Over the past 12 months, you’ve probably heard — perhaps even uttered — some version of this remark: On November 9, 2016, I woke up in a country I no longer recognized.
If so, stand by for a scolding. You’ve surely become familiar with the template. The very day after the election, a writer in The Washington Post chided college-educated Americans for “struggl[ing] to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump.” It was clear that his victory represented nothing less than “an indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority [of] our colleges and universities.” A month later, Nicholas Kristof opined in The New York Times that lingering liberal disbelief merely proved “how insular universities have become.” And to hear Frank Bruni tell it, things have not improved since then: A recent headline announced that even now, “Too Many Colleges Flunk Trump 101.”
Of course, academics were hardly the only people whose electoral predictions turned out to be mistaken. And it’s absurd to claim that vast literatures from across the humanities and social sciences have nothing to say about the forces behind Trump’s rise. Rather, the argument these writers are making is that academics are failing in imagination and empathy for Trump supporters in part because they have failed to grapple with the conservative intellectual tradition. Beyond the walls of your campus, they seem to be saying, there’s a whole country of people who found Trump’s message appealing, and you never took them seriously or even noticed that they exist. But now they’re in charge, and that has to change.
Such criticisms from centrist and center-left pundits explain academe’s stunned reaction to Trump by blending allegations of exclusion and intolerance with allegations of scholarly obliviousness. In charging academics who purport to value diversity with a hypocritical close-mindedness, they also persistently suggest that overcoming the Trump-driven social divide is a matter of devoting more academic attention to important but overlooked conservative ideas. Bruni, signaling his support for new campus initiatives to highlight conservative thinkers and ideas, adds that in order to prevent “one big blissful love-in of like-minded liberals,” college students “need to hear from evangelicals, from young men and women who did tours of duty in Afghanistan, from those whose relatives thrilled to Trump.” And as Kristof pithily summarizes the accusation: “We want to be inclusive of people who don’t look like us — so long as they think like us.”
If this diagnosis is correct, then presumably a serious, sympathetic defense of Trumpism can be found — and at least until academics change their ways, it should require nothing more than a trip outside the bubble of campus life.
Scholars should not launder Trump’s politics by portraying him as the slightly uncouth voice of respectable intellectual traditions.
Let’s do Kristof and Bruni one better: Let’s hear from a prominent conservative intellectual — one with unimpeachable credentials on the right, who has a platform to explain the Republican Party’s new standard-bearer to an educated, skeptical audience. In other words, let’s ask Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, one of D.C.’s leading conservative think tanks, and an op-ed writer at (where else?) The New York Times. If the liberal bubble of Times-reading academics is to be popped, Brooks could do it without his readers’ even needing to switch newspapers.
In fact, since the election, Brooks’s Times columns have evinced little interest in articulating the intellectual side of the president’s agenda, or even in discussing it at all. True, before Trump’s victory, Brooks occasionally and gently signaled his concern over the candidate’s departures from conservative orthodoxy. (As he wrote one month before the election: “Walking away from free enterprise principles on trade and immigration is not the solution.”) During the transition, however, those principles seemed to loosen. Brooks suggested to National Review that the incoming president’s populist and protectionist agenda could fuse with mainstream conservatism after all, since “Americans are not very ideological” and “the ideas and actions of Donald Trump [are] going to wind up affecting how American conservatism understands itself, because the actions he takes that work will ultimately be adopted by the conservative playbook.”
This newfound flexibility reflects the difficult position that conservative intellectuals now find themselves in. As a recent report noted, “the vast majority of conservatives skeptical of Mr. Trump haven’t broken with their Trump-curious institutions,” and some of the institutions themselves are partly overseen and supported by wealthy Trump allies, including funders of Breitbart News. Too much of the conservative policy agenda is at stake for major institutions to abandon the president, even if conservatives privately find his behavior degrading, dangerous, and in key respects unconservative.
But before their policy goals were dependent on this most vulgar of presidents, conservatives frequently portrayed their movement as anathema to Trumpism. Whatever the plausibility of this effort — Trump is more the product of long-term trends on the American right than he is some baffling aberration from them — there was a measure of sincerity in extraordinary disavowals like that of National Review, the conservative movement’s flagship publication, which ran a special issue during the primaries titled “Against Trump.” As its editors warned: “Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.”
Now that Trump is president, conservatives are rethinking this position, but not because they have realized that there’s an intellectual side to Trump after all. Consider Brooks: He hasn’t taken the chance to defend the principles of his tradition against Trumpist corruption. Nor has he attempted to vindicate Trump’s actions in more conventional conservative terms.
In fact, Brooks conspicuously declined to do so when, following the lead of other Times writers, he might have. In a recent column lamenting — like Bruni and Kristof — the inadequate representation of conservatives on campus, Brooks warned that colleges were shunning conservative professors. He concluded with a plea to left-leaning academics: “It is up to you to make campuses more open to debate and the unconstrained pursuit of truth.” The intriguing thing about Brooks’s complaint, when read alongside those of liberal-centrist writers like Bruni and Kristof, is not its similarity but its notable difference: Nowhere does Brooks mention Donald Trump. Brooks’s critique of left-wing campuses actually stops short of the suggestion advanced by writers like Bruni. Could it be that increased attention to conservatism’s intellectual tradition might, in fact, teach us little about Donald Trump at all?
Perhaps there is another path for universities to more sympathetically approach Trumpism. Here we might turn to other figures on the right who, unlike Brooks, believed that Trump could intuitively grasp a right-populist policy agenda even if he did not speak the language of intellectuals.
That was the hope behind the launch of Julius Krein’s pro-Trump journal American Affairs, whose editors bemoaned “ossified intellectual orthodoxies” and the “degradation of our political discourse” in their mission statement. But it took less than six months for Krein — in the wake of Trump’s blown kisses to the Charlottesville neo-Nazis — to realize the magnitude of his mistake and express his regret in a widely discussed Times piece.
Krein concluded that it was not only dishonest but actually impossible to carry intellectual water for Trump, and freely admitted as much in an NPR interview: “I’ve always been very interested in his critique of the prevailing policy consensus that he raised during the campaign. And even though I thought he was always an imperfect vehicle for that, I thought he might be a sort of adequate one,” Krein said. “But after Charlottesville, … it became clear that what he really cared about all along, exactly as his critics said, was the sort of worse parts of his campaign and clearly has no interest in or ability to execute the better agenda that he faintly gestured at.”
Krein’s admission, although belated, was at least frank in its acknowledgment of naïveté and opportunism, qualities that the handful of other avowedly pro-Trump intellectuals who have spoken up for the president have unconvincingly tried to conceal. In other words, the most prominent defender of intellectualized Trumpism eventually realized what more-traditional conservatives have silently concluded: Trump is mostly irrelevant to their ideology, embracing it only when his unrestrained id happens to overlap with its priorities.
This presents a puzzle for people who want to draw a causal link between the paucity of conservative intellectuals on campus and the failure of the academy to foresee Trump’s rise. Of course, in an effort to understand Trump, university educators could devote more attention to the most distinctive elements of his political approach, such as Bannonesque white nationalism. But this would probably be regarded by Kristof and Bruni as a slander against Trump’s supporters. Instead, the demand seems to be that academics base their pedagogy around a version of what Krein unsuccessfully attempted to construct: a sympathetic version of Trumpism, the underlying ideas stripped of all that nasty baggage.
This requires the credulous translation of every Trump utterance into something that it’s not: the well-considered expression of a view that may be unpopular or unorthodox, but that voices a legitimate concern about some prevailing elite consensus. In their research and their teaching, professors might be asked to include more Hayek, or to devote a week of the syllabus to discussing the ways conservatives have addressed widening inequality. They might work to recruit more evangelical students or seek the views of military veterans during a class discussion of American foreign policy. But Trump is almost certainly unfamiliar with The Road to Serfdom. He grotesquely flaunts his wealth and has no plan for addressing inequality. He cites II Corinthians and brags about extramarital affairs. Bone spurs saved him from having to serve in the war that he mocked John McCain for having been captured in, and he so values military sacrifice that he lied about being the only president to call the families of fallen soldiers.
Since none of those ways of including conservative perspectives would illuminate much about Trump, it stands to reason that what is really being demanded here would, in effect, enlist academics in performing the intellectual equivalent of money-laundering on the Republican Party’s behalf. Dissident conservatives have realized that they can’t take Trumpism seriously on intellectual grounds. Establishment conservatives like Arthur Brooks aren’t even bothering to try. Populist conservatives like Krein have tried and failed. So why are America’s pundits singling out liberal academics and putting them on the hook? If conservative thinkers are right in concluding that Trump has little to do with their intellectual lineage, then the scholarly study of that lineage is a poor method for actually understanding Trump.
The first step to passing “Trump 101" is to understand that basic point, and to resist mistakenly intellectualizing Trump out of a legitimate concern over campus inclusivity. Scholars should not launder Trump’s politics by portraying him as the slightly uncouth voice of respectable intellectual traditions. Doing so would not only grant him more intellectual credibility than he deserves, and even more than his own embarrassed allies are willing to extend. It would also impede a more accurate, though unsettling, understanding of what his rise actually represents.
Nathan Pippenger is a Ph.D. candidate in political theory at the University of California at Berkeley and a contributing editor at Democracy: A Journal of Ideas.
