La trahison des Xs

Paul Krugman, "Why Economics Failed", 5/1/2014 (emphasis added):

Meanwhile, powerful political factions find that bad economic analysis serves their objectives. Most obviously, people whose real goal is dismantling the social safety net have found promoting deficit panic an effective way to push their agenda. And such people have been aided and abetted by what I’ve come to think of as the trahison des nerds — the willingness of some economists to come up with analyses that tell powerful people what they want to hear, whether it’s that slashing government spending is actually expansionary, because of confidence, or that government debt somehow has dire effects on economic growth even if interest rates stay low.

Krugman's phrase "trahison des nerds" is adapted from (La) Trahison des Clercs, about which Wiktionary explains:

From French: trahison (“treason”) + des (“of the”) (a contraction of de (“of”) + les (“the” (pl), “hoi”)) + clercs (“clerks”, “scholars”) = treason of the clerks; originally adopted from the title of the French philosopher and novelist Julien Benda’s 1927 book La Trahison des Clercs (whose first English translation bore the title The Betrayal of the Intellectuals).

Krugman's adaptation of Benda's phrase is very much in the spirit of the original, as described in the Benda's Wikipedia entry:

Benda is now mostly remembered for his short 1927 book La Trahison des Clercs, a work of considerable influence. The title of the English translation was The Betrayal of the Intellectuals, although "The Treason of the Learned" would have been more accurate.

This polemical essay argued that French and German intellectuals in the 19th and 20th century had often lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering and racism. [...] Benda defended the measured and dispassionate outlook of classical civilization, and the internationalism of traditional Christianity.

A more immediate — and more puzzling — adaptation of the phrase was René Magritte's famous 1928-1929 painting La trahison des images:

Before looking up "La trahison des clercs", I don't think that I ever paid attention to the title of Magritte's painting, or thought about its relationship to Benda's book. And I'm not alone in this — the curator's notes at the painting's home in Los Angeles don't mention the connection, nor do the various relevant Wikipedia articles (though it comes up in the editors' "Talk" discussion of how to translate trahison des images into English).

Anyhow, a web search for {"trahison des" -clercs -images} turns up la trahison de médias, la trahison des CPAs, La trahison des archeologues, etc. — and  an earlier usage similar to Krugman's but from another region of the political spectrum: "La trahison des woncs".

It's not clear to me how many of these echoes of Benda's title  intend a strict analogy to Benda's argument about the relationship between intellectual investigation and political commitment, and how many just use la trahison des Xs to signal that they disapprove of what the Xs have done, or even that the Xs are behaving in a way that is not aligned with the Xs' natural interests (at least as defined by the source of their paychecks). These last two interpretations are in some sense opposite to Benda's point, which was that intellectuals betray their calling when they allow their politics to steer their analysis.

Krugman's usage is clearly Benda-esque. And maybe Magritte was thinking about the role of images in advertising, where he earned his living for a few years early in his career — but it's still not clear to me how the political/intellectual metaphor aligns with his painting.