The internet has changed who the gatekeepers are. For much of recent American history, gatekeepers had to get voted in by the gatekeeper guild—usually members of the New York liberal elite—to play even a small role in the national conversation. And that’s still the case if we think of some of the public intellectuals often in the news: Nicholas Kristof (Harvard/Oxford); Jeffrey Sachs (the quadrifecta of being an undergrad, grad student, post-doc, and professor at Harvard before moving to Columbia); or Naomi Wolf (Yale/Oxford). “Progressives” might support liberal policies, and think of themselves as democratizing figures, but they are part of and empowered by a public sphere whose meritocratic structure, however democratic it looks to insiders, looks pretty darned elitist and closed to those out there in the cold at East Grantham Community College.