciplines serving in responsible government positions. Indeed, with occasional exceptions (such as political scientists Brendan Nyhan or Jonathan Bernstein), it's hard to imagine academics outside of economics, the law, and medicine having much interesting to say about politics.

I suspect that most members of the majority viewpoint on today's campuses are willing to make the trade, firming up their power within the academy in exchange for losing virtually all influence in the public square. Whether society benefits from this exchange is another matter.