Intellectual Betters?

Interesting paragraph from Richard Posner's book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline that I caught from a reference in Paul Hollander's The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality in the Twentieth Century:

A proclivity for taking extreme positions, a taste for universals and abstractions, a desire for moral purity, a lack of worldliness, and intellectual arrogance work together to induce in many academic public intellectuals selective empathy, a selective sense of justice, an insensitivity to context...an impatience with prudence and sobriety, a lack of realism and excessive self-confidence.

Sound like anyone you know?