In the Europe of the Thirties, the phenomenon led to war and genocide. In the US, of course, the danger took a much less tangible form: not the horrors unleashed by Hitler and Stalin, but the New Deal and the Arsenal of Democracy, the era of big government ushered in by another plutocrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet Jacques Barzun, surveying the scene from his chair at Columbia at the height of American post-war predominance, sounded the alarm at the same crisis of civilisation that had animated Ortega a generation earlier. Barzun’s subtitle sums up his thesis: “How intellect, the prime force in Western civilisation, is being destroyed by our culture in the name of art, science and philanthropy.”

One might baulk at the culprits chosen here, but Barzun justifies them: “The intellectual class . . . has been captivated by art, overawed by science, and seduced by philanthropy.” Barzun’s target is the reduction of the intellect to a means rather than an end in itself, resulting in the loss of independent minds. “The money of philanthropy should smell of its object, not its origin; which does not mean being Puritanical about its use.”

Whether the philanthropists are businessmen or bureaucrats, Barzun is suspicious of their influence on intellectual life in general and academics in particular. Large-scale corporate and public funding of the arts, education and science were then relatively new to America; since the 1950s the funds have flowed freely, despite all the protests of the recipients. While this largesse has enabled universities and other cultural institutions to multiply, many of those employed there have betrayed their vocations by sacrificing their integrity on the altar of political correctness. Barzun, who died in 2012 aged 104, lived to see it.

In this trahison des clercs, the malaise of intellectual bondage that Barzun diagnosed 60 years ago has indeed come to pass. Intellect, he warned, had a special responsibility, for “its chief business is cultural criticism. It exists to perpetuate itself and to wage battle when attacked, whether the attack be external and violent or insidious and as it were self-inflicted. Intellect watches particularly over language because language is so far the only device for keeping ideas clear and emotions memorable.” Since these words appeared, we have seen the opposite take place. We have witnessed the tyrants of trivia, the juntas of jargon and the dictators of relativism extending their sway over our language to the point where nothing can be said clearly or memorably. Instead, language has been put through the grinder of mediocrity until all that is “inappropriate” is crushed. Ordinary Americans have chafed for decades under the tutelage of puritans with PhDs who tell them what they may or may not say, on pain of public disgrace, dismissal or worse. They are sick of it, but they are also too frightened to protest.

Enter the Donald. Here is a man who seemingly says and does what he likes, who deliberately defies political correctness and tramples all over taboos. What makes Trumpery doubly dangerous is the abdication of leadership by the educated elite. Once the prestige of the academy had been dissipated by the petty despots of priggishness, the way was open for a revolt of Ortega’s masses, not only against thought police but against any form of intellectual rigour, linguistic discipline or scientific method. Trumpery throws out the literate baby with the politically correct bathwater. Trump University, which awarded “degrees” that allegedly amounted to little more than photo-opportunities with a cardboard cut-out of the great man, was a bare-faced parody of the real thing. This quintessence of Trumpery, now the subject of lawsuits, could have been designed to be a reductio ad absurdum of the academy — a Trump Tower in place of the ivory tower.