If you were to sum up the last decade of leftist political thought and action you could really break it into two groups. First there are the far left insurgents, the people championing Equity and DEI and anti-racism and white fragility and intersectionality and cancel culture and wokeism and all of the rest of the new think which has dribbled out of higher education/activism over the past decade. And right next to them are the liberals who have spent an increasing amount of their time over the past decade simply denying that the other group exists, or at least that it has any real significance.
As an outside observer to all of this, people like myself (people on the right) have put forth a fair amount of effort trying to differentiate between the two. It wasn’t always easy to do for a host of reasons. For one thing, you have to actually make sense of all of the ideas driving this insurgency, most of which wouldn’t have been discussed in the broader culture prior to a few years ago.
I distinctly remember when student activists took over the campus of Evergreen State College in the spring of 2017. It was difficult for many people to understand what was happening. You had a left-wing professor, Bret Weinstein, surrounded by students demanding his firing…for what? Over the next several months and years, Weinstein became that rarest of individuals. He was someone on the left who could not only see what was happening among the insurgent group, he was willing to step outside his world of left-wing academia to explain it. He proceeded to do this at length, including a long interview hosted by Joe Rogan.
But Weinstein really was an outlier. The majority of people on the liberal left instead spent their time denying and downplaying what was happening. Oh, sure a few kids may have gotten out of hand at one far left campus but there was no reason to make a big thing about it. But it kept happening. Outbursts of the same desire to control and silence on other campuses. Efforts to label anyone who disagreed a racist and to, if possible, destroy them and their livelihood. It was mob rule but coming from a very distinct mob.
There were a few academics who tried to attack the problem at the source by demonstrating how nonsensical and shoddy the new “scholarship” driving this insurgency really was. That should have been the moment when the whole thing started to collapse but that didn’t happen. Instead the angry academics rallied and punished the intruders as best they could and the whole thing just kept rolling.
The majority of liberals continued to ignore and downplay it. In fact, the more people on the right got exercised about it, the more people on the liberal left tried to shrug it off as nothing. At a certain point the studied ignorance began to look strategic. Were the liberals shielding the insurgents to their left from criticism so they could continue their work of transforming everything or were they really as clueless as they appeared to be? From the outside it was often difficult to tell.
The summer of 2020 was in some ways the culmination of a lot of things that had been building before. It was the height of the Black Lives Matter movement’s power and visibility. There were marches and also riots around the country, demands to defund the police and abolish prisons. What had happened at Evergreen State a few years earlier was now everywhere. Corporations lined up to demonstrate their allegiance, spending billions of dollars on DEI/anti-racism initiatives, teaching all the same things that were taught at Evergreen. People stopped denying the insurgency existed and rushed to praise its necessity and importance.
And yet, when people on the right complained about any of this, that studied ignorance returned. There were endless denials that “Critical Race Theory” was something that existed outside of grad schools even as elements of CRT were being shoehorned into public school curriculums everywhere. We spent months in the summer of 2021 playing this game. And again there were a few people who were willing to say openly what was happening while most on the left seemed fixated on denying the obvious. The difference between what people were saying and what they were doing sometimes became humorous.
Incidentally, if you’re wondering how LibsofTikTok became a thing, this is how. People on the left keep denying what is right there before their eyes until it becomes a kind of game to constantly place fresh evidence before them and watch them fly into a rage rather than just admit the obvious.
And more then two years later we’re playing that game once again, this time with regard to former Harvard president Claudine Gay. Ross Douthat has a column today which touches on this dynamic. He notes that not very long ago, Republicans mostly had a positive view of colleges even though they had also produced critics going back to Buckley. But recently that has changed.
By 2019, 59 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents told Pew that higher education had a negative effect on the country; by 2023, Gallup’s polling found that just 19 percent of Republicans were favorably disposed toward higher education.
There are a couple of ways that one could interpret this profound shift. Maybe the internet and social media changed everything; maybe Donald Trump, Rufo and a constellation of right-wing influencers have simply succeeded in deceiving and inflaming the public (including nonconservatives, since academia’s reputation also took a major hit among independents) against universities on a scale that far exceeds anything that Buckley, Ronald Reagan or Rush Limbaugh ever achieved.
On the other hand, the sudden Republican alienation from the American university could also be seen as an entirely reasonable response to academia’s own internal transformation in the past 10 years or so: the ideological ferment of the Great Awokening, the swift expansion of the diversity-equity-inclusion complex, the spread of progressive loyalty oaths in faculty recruitment and hiring, the attempts at political activism and statement-making by university administrators — plus the dwindling ranks of that always endangered species, the conservative professor.
The left is busy this week embracing the former explanation, i.e. people have been tricked by a bunch of charlatans into attacking universities for no good reason. But the reality is much closer to the 2nd explanation. The right has been responding to the avalanche of new DEI verities pouring out of academia daily over the last decade. The insurgents are on the left. The right is reacting to what is actually happening while many on the liberal left continue to pretend it isn’t happening or doesn’t matter.
From watching the debate over Gay’s resignation, it’s clear that many academics would much prefer to be members of a sectarian institution than a national one — at least if the price of national standing is regarding conservative Americans in any way as critics worth engaging, let alone as stakeholders in their institutions. A sect can hold firmly to uncompromised and unsullied truths, after all, whereas a nation can be wrong or racist or corrupt.
Republicans didn’t turn on academia for no reason. They turned on it because it began making ever greater demands on their everyday lives and the lives of their children. DEI is a project designed to take over and control every aspect of America, not just colleges but elementary schools and corporations and small businesses and ultimately every interaction you have with another person every day of your life. It’s a project you can’t even question without facing off with an angry mob and the very real threat of losing everything. To pretend that’s not the case at this late date is to do what many liberals have been doing for a decade while the leftist insurgency advanced: Close your eyes to reality.