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Something noticeable in current attacks on academia is that (besides professional culture warriors) they bring together a combination of people who've failed to get/keep TT jobs and people who've benefitted from elite academic platforms to a superlative degree (Pinker, Peterson).
On one hand I think this both sustains and feeds the ambiguous place of academic credentials in culture-war discourse. "Academics" and "experts" and "professors" are inherently suspect, yet Peterson's H-index score or Pinker's place at Harvard mean we need to take them seriously.
On the other had I think it indicates some side-effects of the rolling disaster that is the academic job market. There is a steady supply of people with familiarity with and justified bitterness towards an academic world that encouraged them to sacrifice themselves for nothing.
Why figures like Peterson and Pinker (neither of them conceivable without the visual trappings of a bygone academic elite) should become plausible beacons for this resentment I don't know, though both of them evidently realize there's a following to be had by embracing the role.
Anyway, as much as IDW- and Quillette-style attacks on The Academic Left are drenched in bullshit and bad faith (and conspiracy theory, in the case of Sokal Squared), both the collapse of regular academic employment and the rise of an academic star system are part of the story.
