“SHUT up a minute,” Gore Vidal told William F. Buckley, junior, during a famously heated exchange on ABC television. The news programme was covering the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, where police violently clashed against anti-war protestors. But Buckley continued comparing the war's opponents, who included Vidal, to Nazi appeasers. Vidal retaliated with "the only pro- or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself." Furious, Buckley called Vidal “queer” and threatened to “sock [him] in the goddamn face.”

Seen in isolation, this exchange can seem depressingly familiar: two political adversaries shouting past each other (albeit with some unusually harsh language) as they play to their respective ideological bases. But step back a bit and it becomes clear just how alien their testy debate is.

It is hard to imagine men like Vidal and Buckley, two snobbish East Coast intellectuals with lockjaw patrician accents, being invited onto prime-time television now to opine on the hot-button issues of the day. Vidal’s death earlier this week, at age 86, marks not only the loss of a provocative novelist and political thinker, but also the demise of a brand of public discourse. It seems there is no longer a place for the erudite and witty public intellectual in America. Instead of learned allusions to classical literature, public figures, including the president of the United States, are now expected to drop their g’s and speak knowledgeably about the cast of “The Jersey Shore.”

In part, this is a product of progress. The club of elite public intellectuals we have lost in the last decade—Vidal, Buckley, Christopher Hitchens and Norman Mailer, to name a few—was decidedly male, largely white and upper-class, drawing its members from a few old-line private colleges and prep schools. As higher education extends beyond a narrow, moneyed elite, mass audiences increasingly want experts who look and sound like idealised versions of themselves. So we get “Joe the Plumber” lecturing Barack Obama on socialism, and Irish pop stars lecturing heads of state on humanitarian relief in Africa. Even card-carrying members of the elite, such as former President George W. Bush, are keen to play down their Ivy League educations and play up their love of clearing brush on the ranch. Punditry reflects the diversity of every other sphere of public life, and few need fear being called “queer” on national television.