I did appreciate Koperski's earlier two cheers for the late Michael Heiser, but I do wonder ...
... What populism does best is break things. Thus, while it lacks the political capital (and attention span) to reform mainstream higher ed, in the shorter term, populism does have the power to mangle the Intellectual Right and those institutions it controls, both in the collegiate sphere and beyond.
But what do we even mean by "populism"? The New Testament was written in Koine Greek and not some other kind. I have started into Douglas Moo's commentary on the Epistle of James and against claims that the brother of Jesus couldn't have written an epistle because epistles are too literary Moo counters that New Testament Greek, even at its best and highest style, was/is never "literary" Greek. Jennifer Eyl has gone so far as to suggest that Western academic theologians and scholars have had a thousand years to extract from the Pauline epistles all kinds of high level symbolic matrices of thought and doctrine and so overlook aspects of Paul's letters that suggest he was more like a Pentecostal street preacher than a high church Anglican. Reed Carlson has argued that Western Christian theologians and biblical scholars have been so busy taking all use of terms cognate with "spirit" to refer to the Holy Spirit they have ignored by choice or disciplinary neglect various passages in the Hebrew Bible that attest to individual and corporate states of spirit possession. Now this Gordon Fee fan snapped up this book the year it got published so yours truly wouldn't fit into this general category of assuming the Bible (either testament) has no reference to spirit possession states.
I don't think that what populism does best is break things because I think that misconstrues populism altogether. The New Testament documents were not written in highbrow Greek and all the academic dogmatics that have accrued within the West in the last two thousand years do not change this reality.
That we can even talk about Pauline epistles in 2026 in vernacular English tells us that even among academics there is something that has been done with Paul's sloppy Greek, translation has happened. The convergence of the populist and the intellectual happens all the time by way of translation. Did you read Don Quixote or The Brothers Karamazov in English? Someone translated those works for you to be able to do that. Casting populism in purely pejorative terms isn't even a particularly conservative thing to do among intellectuals. It may be more an academic vice par excellence to just assume any and all populist impulses are hostile to the life of the mind.
In my own reading and study the easiest way to distill the problems with the Intellectual Right and populism is to point to the work of Roger Scruton on the aesthetics of music. I can appreciate his criticisms of Theodor Adorno (who Scruton said vowed to hate pop culture on behalf of the working class, though Marcuse claimed that Adorno wanted a revolution that had no proletariat). On the other hand, I can also see, having read Adorno for myself, that Scruton retained Adorno's snobbery while excising the Marxist-Leninist element and retroactively sympathizing with the canon of the American song book. In other words, Adorno's general and generic criticisms of American song and dance music were retained by Scruton without adding anything much else on top of that. So Scruton formulated a distinction between physically sounding music and the "acousmatic" space of music as perceived in the mind? Well, okay, but so what? In that realm Scruton wasn't an improvement on Adorno (who never came up with a compelling, competent or coherent distinction between musical "time" and musical "space" in his works).
For that matter Scruton didn't do anything as a philosopher to clarify the nature of musical time and space that wasn't more succinctly and cogently set forth by the American composer George Rochberg in The Aesthetics of Survival. You can also find writing about the nature of musical time and space in writers like Jason Yust, Jeremy Begbie, Chiara Bertoglio, maybe some Ferdia Stone-Davis, and Andrew Bowie has written a couple of books engaging with and dissenting from Adorno's best and worst ideas.
I agree with Koperski that the intellectual right tends to fixate on the big picture and the grand tradition(s) rather than coming up with new things or engaging with "data". When it comes to musical analysis I have not (as yet) seen any detailed or memorable analysis of music done by anyone connected to the former Future Symphony Institute except the late Roger Scruton. Borstlap has provided nothing at all (in English, maybe he's got books and books in Dutch on this) discussing musical works in detail.
I mention all this because I have been blogging here at/as Wenatchee The Hatchet for twenty years and it seems to me that in the realm of music aesthetics and musical form the intellectual right has had more than enough tools to make a positive contribution to the life of the mind. How can a group that has had access to Aquinas and John of Damascus on intra-Trinitarian relationships and ontology not applied these insights to the prospect of recalibrating our understanding of musical timespace and spacetime toward the explicitly populist aim of synthesizing African diaspora vocabularies in the United States with the syntactic scripts of 18th century galant norms? This would seem like an ultimately simple prospect.
The intellectual right may be likened to Gustav rather than Vincent in Harmut Rosa's parable about two painters from the book Resonance. There's a lot of soul-searching and assessing the state of knowledge and the greatness of the tradition. Resource assessment is continually and continuously done without necessarily showing that there's anything new to do. This could probably never be more painfully obvious about whatever the intellectual right has been in the last thirty years than in the realm of the arts and probably most specifically music.
Let me put it this way, can you, dear reader, find a single commercially released recording of anything composed by Roger Scruton? I didn't even know he'd composed music until years after he died. Philosophers who write music don't necessarily write memorable music. When I finally got around to hearing the music of Theodor Adorno it just sounded like something Paul Hindemith would have churned out in a day if he didn't care how it sounded. The irony of that dismissive appraisal won't be lost on anyone who read what Adorno had to say about the music of Paul Hindemith!
Whatever the intellectual right is, in its putatively anti-populist sentiment it has yet to show signs of producing culture worth talking about. This doesn't mean I want to be a liberal. I can still think that Schleiermacher was an annoying Marcionite panentheist while granting his contribution to the development of hermeneutics is too important to ignore. This gets at something Jacques Ellul pointed out in The New Demons, that very frequently today's conservative has merely assimilated ideas and insights that were formulated centuries ago by radicals.
Scruton is an easy example, someone who rejected Adorno's Marxism but retained all the snobbery that pop music had no "argument". But both Scruton and Adorno were wrong and the most blistering way to make this point is to say they were too busy judging the value of cultural this and that to make a lasting contribution within culture. They were sounding off about music well enough but did any of the music they made themselves constitute a significant contribution to musical life? Thriller and Off the Wall are incontestably more cultural significant than any of the string quartets of Theodor Adorno. Innervisions and Dark Side of the Moon have more traction than an opera by Roger Scruton. Scruton, at least, could sometimes grant that the voice of the people can't always and everywhere be wrong and that the American song book and traditions connected to jazz had some real value. But my point here is that Scruton valorized the already canonized. That's shooting fish in a barrel. Anyone can decide that J. S. Bach deserves to stay in a canon he's already been part of for centuries.
Darryl Hart once wrote that a sign of the life of the mind of evangelicals would be in how much they engage the ideas of others outside their team By that measure there's not much life of the mind. I could read Anthony Bradley provide an evangelical critique of Black liberation theology only to discover that he selectively made use of the radical theologian Alistair Kee. This is another example of the kind of dynamic Ellul noticed in the intellectual right. Kee's criticisms of Black liberation theology was lacerating and Bradley could add little more than note these criticisms came from a Marxist perspective and hope that things could be improved.
May I suggest that one of the problems with an intellectual right is that it constitutes an ivory tower within the ivory tower? I tried slogging through some Catholic integralist literature and in the realm of music and musicology what the Future Symphony Institute wants can be likened to liturgists who insist everyone should use Latin liturgy and you train the youngsters from the age of 3 upwards and they'll just love an all-Latin liturgy. I attended a Greek Orthodox Christmas Eve service last month and 80 percent of the liturgy was in standard American vernacular. Faith doesn't get much more ancient in Christianity than Greek Orthodoxy, does it? But the liturgy wasn't in Greek.
Among those types who think of "religion" has having timeless and eternal verities good for all ages everywhere there's no reason to look askance at populism as a stream of thought within the life of the mind rather than as something set against the life of the mind. Every generation of biblical scholars takes it upon itself to translate the biblical literature into idiomatic/vernacular language. We go back and read King James English, yes, but there's the NAS, the ESV, the NIV, the CEB, the REB and all sorts of other English translations. Writing as if all populism does is break things overlooks this other obvious facet within Protestant thought and even conservative thought.
Koperski was right to point out that in the realm of demonology and diabology the gap between what academics have found respectable and what laity find believable has been pretty big. Give a scholar a chance to write about the evolution of scribal demonologies in Aramaic Jewish scribal literature and you'll get a sweeping panorama of how Aramaic scribal literature evolved within the context of Hellenistic imperial annexation and as a kind of counter-movement that also strove to assimilate the claims to have accumulated and acquired all wisdom in the world. Scholars will see the world in scholarly terms. That's not a surprise. It is probably axiomatic for twenty-first century Westerners that almost nothing is more against the life of the mind than going on and on about demons and angels and stars as sentient beings but this was the life of the mind thousands of years ago in southwest Asia. Scientific racists in the 19th century were absolutely certain science was on their side. As John Gray put it in Seven Types of Atheism, religious racists would be racist for religious reasons and atheist racists would find scientific reasons and there was and is no automatic correlation between "racism" and religious beliefs, even very conservative religious beliefs as such.
Populism can't be taken as some reified thing unto itself, it should be considered part and parcel of a larger life of the mind and it plays an important part. The impulse to translate across generations and regions is guided by a populist impulse. There are things from the past made by people and bequeathed to us by people so important and beautiful (and, surely, we hope also true) that it is worth the labor and cognitive toil to translate those things into contemporary idioms and language so that they can be passed on to future generations.
If the intellectual right regards the populist impulse in whatever form as only ever the domain and purview of benighted cave dwellers it's little wonder they will only fixate on a largely imaginary past and not produce anything worth talking about. Progressives, liberals and radicals can show us which intellectual right figures are important by way of either denouncing them or feeling no choice but to study their works. There are plenty of people who found T. S. Eliot's views on Jews and politics repellant but continue to study and teach his poems and essays. Dostoevsky's novels are still read centuries later. But Dostoevsky, obviously, was engaging with all the most liberal ideas of his time and place.
As Protestant history, historiography and legend have put it one of the great innovations of the Reformation was to champion vernacular worship over against Catholic Latin-only depostism. This deserves to be nuanced and corrected. Chiara Bertoglio has pointed out that vernacular German worship predated Martin Luther and was clearly part of German Catholicism even before the Reformation began. It seems to me, as I have been blogging over the last twenty years, that one of the banes of the intellectual right is simply not questioning its own bromides. Radical and critical theorists can most assuredly be annoying but among socially conservative Angl-American Christian intellectuals the ivory tower within the ivory tower huddle seems as though it ensures that if there is an intellectual right it's probably the Catholic integralists who hold court. If we don't count the low church theonomist types I get that. Nobody who gets published by Canon Press comes off as someone I would take seriously on any issue of the life of the mind but ... I also suspect that the sheer success of those kinds of books can be partly explained by the reality that popularizing populists crank stuff out in ways that show they are doing the work of "translating" and "contextualizing" that the self-identified Intellectual Right is loathe to do.
Do populist right-wing agitators make a hash of all kinds of things? Obviously. But consigning the populist impulse in its entirety to anti-intellectual agitprop is to forget that within scholarly life a populist impulse has been a good thing and it can still be a good thing now.
POSTSCRIPT
Igor Stravinsky was openly sympathetic to fascism before World War II. Ezra Pound supported fascism. Eliot was a monarchist. As Richard Taruskin used to put it, the vogue for separating the art from the artist became popular in the 20th century in part to distance undeniably influential and revolutionary writers, poets, composers and musicians from what we in the modern liberal West would have to regard as dangerously reactionary political views.
Stravinsky's music in the 20th century was too important to just dismiss because people dissented from his politics. Ezra Pound was too important a literary figure to write off because he wrote off the viability of liberalism. If the contemporary intellectual right writes off liberalism (as some of them have been doing) we are definitely not seeing anyone from that part of the field also creating art at the level of a Pound, an Eliot, a Stravinsky or even a Richard Strauss or Anton Webern. It's as though the self-appointed guardians of culture have become so busy appraising culture they aren't making any of it themselves. How could they? They're busy appraising the timeless values of the timeless works of art largely generated between 1720 to 1910 in the realm of music. ;)
I really will have to write a blog post about finish a recent Kofi Agawu book on African music and scholarship because his riff on why now Africans take "ethno-theory" seriously in music theory got me thinking about Christian nationalists who put stock in the stupidity of versions of ethno-theory that were promulgated in the 19th century. But the bigger thought that stuck with me was Agawu pointing out that the signal failure of any would-be "ethno theory" is in relationship to what it is set against. Why can't we just consider the theoretical paradigms of Heinrich Schenker and Hugo Riemann "ethno-theory"? Why not indeed!? If partisans within the intellectual right take up any similar ideas it will prove Ellul's axiom yet more correct that today's conservatives embrace ideas formulated centuries ago by radicals, albeit radicals who formulated "nationalism" as a counter to the "false" claim of "universality" in 18th century deistic ideas. But I digress.
