Today’s post focuses on the contribution of elite higher education to the rise of Trump. This may seem in bad taste because it is also clearly targeted by MAGA, and so our impulse is to circle the wagons. But if you wish to develop a defensive posture you must understand the territory.
Here I presuppose three ideas: first, that wherever the Trump II presidency ends up, America’s constitutional and political regime will be quite different from (to simplify) the (cold war) post-Warren court era of the last half century and a bit.* Second the re-election of Trump exhibits a willingness to embrace the corruption in the Machiavellian sense that he represents. Importantly, corruption in this sense is not just about illegal and legal bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. The two are, of course, connected.
In particular, ever since I first started blogging on Trump’s ascendancy (back in 2015), I have been treating the electoral preference for Trump as a sign of mistrust between the electorate and the then political elites (which was first expressed in the Obama elections) and, more subtly, a preference for a crook who people believe will be our sonofabitch. America-First is a doctrine of zero-sum relations. And so, in particular, who gets what is related to who you know and how you navigate an opaque system (recall my post on the Madoff scandal).
By elite higher education, I mean roughly the highly selective universities and colleges (starting with the so-called “Overlap meetings”), and the schools that emulate them, that were the target of antitrust action and class-action lawsuit(s) for colluding on financial aid and price-fixing since the 1990s (see also 568 group). To be sure, some of the collusion had the noble aim to prevent scarce resources intended for poor and disadvantaged students flowing up to wealthy applicants.