Aug. 4, 2021
Lee Drutman was interviewed for a Deseret News article on public intellectuals.
Lee Drutman, a political scientist named one of Washington’s most influential people of 2021 by Washingtonian magazine, recently published a scholarly book with a populist title: “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.”
In praising the work, one Brookings Institution scholar described Drutman as “first-rate scholar and public intellectual.”
While Drutman was appreciative of the praise, he’s a little embarrassed by the designation. “It strikes me as a little pretentious, and I suffer from enough pretentiousness as it is,” he told me.
Like Will, Drutman hesitated when asked to come up with names of people he considers to be public intellectuals. He finally settled not on a person, but on a genre: podcasts. That’s where the public intellectuals are intellectualizing.
Drutman mentioned “The Ezra Klein Show” in particular. “There are a lot of really thoughtful ideas being discussed in podcasts,” he said. (Full disclosure: Drutman is part of a podcast called “Politics in Question.”)