It was amongst "intellectuals" that Communism found its most enthusiastic supporters; the people who shilled for them, denied their numerous absurdities and atrocities and championed such regimes long after it was obvious to everyone else that they sucked serious balls were the "intellectual" elite.

And it's not just Communism's Western cheerleaders either: The 20th Century's greatest mass murderers Pol Pot (in terms of ratio of population) and Mao (by sheer numbers killed) both acquired their Communist activism while studying at Paris and Beijing universities respectively.

Outside of shilling for totalitarian dictators, the intelligentsia's reality dodging treasonsous dumbassery doesn't diminish, even when their nations are facing imminent destruction: even when Britain stood alone against Germany in 1940, when the Wermacht was 12 miles from the coast and the Luftwaffe was bombing the crap out of its cities, Orwell noted with disgust that certain "intellectuals" still couldn't bring themselves to support their nation's war efforts, seemed to get a grim satisfaction from every Allied setback, refused to believe the Axis could be defeated long after it was obvious to everyone else they couldn't win and even opposed America sending troops to Britain, believing they were really there to suppress an imminent prolaterian revolution (to which he remarked that "one has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe something like that. A normal person could never be such a fool").

Oh, and if you want to see the "intellectual" left's contribution to infant mortality rates, read up on what happened thanks to their campaign against DDT.