Part 4 of a four-part series. Read part 1 here, part 2 here and part 3 here.

One of the things that attracted me to the political Left as a young man was a belief that Leftists were for “the people.” Fortunately, I was also very interested in the history of ideas — and years of research in that field repeatedly brought out the inescapable fact that many leading thinkers on the Left had only contempt for “the people.”