This book thoroughly exposes the (generally leftwing) pseudo-intellectualism that has dominated so many institutions and power centers in the world, particularly in the west, with special focus on the United States.
The book accomplishes this in a fairly concise manner of 9 easy to read, well written and well reasoned chapters supported by a moderate-or-higher amount of examples and historical cases demonstrating various points.
Ultimately the book demonstrates in stunning clarity that American society has more and more come to be dominated by what are like modern day sophists. This class of people, whom Sowell names “the anointed” in sarcastic reference to their own inflates egos and views of themselves, is one which is expertly skilled in rhetoric and highly articulate.
A fundamental flaw in society/human nature is that large swaths of the public are unable to see through the charade that is the verbal cunning of the anointed because they equate verbal skills/articulate speech with high intelligence and virtue. Or they cannot tell the difference between those who are smart and those who appear or sound smart, those who are virtuous and those who appear or sound virtuous, those who want and pursue what’s best for society and those who claim to do so, and so on.
And so the anointed are able to achieve huge success in their ambitious through clever manipulation and exploitation of the large swath of society which is gullible and easily manipulated, especially emotionally. Yet virtually whenever the anointed exercise power, they leave a trail of destruction in their wake. But they never examine themselves, their presuppositions, the ultimate effects of their policies, etc. They always find other things to blame, they redouble their commitments, they redefine terms and abuse language, they rewrite history, they slander and demonize their opponents, they silence opposition and debate, they hide or dismiss contrary evidence, and so on.
This book is a walk through all of that, how the anointed tend to think, how they tend to operate, how their various misguided crusades and misadventures come to be, their strategy and tactics for achieving their goals and dealing with their opponents, and the gargantuan gaps in their thinking and in their overall processes which serves to insulste them from evidence and from reality itself really.