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.
That is, I have in mind the kind of places with employees involved in the Varsity Blues scandal, that is, parents bribing their children into an admissions spot. I should disclose that during this period, I was a student representative, first on the faculty budget and priorities committee and then on the Board of Trustees (on the financial sub-committee). I spent three years of my life studying harder to understand the financial aid system than to master my coursework.
But the previous paragraphs also already hint at some of the underlying issues. These schools practice an incredibly opaque and unaccountable admission process that effectively practices differential pricing and unequal treatment shaped by preferential treatment for legacy, donor classes, and disadvantaged students. The outcome is neither impartial nor meritocratic.
It is no surprise that people come away from their first contact with elite formation institutions thinking that to get ahead in our society who you know, and how much money you have, is as at least as important as your effort. And university messaging makes quite clear that who you meet in college (and professional school), and which school you attended, may well be more important than your formal education. (This is also true, of course, in the academic professions.) If you think I exaggerate, I am happy to concede the point after you read this article reporting on Harvard University’s faculty on the subject. [HT Christopher Robichaud.]
That is to say, universities project to their students and their families a transactional ethos. Now, regular readers know I have no distaste for markets. Yet, this transactional ethos has led far down the slippery slope that, as was demonstrated again throughout 2024, major donors shape university policy and personnel in non-trivial ways. But this fact signals, anew, that who you know and what you have is more important than the underlying intellectual arguments. It’s also amazing that institutions that have incredible high reserves feel so vulnerable in response to donor pressure.
But that’s not all. To see what I have in mind, I remind you that relative to their institutional (or corporate in the medieval sense) mission, all universities have three main tasks: advance knowledge, teach it, and witness truth (for fuller explanation recall here and the links in it). As the debate over institutional voice has evolved, it’s clear that most university administrations prefer lip service to ‘free speech’ or the ‘market place of ideas’ — a concept wholly out of place inside a university which is characterized by disciplined speech — than to take on the task of witnessing truth. This itself is a forfeiture of any spiritual authority the academy could have. (And if you snicker at the thought of spiritual authority, you exhibit the corruption I have in mind.)
But the situation is much more alarming. In Lost in Thought (2020), Zena Hitz has forcefully argued (and I simplify her view here), “for intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy.” (See here for an engagement with her book.) My own view on these matters is less austere than hers, but I agree with her that when academics are incapable of imagining the intrinsic worth of the academic life, there is no spirit left to be authoritative. In addition, she has argued aptly that elite academics have succumbed to (what she calls) “the pursuit of spectacles” feasting while the prestige-pyramid that supports them and which is populated by increasingly precarious and stretched peers is sinking in quicksand. Enough said.
But, and this gets me to the promised third presupposition of this essay, and the more exclusive (fourth) task of elite universities. These also have the mission to educate a regime’s elite and to put it in a position to guide it prudently and maintain itself. This is not human capital formation, but rather ultimately the cultivation of good judgment needed for (ahh) the art of government. Judging by the ongoing consequences, perhaps somewhat unfairly (post hoc ergo propter hoc), the universities have failed miserably in this task.
Of course, I am not holding the universities responsible for the rise of MAGA. The longer-term causes can be found (I suspect) in the destruction of Glass–Steagall, the deception to justify war in Iraq, the Wall Street bailouts, and a permissive tax and political environment for concentrated wealth/power.
But it is notable how uncurious and how unprepared our educated aristocracy is for this moment. This is a feature (primarily) of their habitus, of course, but also (non-negligibly) the curriculum, which, against the evidence of history, insisted on American exceptionalism and the puzzling identification of the essentials of American political culture and institutions with a myth of enduring liberalism.
Now, as I have remarked before, universities are themselves incredibly long-lasting institutions. So, I have no doubt that they will aim to adapt to new circumstances and survive by playing the long game (that is to accommodate themselves to the new status quo). But from their perspective, the most damning fact of our time is the evident contempt by which their political enemies in MAGA-land hold them—and this contempt is not a product of ignorance, but of first-hand experience.
*The larger story would focus on the end of Jim Crow, the consolidation of the New Deal, the Civil rights revolution (including the embrace of expansive first amendment), the post-Watergate reforms, etc.
{ 74 comments… read them below or add one }
vorkosigan1 02.17.25 at 6:29 am
If “the re-election of Trump exhibits a willingness to embrace the corruption” who is it who is doing the embracing? The voting public? Trump’s enablers? Billionaires?
That seems fairly important, so some clarification would be helpful.
Laban 02.17.25 at 11:13 am
“I have been treating the electoral preference for Trump as a sign of mistrust between the electorate and the then political elites”
Which is totally unsurprising, as US living standards are declining (as they are in the UK).
The days where a guy with a factory job could afford a good house, a car, a stay at home wife raising kids, maybe a boat for weekends, have long gone.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-typical-male-u-s-worker-earned-less-in-2014-than-in-1973/
“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.”
Well, yes. As above, the post-war settlement is well and truly over. In the UK, house prices at the end of the Thatcher/Major era were still less than four times median gross annual wages, now they are seven or eight times, and people in their early 30s with postgraduate degrees are sharing houses as if they were 19 year old undergrads. Victorian houses built in places like Oxford for manual workers are now worth a million, two million in London – and our financial media reports a “strong housing market”.
Lisa Herzog 02.17.25 at 12:30 pm
Many of these points seem plausible to me, but here is a big question mark that I have, and I’d like to hear whether you have some thoughts on this. In continental Europe, you don’t have those kind of elite institutions. Universities function very differently (not least because they are funded differently), and not all countries have clearly visible “elite” universities. And yet, right wing populism is on the rise in these countries as well. So it must be a much broader phenomenon, which has to do – to name just a few factors – with city vs. countryside (and housing prices in both), loss of mid-range jobs, assortative mating (and elite universities then playing an unholy role for privileged families to pass on privilege to the next generation), as well as finance, geopolitics, etc., to which you allude. The features of elite universities that you discuss are important, but aren’t they more important in the tip-of-the-iceberg way?
huaping lu-adler 02.17.25 at 2:22 pm
Thank you so much for this thoughtful post. As a philosophy professor at one of those elite universities, I especially appreciate the following: “it is notable how uncurious and how unprepared our educated aristocracy is for this moment. This is a feature (primarily) of their habitus, of course, but also (non-negligibly) the curriculum.” 2015/16, when I was still an early-career faculty member, led me to critique both the education I received in this country (I grew up elsewhere and came here to get a PhD in philosophy) and the education I was giving to my students, which reflected the education I received. I became an entirely different kind of professor in terms of both what I taught (curriculum) and how I taught (pedagogy). Now I’m casting about for new inspirations again.
Eric Schliesser 02.17.25 at 2:35 pm
Hi Lisa,
My post is on the “contribution” of elite higher education. It’s not a full causal account.
But to respond to your underlying claim, and to paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy polity is unhappy in its own way despite some apparent commonalities. To what degree targeting universities resonates with local electorates and (more important) would be new social elites is determined, in part, by local conditions and path-dependent political trajectories. France is not the Netherlands and neither is the UK or Germany (etc.). And, yet, even in places where universities are much less visibly ‘elite,’ they may well be perceived as relatively closed shops (due to low social mobility and assortative mating at the top–or the significance of tracking in high school, etc.).
Eric Schliesser 02.17.25 at 2:54 pm
Dear Prof. Lu-Adler,
Thank you for your kind remarks. I look forward to learning more about the fruits of your inspiration.
Eric
TPO 02.17.25 at 3:22 pm
I think attempts to understand our current circumstances would be better focused on demagogues and scapegoaters rather than the scapegoats of the day.
Laban 02.17.25 at 3:54 pm
TPO – but there have always been “demagogues and scapegoaters” – indeed you could say a fair few of the revolutions in history, failed or successful, were their work. Why are there more receptive ears for their messages now?
Guano 02.17.25 at 5:12 pm
The post-war settlement is over because it is no longer possible to imagine that society’s crises can be dealt with by endless economic growth and ignoring what is happening in the rest of the world. Distrust of academia is being fostered because some of its output is very challenging to the status quo.
Derek Bowman 02.17.25 at 9:48 pm
@TPO: While I agree with you on the question of how to best understand our current circumstances as a whole, I do think the fact that “it is notable how uncurious and how unprepared our educated aristocracy is for this moment” is a very telling point of internal critique and self-reflection for those of us who work (or, in my case, once worked) in academia. If the claims we often make about the value of studying the liberal arts (especially the humanities and social sciences) are even approximately true, shouldn’t we have expected the supposed masters of those disciplines to be better prepared to think and respond critically to the present moment?
But of course part of the reason I’m no longer in academia is that those leaders were so poorly prepared to deal even with the previous political moment, at least here in the U.S. (the casualization of the academic workforce, etc).
John Q 02.17.25 at 9:55 pm
Repeating a comment I’ve made elsewhere, this is mainly about the US. As Lisa points out above, the situation in Europe is quite different. In Australia, there’s no elite stratum similar to that in the US – the top unis are more like state flagships. So far, attempts to import US culture wars over universities have gone nowhere. The big issues are sky-high salaries for Vice-Chancellor (= President) and the problems of reliance on fee income from international students, which ties into migration and population growth.
AFAICT, the same issues are present in the UK, along with long-standing left critiques of Oxford and Cambridge as bastions of privilege.
Eric Schliesser 02.17.25 at 10:06 pm
When and how culture war imports work or not depends on local conditions and local political entrepreneurship. The UK has been very receptive to trans-phobia, for example, whereas the Dutch have been not. But the Dutch have been receptive to the attack on universities despite theirs being like (Australia) state flagships. But not all European university systems are so egalitarian (witness France, Suisse, and UK). So, I wouldn’t agree that the situation in Europe is in all respects different. (The slow, accelerating implosion of the UK non-elite university system is, of course, well documented here at CrookedTimber but I grant that’s a different dynamic.)
engels 02.17.25 at 10:52 pm
#12 seems to imply the trans “culture war” in UK was started by right-wingers, who imported transphobia from the US: I’m curious what evidence there is for this narrative. In general, that the right have been engineering “culture wars” is something I here over and over again from lefties and it mostly doesn’t fit my perceptions at all (speaking as someone broadly sympathetic to the cultural “left” causes but not to the zealotry with which they have been prosecuted).
JPL 02.17.25 at 11:26 pm
“In Lost in Thought (2020), Zena Hitz has forcefully argued (and I simplify her view here), “for intellectual life to deliver the human benefit it provides, it must be in fact withdrawn from considerations of economic benefit or of social and political efficacy.””
This reminds me of George Sarton’s notion of pure inquiry as the learning program carried out by the “enthusiasts”, as opposed to the “job-holders”, and that one of the duties of the university is to provide a place, a “haven”, even, where this kind of pursuit of true understanding can be engaged in and protected from economic and political disturbance. It certainly can’t effectively be carried out in the “private sector”, i.e., the business world, or the world of money and power in general. One would have to elaborate on this, but pure inquiry must survive somewhere, and the university has a responsibility to ensure that it does, in spite of their (job-holder) activities as hedge funds and so forth. And unlike a lot of the job-holders, the enthusiast has as their ultimate ethical grounding the alleviation of human suffering, not primarily “getting ahead”.
John Q 02.18.25 at 12:08 am
I have to say, Engels, that you’ve never struck me as someone concerned about excessive zealotry in relation to causes you actually support (class war, for example). Is you inner centrist coming out, or was your “sympathy” always limited?
JPL 02.18.25 at 1:03 am
As a casual observer I have registered that engels has expressed a lack of sympathy for the zealotry with which “left” culture war causes have been prosecuted, which is possibly why he uses the scare quotes. I would consider these zealous prosecutions to be the work of the pseudo-left. These ones have never put socialism front and center, for example. (Although these causes could just as well be part of a socialist program.)
engels 02.18.25 at 1:07 am
Eg am in favour of properly funding NHS gender affirming care but not office workers customarily stating pronoun in meetings… if that makes me the Matt Yglesias of Marxism so be it.
LFC 02.18.25 at 2:21 am
The OP seems to have in mind an idealized image of universities as institutions set apart from the “real world,” sites of learning mostly insulated from social, economic, and political developments in society. This picture does not match the history of universities in general, I suspect, and certainly not the history of universities in the U.S. While there are probably a few exceptions, my guess is that even small liberal arts colleges, which may not have to navigate a relationship with the federal govt in the way that large research institutions do, find themselves unable to ignore completely what’s going on around them.
Precisely for this reason, however, it is quite rational (and sensible, imo) to adopt “institutional voice” policies that say official university pronouncements should deal only with matters directly related to the university’s core missions. In my view there is no reason why a university president, who may be an expert in engineering or 18th-century poetry or health economics or linguistics or whatever, should make pronouncements in the name of the institution on political events in the world that don’t directly affect the university’s functions (research, teaching, even “witnessing truth” (however exactly that phrase is unpacked)). At the same time, a commitment to “disciplined speech,” in the sense of recognizing disciplinary expertise, should not be used as an excuse to deprive faculty and students of the right to express their views on controversial matters, within certain obvious and very broad limits.
Contrary to the OP’s assertion that the concept of free speech is “wholly out of place” [sic] in a university, the concept of free speech is quite central to any institution that claims, as most do, to inculcate in its students a questioning, “critical” turn of mind.
Not a “marketplace of ideas” if that means, for instance, that an 18-year-old’s view of the Middle East should carry the same weight as that of a professor who specializes in the region, but the 18-year-old should be entirely free to say whatever they want (within certain very broad limits) on the subject. The alternative to a conversation in which pretty much any view can be entertained and discussed and its weaknesses and strengths and assumptions revealed, which is what the concept of free speech in an academic setting should amount to, is a situation where people are just shouting at each other in dueling demonstrations.
I have other disagreements with the OP, but this comment is already long enough.
Alan 02.18.25 at 5:29 am
Surely the change from universities being a place of learning to becoming a business is a fundamental part of the problem?
Tm 02.18.25 at 9:27 am
This post, like many of its sort, completely overlooks the fact that almost all of the leaders of the fascist movements both in US and Europe are themselves highly privileged, highly educated, often with elite education backgrounds. They are by no means uneducated and don’t represent the undereducated underprivileged classes. In the dominant discourse, this fact is simply ignored or shrugged away by pointing out that fascists often express disdain for education. But that doesn’t negate their elite status, quite the opposite. Being able to access elite education because one’s parents are rich, and then expressing contempt for that very education, is itself a sign of immense privilege. Only the already privileged can afford to spit on the value of a good education. And of course, because intellectual prowess cannot be inherited or bought, it’s logical that privileged spoiled brats hate their intellectual betters coming from moderate backgrounds and so they make a point of giving the middle finger to very ideas of knowledge and scientific inquiry. It’s a resentment that explains a lot of the culture wars. It’s really just old-fashioned anti-intellectualism, an essential ingredient of all varieties of fascism.
One of the most obvious characteristics of the Trump regime is that it’s an elite project, supported by economic and political and media elites including the world’s richest oligarchs and the world’s most powerful media moguls. And yet here we are for the ten thousandth time discussing the ridiculous thesis that Trumpist fascism is anti-elitist. If we can’t do better than that, we are truly cooked.
Tm 02.18.25 at 9:44 am
Also seconding TPO 7: “I think attempts to understand our current circumstances would be better focused on demagogues and scapegoaters rather than the scapegoats of the day.”
This also ties into my post above. Anti-intellectualism is not just a typical ingredient of fascism, it’s also closely related to antisemitism. This fact is well-known to those studying reactionary ideology but totally ignored in the current discourse.
Alex SL 02.18.25 at 10:01 am
I must start by admitting that I may lack the experience of an elite US university, because I went through a public German university in the late 1990s and early 2000s instead. Still, it seems to me that while many of the observations made here may be true, it is unlikely that they contributed to the rise of MAGA.
In terms of what is relevant to universities, the shape of the current populist right, especially in the USA but also elsewhere, is anti-intellectualism, simplism, a rejection of diversity and global mobility, and an immature gut reaction against “being told what to do” by experts, e.g., on the climate or on the utility of vaccinations and masking against infectious disease. On top of that, the acid that is neoliberal ideology has eaten through so many functions of society that very little remains to asset-strip, privatise, and deregulate, so this current wave of right-wingers is already reduced to stripping the wire from the walls. This time, the US right destroys research, education, foreign aid, and national parks. The next time around they will have to sell the army off to some group of investors; it will be the only thing left at that point.
Point is, I do not see how anything would change if US universities were less less elitist or commercialised. Would Elon Musk or JD Vance seriously think, that prof I had in university was an idealist, and I felt that Harvard is truly aiming to support poor people, so I will now serve the public instead of riding ignorant xenophobia to self-advancement? Would Schumer have any clue how to deal with the person ignoring the law who also controls the institutions meant to arrest law-breakers, if only universities had put more effort into teaching good judgement?
In other words, just because something is bad doesn’t mean that it is the cause of another bad thing; the two could be completely orthogonal while still both being bad. The post kind of leaves wiggle room with, “Of course, I am not holding the universities responsible for the rise of MAGA”. But all the other sentences at least heavily imply just that, so…
Tm 02.18.25 at 10:48 am
I think this is a relevant observation. I’m just watching a portrait of Alice Weidel, the candidate of the fascist party for German Chancellor (https://www.zdf.de/dokumentation/dokumentation-sonstige/250219-alice-weidel-ein-portrait-100.html). Weidel has a PhD and has worked in finance and consulting, probably in a middle or upper management role with stints in China and Singapore (you’ve heard of PMC right?) before becoming a full time politician. (The other party leader, Höcke, is a school teacher). She runs in a district by Lake Constance where she claims to reside but in fact she lives in Switzerland and, when asked, knows nothing at all about her constituency (that’s about minute 20 of the video). She’s then shown at the party congress and what does she say to thunderous appause:
“When we get to power, we’ll close all the gender studies departments and [voice rising] fire those professors!”
This in a nutshell is the fascist elite, or the fascism of the elite. If you now feel compelled to blame the gender studies professors (all three of them) at German universities for the rise of fascism, I think you need to take step back and do some serious research.
MisterMr 02.18.25 at 12:29 pm
Agreeing (I think) with Alex Sl and TM above, I think that the causality runs in the reverse: there has been an economic and consequently cultural change in western societies, this change is what is causing “fascism” (or right-wing authoritarianism) and is also what caused the mercantile thinking in universities.
So this particular correlation between A and B is neither A->B nor B ->A, but there is an element C that causes both C->A and C->B.
engels 02.18.25 at 1:06 pm
Weidel has a PhD and has worked in finance and consulting
Iirc she’s a Goldman Sachs alum (as is Mark Carney, Canada’s current great liberal hope: small world!)
engels 02.18.25 at 1:39 pm
So this particular correlation between A and B is neither A->B nor B ->A, but there is an element C that causes both C->A and C->B.
I think it’s more like climate change where are feedback loops.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/glaciers-methane
novakant 02.18.25 at 2:57 pm
There are a lot of former Goldman Sachs employees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_employees_of_Goldman_Sachs
She was one of a gazillion of consultants and there only for a year or two – she never stayed anywhere for long before the AfD.
More interesting is probably her family background: the parents belonged to the group of Germans expelled after WW2 and never got over it. The father was one of those self-made men who value economic success above everthing else, which explains a lot. She also seems to be a person driven by trying to reconcile immmense cognitive dissonances.
LFC 02.18.25 at 3:04 pm
The OP criticizes (at least it sounds like criticism) “an incredibly opaque and unaccountable admission process….”
Those universities (I refer here to the U.S. context) that have a lot more applicants than places have basically three options re undergraduate admissions: (1) A lottery system, where everyone who meets certain threshold requirements is put in a hat and names are drawn out randomly; (2) a strictly “meritocratic” system based on test scores and grades, which will produce a student body made up mostly of people who got straight As in high school, were valedictorians etc., or (3) the now prevailing system, necessarily somewhat subjective and “opaque,” which aims to assemble a class that is varied (“diverse”) in terms of students’ interests, talents, experiences, and (albeit to a lesser extent) socioeconomic status. Legacy preferences can be part of this option but they don’t have to be, and at least a few schools have (wisely) gotten rid of them.
Each of these options has drawbacks, but it’s far from clear that number 2, the “meritocratic,” is the best approach. I happen to think it’s the worst of the three.
Aardvark Cheeselog 02.18.25 at 4:05 pm
I would place the beginning of the “longer term” sometime around 1985, after the re-election of Ronald Reagan. For six years the man had been on the national stage, spouting nonsense and easily-refuted lies. There was some derisory effort to report on that 1981-84, but when he was re-elected what remained of the guardrails got removed. A process we are currently seeing recapitulated with Trump.
The most important US political story of the last 40 years is the R Party’s transformation from a political organization that tries to win elections by appealing to a majority of the electorate to a radical subversive organization trying to impose one-party rule, and that has gone completely unreported by the curiously somnolent Watchdogs of Democracy.
Anyway, yeah even elite-educated younger people these days seem to be remarkably ignorant of how their world works, and why they can be so comfortable. In the US. As other commenters have pointed out, the global phenomenon of democratic backsliding must have additional explanations, because it’s happening in places where the pathologies of the American higher education system are not a problem.
Tm 02.18.25 at 4:23 pm
Weidel’s bio on wikipedia doesn’t tell us much about what she actually did. Editors also disagree whether the info is reliable. Apparently her stint in Singapore was just an internship. This is interesting only insofar as her rather elitist self-portrayal and her eagerness to put the Dr. before her name doesn’t seem to alienate all those anti-elite voters. The point is that if she is supposed to be the anti-elite anti-PMC candidate, she’s a curious choice. But this can be said for most of the current crop of right wing leaders.
Harry 02.18.25 at 4:25 pm
Once you get out of the super-elites to the state flagships, admissions are really quite predictable (except for odd, glitch years, we had one in 2022). It only looks arcane at the very top end because there’s such a large element of lottery. Doubling enrollment at the Ivy plusses would relieve a lot of pressure (I’m not calling for that: I have a strong material interest in it not happening).
engels 02.18.25 at 5:25 pm
There are a lot of former Goldman Sachs employees
Thanks for reminding me about Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, Steve Mnuchin, Rishi Sunak, Draghi, Prodi, Paulson, Rubin… pretty impressive for an organisation with 40 000 employees: the population of a medium-sized town.
ETB 02.18.25 at 7:04 pm
As a Marxist, the most sympathetic position I can imagine adopting towards an opressed minority is “while I don’t support treating you with any degree of respect or dignity, I don’t actively lobby to prevent you from accessing healthcare”.
Laban 02.18.25 at 7:12 pm
Do people really, seriously see Trump as a “fascist”? He was remarkably powerless in his first term for a fascist, although for good or ill he seems to have started very differently this time round.
The changes he’s made so far are obviously goring a lot of oxen, but is he acting outside his powers? He reminds me more, this time round, of the 1945 UK Labour government, who gored a huge number of oxen but set the structures of post-war Britain right up to 1979 and Mrs Thatcher.
There’s a liberal orthodoxy (which is all we’re taught) that the Attlee Government was doubleplusgood, yet many of its policies were seen at the time as near – if not actually -Communist. Taxes and death duties were at confiscatory levels for the wealthy, so much so that Lord Alanbrooke, Churchill’s WW2 chief of staff, not only had to sell his (large) house and move into his former gardener’s cottage, but sell his much-loved Audobon bird books to stay afloat financially. Similarly many aristocratic estates, especially those where the title holder had been killed in action at a young age, ended in the hands of financial institutions or charities.
The story of Wentworth Woodhouse is atypical in its extremity, but shows how the old elite were totally at the mercy of Attlee’s government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wentworth_Woodhouse#Coal_mining_on_the_estate
engels 02.18.25 at 8:25 pm
while I don’t support treating you with any degree of respect or dignity, I don’t actively lobby to prevent you from accessing healthcare
I suggest you look at what I wrote and compare it to this, and then ask yourself why you feel the need to behave in this way.
LFC 02.18.25 at 9:17 pm
Laban @34
Is Trump acting outside his powers? Definitely. He fired inspectors general – that’s outside his powers. He’s effectively shut down an entire agency that Congress wrote into statute (USAID) or 90 percent of it, right down to taking the signage off the building. That’s outside his powers. Impounding federal funds already appropriated – outside his powers. The list goes on and on.
The comparison to Attlee is kind of absurd. Anyway this is OT. The OP has nothing directly to do with this.
Alex SL 02.18.25 at 9:30 pm
Laban, whether or not you want to apply the label fascist is one thing. It might be helpful to look up some definitions of that ideology and compare it with MAGA tenets (e.g., veneration of strength, admiration of masculinity, humiliation of those perceived as weak, thinking in terms of a unitary “will of the people” while defining those who don’t agree with it as traitors or deviants, etc.), then come to your own conclusion. Whether or not a fascist has power to achieve their fascist goals in their first administration is, of course, not among anybody’s criteria.
More importantly, yes, he is clearly acting outside of his legal powers. His government has taken money back that was already allocated, and I understand there is a law against that that hasn’t been changed. Musk is shutting down agencies and cutting others, which would be legal if done through an act of congress but is illegal if an unofficial advisor to government does it. Musk’s henchmen access confidential, classified, and personal data, again without any legal basis. The US government is currently breaking legal contracts and legally binding international agreements everywhere, simply deciding on a whim that they will rescind this grant here and raise tariffs there. And this is not even to mention fraud, conflicts of interest, and blatant corruption, from Trump’s memecoin to Musk’s contract for armored Teslas. In any functioning state, Musk and his henchmen would be in prison several times over, and Trump would already be facing impeachment proceedings, because, yes, they are all acting outside of their powers, i.e., breaking so many laws that it is difficult to maintain a list.
And to head off any whataboutism beyond Attlee: Yes, in any functioning state many other US politicians would at the very least be heavily fined if not in prison for insider trading and other corruption, and in a just world, every US president currently alive would be at The Hague, starting with Clinton for bombing that pharmaceutical factory. But none of that changes the fact that what Musk and Trump are doing is blatantly illegal and goes far beyond what any US president has done in decades.
engels 02.18.25 at 11:10 pm
This is interesting only insofar as her rather elitist self-portrayal and her eagerness to put the Dr. before her name doesn’t seem to alienate all those anti-elite voters.
“She may be a dr but she’s our dr”—to paraphrase FDR.
J-D 02.18.25 at 11:39 pm
For good or ill? You’re not sure which?
How bafflingly mysterious! They did good things and then some people didn’t like them! How could that possibly happen? Can anybody explain this colossal enigma?
He did? Oh, no!
They did? Oh, no!
They were? Oh, no!
Some people don’t know they’re born.
KT2 02.19.25 at 12:05 am
Laban @34 “Do people really, seriously see Trump as a “fascist”?”
If you:
– open a transactional space that is inviting for facists;
ES: “transactional ethos has led far down the slippery slope that, as was demonstrated again throughout 2024, major donors shape university policy and personnel in non-trivial ways. But this fact signals, anew, that who you know and what you have is more important than the underlying intellectual arguments.”…
And “In 2018 Steve Bannon famously said the way to beat the media was “to flood the zone with shit” (1.)
– quack like a facist;
ES: “the most damning fact of our time is the evident contempt by which their political enemies in MAGA-land hold [universities], education, elites]…
And… “As one article described the barrage of announcements: “The point isn’t to persuade anyone of anything, it’s simply to ensure that critics don’t mobilize around a coherent narrative and that no one has control over the flow of information.” (1.)
– talk to authoritiarians appeasingly, …
– what others have mentioned,
! eventally you are effectively a facist too.
“”So this is how liberty dies… ” Making sense of Trump’s first three weeks
Where I categorise 76 Trump administration actions from the last 3 weeks and show how they align with the authoritarian playbook
…
“Because there have been so many actions, you may need to zoom in to read everything on the diagram. A high resolution PDF version of the diagram is available here.”
[you need the hi res version!]
…
https://christinapagel.substack.com/p/so-this-is-how-liberty-dies-making
ES?: Maga Risen. On Elite Education and the space for fascism.
I feel we’ve past “…the Rise of Maga”
engels 02.19.25 at 1:35 am
In other German news…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/18/could-the-left-linke-surprise-in-german-election-elon-musk-afd-election
engels 02.19.25 at 2:39 am
It’s all about the benjamins…
<
blockquote>Jim Dilworth, a US banker living in Germany who worked with her at Goldman and later at Allianz Global Investors, said [Weidel] did not display any rightwing views at the time. “The most ‘radical’ thing about her views was her scepticism about the euro as a common currency,” he said. Dilworth added that when he later expressed surprise at her decision to join the AfD, she told him that “it would take me 20 years” to make the same progress in the more centre-right Christian Democrats. “So that’s basically why she chose this party. I think there was a lot of opportunism there.”
https://www.ft.com/content/221911c1-bca0-4bfe-aa99-5950033bd31c
somebody who remembers the land grant 02.19.25 at 3:08 am
i’ll excuse it this time because you took so much time to explain what you were talking about but the conflation of “universities” with “three universities that, statistically, nobody attends except senators and lobbyists’ kids” happens all the time in american media, letters, books and elsewhere. looking at these institutions actual impacts on the world, contrasted to, say, the land grant universities impacts, i frankly find the hatred of these institutions excusable. how long, for example, until the president of yale goes to iraq to explain to someone whose legs were blown off in 2004 that, if you think about it, yale’s purpose is witnessing truth, but you know, “I can’t say nobody would get their hair mussed”
John Q 02.19.25 at 4:40 am
Engels @41 That’s a bit of good news. Regardless of the ultimate implications for government formation (too complex for this Aussie), it would be great to see Die Linke in and the FDP out, especially now they are rid of Wageknechte (sp?)
J-D 02.19.25 at 5:09 am
Wagenknecht.
Anybody who is interested in pre-election polling can look at the Wikipedia page on ‘Opinion polling for the 2025 German federal election’ (similar pages can be found on Wikipedia for many elections, well in advance of the dates actually being fixed–they’ve already got one for the next UK election, for example). A graphical summary is included. The recent German polls (since the beginning of the year, roughly) show not only a significant increase in voters for the Left (who last year were polling below the threshold for getting back into the Bundestag but now are above it) but also a significant decrease in voters for the BSW (who last year were polling above the threshold but now are below it). The FDP also continues to poll below the threshold. If the results match the current polls (I say if), then the probable result is another ‘grand coalition’ government (CDU-CSU and SPD)–that is, assuming the CDU-CSU holds firm on not working with AfD. (If the polls are wrong, or if they take another turn before the election, then who knows?)
novakant 02.19.25 at 7:03 am
It will take another decade or so until I can maybe trust Die Linke. But granted, they can be quite effective asking imconvenuent questions in parliament, so good on them.
Tm 02.19.25 at 7:56 am
“The far-left Linke, successor to the East German communists who built the Berlin Wall”
This is almost hilarious. Die Linke, a long time ago, did integrate the rest of the former socialist party (of which almost nobody is still around) but then, the CDU integrated the rest of the east German CDU, and yet nobody calls them “successor of a pro-regime East German party that supported every single one of the socialist government’s policies with the exception of abortion rights”.
And of course it’s typical for our broken media discourse (and the Guardian is generally better than most but who am I telling this) to refer to the defense of bog standard social democratic welfare policies as “far left”.
Alex SL 02.19.25 at 8:36 am
Tm,
Not to forget, for some reason nobody calls the CDU “successor of the Centrum party and other assorted conservative parties that all voted for the Ermächtigungsgesetz, giving Hitler dictatorial powers”. Very puzzling, how that is always memory-holed.
I am curious to see if I will live long enough to see a future Republican party pretend to have amnesia about what their predecessors did (and did not do) in 2025.
hix 02.19.25 at 11:57 am
https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/
Linke in: Almost certain now. They also got a second option of winning 3 districts to get in, which is realistic.
Fdp out: Quite likely
BSW: (Wageknechts new personal conspiracy and anti immigrant party) pretty good odds for out.
I might vote Linke this time, now that the Wagenknecht fraction is out.
Tm 02.19.25 at 12:30 pm
It will be a great relief to not have to hear about the FDP any more. Their party leadership is a mystery to me. Their political behavior has become increasingly self-destructive. Lindner seems to have turned into be a genuine member of the Mump-cult but why do the others stand by and let this happen?
NomadUK 02.19.25 at 1:45 pm
I’m having a difficult time finding anything wrong with this approach.
Laban 02.19.25 at 5:48 pm
J-D – “For good or ill? You’re not sure which?”
Much too early to tell, as Zhou Enlai apparently said about the soixante-huitards in Paris, not the 1789 lot.
novakant 02.19.25 at 7:15 pm
Yeah, I never liked the FDP much, but in the good old days they stood, apart from economic laissez faire policies, for civil liberties, diplomacy and human rights.
Now Linder openly embraces Milei and Musk.
Casey 02.19.25 at 8:53 pm
When I talk to friends who voted for Trump (or would have voted for Trump, I live in Canada) it’s very clear to me that the vast majority of his coalition doesn’t actually like him. Instead, they believe that the MAGA movement is the only force capable of stopping social justice orthodoxy run amok.
Whether you think that view is grounded in reality or not, academics and journalists are going to have to start treating the more extreme claims of wokeism with the same intellectual honesty that they would any political movement, or the loss of trust will be complete enough to undermine the missions of their institutions.
J-D 02.19.25 at 9:13 pm
Many people find themselves already able to form a judgement about it. Perhaps you’ve noticed.
J-D 02.19.25 at 9:19 pm
Some caution is called for. The FDP failed to get into the Bundestag at the 2013 election and then returned at the 2017 election.
Currently there are eight of the sixteen Länder where the FDP is represented in the Landtag. In four of those eight, the next election is due by 2026. If a poor performance in the Bundestag election is followed by poor performances in those Landtag elections, it will be a strong indicator of the prospects of the FDP in the longer term; if not, then less so.
somebody who remembers what the workplace was like before "you couldn't just say what you wanted" 02.19.25 at 10:42 pm
Casey @ #54 is correct. the supporters of this movement yearn for the days when you could scream racial slurs at your co-workers, grope women in the workplace and slap them if they complaint about it, and kick the living shit out of anyone with a haircut that deviates even slightly from acceptable. there will be no peace until these people are satisfied and there is no line they won’t cross to get “back” to where they “deserve” to be. when you hear someone complain about “dei” remember how many people had to be involved in order to install the door locking button under matt lauer’s desk, and how it would have been different, if, even once, one of them had said “i don’t think a ‘press here to trap your rape victim’ button is good for the workplace.” the problem is that the uppity femazoids and dyed-haired gay transazoids are not going to go back into the kitchen or the closet happily. they may be forced there by truncheons, corrective rape, and even laws, but the anti-woke coalition will still seethe, knowing they’re still loathed – perhaps loathed even more now that the filthy woke have gotten a taste of liberation. they will then decide that the problem of dei needs a more comprehensive solution. more final, you might say.
J-D 02.19.25 at 10:56 pm
If I say that ‘political correctness’ is what rude people call it when it is suggested that perhaps people should not be rude and that ‘woke’ is what inconsiderate people call it when it is suggested that perhaps people should not be inconsiderate (and I have said that, and I do still say that it’s true), do you consider that intellectually honest?
The extreme claims, in this context, take the form of people saying ‘woke is doing this’ and ‘woke is doing that’ and the accurate and intellectually honest response to these claims ‘No, that’s not happening’. If you have friends who are saying ‘social justice orthodoxy is running amok’, then your friends are mistaken. If you think that whether their views are grounded in reality is not an important consideration, then you are mistaken.
russell1200 02.19.25 at 11:03 pm
Although I understand the point about Obama being the precursor protest vote, IMOP Ross Perot is on a continuous line with Obama – Trump. Perot, rather presciently, warned of the giant sucking sound as jobs went south of the border if NAFTA was signed. That China would be a bigger problem is somewhat beside the point.
Although Buchanan is often stated as a precursor, I think Perot is more indicative of a class-distinct movement. The Maga people may have adopted a lot of what Buchanan, and many others, were talking about. Perot, like Trump, was a political neophyte, and independently wealthy. Maybe not as charismatic as Trump, but his background had a lot of the same appeal.
Tm 02.20.25 at 8:57 am
J-D: The FDP did poorly in every recent state election, got kicked out of several parliaments and was down to 1% in East Germany. They won’t completely disappear any time soon but at least Lindner and hopefully most of the current leadership will be out of politics (no doubt he’ll get a cushioned oligarchy-funded job at some fake thinktank). They are some of the most despicable politicians in present-day Germany and that means something in these dark times. But also they are incredibly stupid, their program is unpopular and really really stupid (vote for us so that in future you’ll havce to pay for the weather report, btw that’s an idea we got from our cult leader Musk , he’s great, have you heard of some of his other ideas?) After a string of election defeats, their approach was to double down on all the unpopular stuff. I don’t know how we deserve this political class. Voters can’t really be blamed in this case because in 2021, the FDP wasn’t that unhinged.
An important observation, the strong showing of the party in 2021 (11%) is a result of a coordinated campaign by right wing media, especially Bild. Martin Döpfner, who now owns Politico, told journalists at the Springer media empire explicitly to do whatever possible to help elect the FDP (https://www.n-tv.de/politik/Kann-man-noch-mehr-fuer-die-FDP-tun–article24049439.html). It’s a testament to our broken media environment that when this scandal was revealed, it didn’t hurt his career in the least.
The strategy worked, the FDP prevented a red-green majority, became part of the government, and after doing some normal stuff initially got to work sabotaging the government, which is exactly the job they were supposed to do. Their politics of obstruction hurt them severely in the polls but the leadership didn’t change track, they doubled down. They sacrificed their own political career for the grater goal of serving the interests of the oligarchy they hope to be part of.
All of this has little to do with the will of voters. It’s the oligarchic class working to destroy liberal democracy. The FDP having done their job, they now directly support the AFD.
engels 02.20.25 at 12:34 pm
If I say that ‘political correctness’ is what rude people call it when it is suggested that perhaps people should not be rude and that ‘woke’ is what inconsiderate people call it when it is suggested that perhaps people should not be inconsiderate (and I have said that, and I do still say that it’s true), do you consider that intellectually honest?
No. It’s similar to saying “Christianity just means being a decent person” and its implications are just as extreme and dangerous.
Tm 02.20.25 at 9:40 pm
Interesting comparison engels except that there is a huge body of literature written by people who self-identify as Christian explaining what Christianity means for them and there’s a well-documented 2000 year history of the deeds done by self-identified Christians that we can rely on to define the meaning of Christianity, whereas your concept of wokeism is not based on anything written or done by self-identified woke people, instead it’s based on a propaganda campaign by people who explicitly identify as anti-woke.
J-D 02.20.25 at 11:27 pm
So can I take it that what you mean by ‘interesting’ is ‘interesting in that it’s so wrong’?
Anti-woke campaigners avoid making explicit their concept of what ‘woke’ means, making it easier for them to retrospectively add things they don’t like to the category they’re campaigning against.
engels 02.20.25 at 11:58 pm
I didn’t say anything about my concept of wokeism. I was voicing a general objection to the identification of a particular complex and contested set of ethical commitments with morality itself—which was put forward in J-D’s comment, albeit in more patronising language about rudeness and consideration for others.
MisterMr 02.21.25 at 7:05 am
Woke is a very broad concept and people might mean different things by it.
E.g. I’ve seen people on internet saying that “sex” is a purely cultural category (like in the phrase “sex assigned at birth”); I don’t agree with that and in fact I see that as the equivalent of creationism from the left.
Then there are people that say that transwomen should be addressed as “she”: this is clearly more reasonable and closer to “just means being polite”.
Then there are people who just want to be generally offensive to transwomen or other minorities, this is not even “just polite” but actually “avoid hate speech”.
People on both sides of the argument have incentive to mix these levels: e.g. the pro-trans have incentive to say that if I don’t accept the idea of “sex assigned at birth” this is the equivalent of hate speech, because this shuts me up. People who are anti-trans and want to go on with hate speech have interest to mix things up because this way they can hide their persecutory behaviour by blaming excessive wokeness.
That said, if we speak of the rise of right leaning authoritarianism, I don’t think it can be attributed to just a recoil from “wokeness”. The late Bob Atlemeyer, who was the social psychologist who first used the term “Right Wing Autoritarianism” and created the RWA scale, was worried by an increase of authoritarianism in the right well before the rise of “wokeness”.
I still think that the problem is that some groups perceive the floor breaking under their feet economically, this creates anxiety that in turn makes them more authoritarian.
Furthermore, there is the influence of internet that creates echo chambers, moreso than traditional media, so that both sides tend to be more ideologically extremised.
J-D 02.21.25 at 10:57 am
Yes, but the people who say that don’t seriously defend this position on the grounds that it is ‘woke’; the people who attack this position describe it as ‘woke’ without explaining why they call it that. You disagree with the position, but you don’t justify that disagreement by condemning the position as tainted with a ‘wokeness’ which you don’t define.
But this position too, which apparently you don’t object to, is condemned by people who identify it as ‘woke’, still without explaining what they mean by ‘woke’.
Just so; a large part of what they mean, effectively, by ‘woke’ is ‘all those things I want to hate on’, and by not offering any more precise explanation of what they mean by it they allow themselves the option of adding more things to this category when they decide they want to hate on those things also.
‘Eastasia has always been an enemy of Oceania, Citizen, because Eastasia has always been woke!’
‘So why don’t any of the Hate Woke posters we see everywhere say anything about Eastasia?’
‘Why are you questioning Hate Woke, Citizen? Are you secretly an agent of wokeness yourself?’
engels 02.21.25 at 11:37 pm
Please don’t make this another thread where some people are trying to define “wokeism” and others are pretending not to understand what it means.
Wokeism is identity politics plus the social media addiction of the whole PMC.
engels 02.21.25 at 11:54 pm
It also shares rather a lot with Altemeyer’s “right-wing authoritarianism,” viz.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-wing_authoritarianism
MisterMr 02.22.25 at 10:22 am
My point is just that people might mean very different things with “woke”.
@engels yes there are obvious similarities due to the “echo chamber” effect but, having read Altemeyer’s book, I would class it as the “left wing authoritarianism” that A. was not trying to measure with his scale, because it explicitly goes against tradition and the whole idea is to go against estabilished authorities (imagined as an old male straight white father figure).
ETB 02.22.25 at 12:57 pm
Always amusing to see someone who has invested a significant portion of their time and energy into opposition of something demand that their definitions be accepted by everyone as objective truth, and the people who support that thing are entirely wrong about what they believe and why. Doubly amusing if not three days ago they were reaching for the fainting couch over a glib and sarcastic reply not treating their position with requisite degree of sensitivity and nuance. Ah well, as so it goes: “normally I abhor hypocrisy, but for myself I’ll make exception”.
ETB 02.22.25 at 12:58 pm
(One wonders what might happen if one applies Altemeyer’s markers for “right-wing authoritarianism” to, for example, the SWP, CPB-ML, the CCP, etc.?)
engels 02.22.25 at 3:25 pm
Sorry, the comments that get through aren’t always the most carefully written.
Obviously (?) #67 wasn’t meant to be an objective definition.
I mostly agree with #69 but despite not having read Altemeyer I don’t think he could have anticipated wokeism even as something he chose not address and imo it is basically liberal rather than left (eg because of its middle class base and meritocratic preoccupations); many of the Marxist sects may well be left-wing authoritarians for all I know.
JPL 02.23.25 at 9:12 pm
The “woke” ethos (or mania) seems to have some properties in common with the early American moralistic tendency people have always called “Puritanism”.
(Also, I have always thought of it as liberals speaking to other liberals, not to Republican audiences.) A phenomenon that could be interesting to look into in a more systematic way.
somebody who remembers that "metoo" was born after the backlash against it was already stronger than it ever would become 02.23.25 at 10:04 pm
MisterMr at #69 raises, perhaps obliquely, the critical point, that “wokeism”, to re-anglify the francophone, never had power to do more than have your office racist sit and stew for an hour – being told (in the most simpering, pleading terms), not to be racist – before, immediately, being racist to anyone and everyone within earshot. every powerful guy accused of sexual misconduct during metoo, more or less, got away with all their riches and all their power and the only thing they lost was the slavish respect of a society that adored them. louis ck got multiple grammies the same year he was “cancelled by the woke mob”. dave chappelle got paid hundreds of millions of dollars to record repeated netflix specials where he just repeated the same transphobic shit over and over, and every time he was “cancelled by the woke mob”, he got another, larger paycheck. wokeism suggests that society loves racists, misogynists, transphobes and other bigots, and rewards them passionately while only giving “woke” ideas lip service at best and usually not even that. what is the evidence they’re wrong? explicit anti-wokeists control 40 states out of 50 and in the other 10 their ideas are in control. they have total power over every cultural industry and infinite money and power. what is the point in time when this wasn’t true?