As counties on the electoral map turned gradually this week from red to blue, the presidency of Donald J. Trump appeared, as the poet might have said, like a patient etherized upon a table.
The overwhelming question looming over the proceedings was not just whether Trump’s electoral hopes could have been revived, but also what might happen after his time in office reaches its end. What aspects of Trump’s presidency, in all of its populist brashness, might endure once Americans had denied him a second term?
It is a question of particular urgency on college campuses, whose leaders and faculty members seek to revive a spirit of intellectual engagement and civility in a riven nation.
Despite Trump’s loss on Saturday to Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger for president, the vitality of “Trumpism” appears intact. The suspicion of intellectual elites, the dismissal of scientific research, and the notion that the nation’s prosperity is threatened by named and unnamed outsiders are hallmarks of a political philosophy that has gone mainstream with a presidential bullhorn.
Anyone hoping for a decisive rejection of these ideas has by now been disabused of the notion that only a small number of Americans like what they’ve seen from this White House.
Trump’s presidency, predicated on building walls and blocking international collaboration, has been symbolically, if not practically, anathema to the mores and ideals of higher education. His reluctance to denounce an emboldened strain of white nationalism is, to professors and students convinced of the virtues of multiculturalism, repugnant.
It is one thing, though, to see Trump’s election, in 2016, as a fluke, and dismiss his politics as an aberration. It is quite another to see Trumpism, and its opposition to academe’s values, as a powerful and sustaining force in American society that endures.
In his years as a political scientist, Sekou M. Franklin had not encountered the sort of voters he found in his own classroom, in 2016, at Middle Tennessee State University. Many were Trump supporters, but they told him that they might just as easily have voted for Bernie Sanders, the progressive senator from Vermont, whose political kinship to Trump begins and ends with antiestablishmentism. At a policy level, the two politicians couldn’t be further apart.
Other contradictions kept popping up: A military veteran in Franklin’s class expressed affection for Vladimir Putin, Franklin said. Huh, Franklin wondered.
Fluid as his students’ political identities may seem, Franklin agrees with the view that they are united by a sense of white grievance that Trump’s populist message exploited to great effect. By the time they arrived in his class, Franklin said, many students were deeply influenced, not just by Trump and Fox News, but by a vast network of “chat rooms, radio shows — second-tier radio shows — their state lawmakers, an entire infrastructure communication medium.”
In the classroom, Franklin said, he encounters students who are anxious about the changing demographics of the country and legitimately concerned about where they fit in a global economy. But Franklin, who is Black, said it can be difficult to separate these concerns from the racial prejudice that can be underneath.
“Sometimes I think, Do the students I’m talking about have racial resentment, even though I’m teaching them? Probably,” he said. “Do they have grievances that intersect with that, that reinforce all that, that we maybe have to give consideration to? Maybe.
“That’s the struggle,” Franklin continued. “How do you interrogate something without being an apologist for it, if it’s partly racism?”
In the wake of the 2016 election, Franklin’s argument was a popular one — and it still is. Some segment of the Trump base, particularly those in rural areas or manufacturing towns with diminishing economic prospects, have made sense of their dislocation by lashing out at immigrants or minority groups that they see as threatening their way of life, the theory goes.
That’s an argument that academics can live with, because it does not directly implicate professors or intellectual elites as responsible for whatever backlash animated Trump voters. It’s also a cop out, Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia University, posited in an op-ed that was published in The New York Times shortly after the 2016 election.
“A convenient liberal interpretation of the recent presidential election would have it that Mr. Trump won in large part because he managed to transform economic disadvantage into racial rage — the ‘whitelash’ thesis,” wrote Lilla, who extended his argument into a book, excerpted for The Chronicle. “This is convenient because it sanctions a conviction of moral superiority and allows liberals to ignore what those voters said were their overriding concerns.”
What enabled Trump’s rise, Lilla argues, was actually the destructive power of “identity liberalism.” By catering to specific groups based on race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, politicians and academics only reinforce division among identity groups, Lilla wrote.
Like so many political arguments advanced in our dug-in, polarized age, Lilla’s was probably more provocative than persuasive. (The title of a column he wrote this week, “When Will My Fellow Liberals Learn?” would seem to concede as much.)
Diversity programs, LGBTQ organizations, and Black studies are the sorts of higher-education hallmarks that, following Lilla’s argument, could inadvertently empower a politics of division. They are the sorts of things Trump has railed against, as he did with an executive order banning federal-grant recipients from sensitivity training that is “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country.”
It is unlikely, though, that political backlash will prompt higher education to reconsider the efficacy of multicultural curricula or identity-based organizations, which are deeply ingrained in the modern notion of an enlightened collegiate environment. This isn’t political correctness, many professors argue, so much as it is a recognition of how lopsidedly focused higher education has been for much of its history with regard to race, gender, and sexuality.
“For the first 300 years or more of higher education, the only identity politics that operated on campus was white-man identity politics,” said Christopher P. Loss, an associate professor of history and public policy at Vanderbilt University, who is white. “And all the successive permutations that have emerged, especially since the 1960s, have in many ways been in response to that dominant ethos.”
Higher education is “an institution created by white men, for white men, to study the ideas of white men,” Loss said. “Only recently has it begun to change in a profound way. We’re going through the growing pains around that, creating a more representative and equitable institution.”
There’s no question, though, that the past four years have put colleges on the defensive, and the answers that academics are providing for a host of societal ills are subject to greater scrutiny, if not derision.
“It’s clear that what we’re selling, a lot of people don’t want to buy,” Loss said. “Our expertise, although we value it, the minute we leave campus or the hotel conference room or the Zoom call, our ideas are just opinions to a lot of Americans.”
One of the fascinating contradictions of Trumpism is that its anti-intellectual features have been a boon for intellectuals. As it turns out, professors have found the Trump phenomenon a fruitful source of scholarship.
Trump’s ascendence drove David B. Lebow, a political theorist at the University of Chicago, in 2019, to publish a journal article titled “Trumpism and the Dialectic of Neoliberal Reason.” It is a dense scholarly work that tested the interpretive powers of this Chronicle reporter, but it argues that Trump has the attributes of a fascist. The president masterfully exploits people’s economic insecurities and “spiritual homelessness” — a term coined by a pair of mid-century scholars — to destructive political ends, Lebow writes.
This fascistic streak, Lebow argues, derives its power from amplifying the “us versus them” features of our political discourse: conservative versus liberal; rural versus urban; white versus Black; educated versus not. This emphasis on division has implications going forward for higher education, Lebow says, because scapegoating intellectual elites ensures that the conversation won’t steer toward the deeper economic structures causing a lot of human misery. (Yes, Lebow is a bit of a Marxist).
All of this competition between groups feeds conspiracies, which have a half-life well beyond the Trump presidency, Lebow says.
“A Biden presidency will probably restore, at a certain level of visibility, commitment to knowledge, to truth,” said Lebow, a senior lecturer and associate director of law, letters, and society at the University of Chicago. “But the cat is out of the bag. This subterranean break with reality, the conspiracy mongering, the fake news stuff, that’s going to continue.
“It’s just going to be slightly below the surface of what we in the so-called reality-based community see, because it’s not going to be that it’s the president of the United States tweeting it,” Lebow continued. “But there are still going to be millions and millions of people on Facebook groups and on Twitter continuing to exist in a fundamentally different reality. That’s not going to stop because of Biden.”
The long tail of anti-intellectualism, which indicts the idea of the university itself, had some professors hoping for a Biden blowout. It’s part of what prompted Bethany L. Albertson, a political psychologist and an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, to tweet on election night about how sad it was not to see “a full scale repudiation to Trumpism.”
What’s troubling, Albertson said in an interview on Thursday, is that conservatives attacking highly selective colleges often attended them and benefited accordingly.
“My snarky point, make of it what you will, is that Republican elites that are selling this anti-university, anti-elite discourse are all sending their kids to our elite institutions,” she said, “and they are products of those institutions themselves for the most part. It’s disingenuous.”
It’s into this moment of deepening distrust and discord that college leaders step, struggling to hold their campuses together. Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, has been vocal in his criticism of Trump over the past four years. He describes a “Trumpian malignance” that has infected reasonable political disagreement with an undercurrent of racism, making it difficult to debate policy in a civil manner.
“There are a whole range of things that obviously reasonable people can disagree with,” Roth said, “but he has successfully stained all those ideas.”
This politically vitriolic moment, which coincides with a pandemic, presents a test for colleges struggling to build community. Wesleyan’s response to Covid-19, though, gives Roth some hope. With masks and social distancing, the college is not the same as it was a year ago, he said. But nor is it completely different. People have found a way to carry on despite restrictions and fear, Roth said. Theater, and performance, and learning, and falling in love are still happening at Wesleyan.
What Roth is describing, though, sounds a bit like a protected bubble — a commune of reasonable students who pay $60,000 a year to live in a world untainted by the worst aspects of the post-Trump age. Setting aside whether that’s even possible (it’s not), it’s surely not the answer, either.
“That is a great danger, for people with money and wealth to say, as has happened in history, ‘Screw politics,’ I’m going to take care of my garden or my orchestra — whatever my private passion is — and not try to make the country better,” Roth said.
“You have to fight that and remind people that politics can break your heart, but the only way we make the country better is to listen to our neighbors and contribute to the community’s well-being,” Roth said. “But that’s a hard sell right now.”
