How Did Academia Not See It Coming

Because to see it coming would have required a direct confrontation several decades ago along the central ideological dividing line within academia

I see my discourse leaves you cold;
Dear kids, I do not take offense;
Recall: the Devil, he is old,
Grow old yourselves, and he'll make sense!

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part I

One of the MAGA’s biggest misconceptions about American academia is that it’s ideologically homogeneous or a unified political bloc. This misconception stems from the fact that conservatives — and especially reactionaries — are rare in high-prestige universities. From their perspective, academia appears as an ideologically monolithic “leftist” or “liberal” entity (MAGA uses the two terms largely interchangeably) bent on imposing “woke indoctrination.”

This is simply incorrect.

The Ideological Diversity of the American Academy

Within these ivy’d halls, not monolith, but schism. Since the 1960s, there has emerged a very deep ideological divide within academia. It is not between liberals and conservatives, but rather between liberals and leftists. This distinction is mostly imperceptible to mainstream political discourse, especially on the right, yet it is crucial for understanding the internal politics of elite universities over the past half-century.

The liberals are who you think they are. They generally see the United States as having been a flawed country (like all countries) whose history nonetheless has more or less bent toward greater justice and inclusion over time. They believe in empirical inquiry, the value of the scientific method, and the generally positive value that existing American institutions offer to U.S. citizens and that American-backed international institutions offer to the world. They believe in rules-based orders, in the value of meritocracy, in respect for institutional continuity and in “win-win outcomes” through technocratic-scientific improvement and “evidence based” policy-making. They are internationalists and believers in cosmopolitan universalism. Once they make tenure, they usually find a personal peace with neoliberal capitalism, even if they acknowledge its flaws and limits. They are reformers, not revolutionaries. In the context of the now-passing order of 1980-2024, they are small-c conservatives, in the sense that they believe in and support the continuation and incremental improvement of a system that they have excelled in professionally.

By contrast, the leftists reject almost all of this — just like MAGA reactionaries, as we will get to below.

These leftists can be further divided into two main camps:

On the one hand, you have the Marxists. While Marxists are famously disputatious amongst themselves, what unifies them is a materialist critique of the capitalist system as one that is inherently oppressive and riven with contradictions that presage its undoing. These oppressions and contradictions are made manifest in the institutions of a capitalist society, not least that of the University, which is depicted as an engine of class privilege reproduction, the servant of the industrial capitalist enterprises, and the intellectual handmaiden of U.S. empire. While the Marxist generally loathe the liberals, it must be said that they are both children of the Enlightenment’s belief in meliorism, rationalism, and the pursuit of material improvement.

On the other hand, you have a motley crew of epistemic radicals. What these scholars have in common is a profound skepticism about the categorical foundations of the Enlightenment project, including the scientific method, the possibility of universal truth, and even rationality as such. Though they had intellectual antecedents going back to the 19th century, these radicals began to emerge in the 1960s and 1970s (not least in reaction to the political disappointments of 1968) under a variety of guises: radical feminism, deep ecology, post-structuralism, “the linguistic turn,” and so on.

Standpoint theory, neo-Nietzschean perspectivalism, Feyerabendian anti-foundationalism, DeManian deconstruction, etc. — all were conceptual frameworks that rejected the supposed intellectual naïveté and political oppressiveness of positivist ideas about objectivity, empiricism, and truth itself. The people espousing these ideas were, in a deep sense, hostile to the Enlightenment, which they regarded as having spawned a system that privileged instrumental reason over other bases of knowledge and power. The epistemic radicals often dislike the Marxists almost as much as they do the normie liberals, because both the Marxists and the liberals operate within the horizon of Enlightenment rationalism. (The Marxists, for their part, are also often hostile to the epistemic radicals.¹)

Unlike the Marxists, the epistemic radicals were not a political operation in the first instance (that is, a political party with a strategy for seizing power), nor were they ever forced to position themselves with respect to empowered political leaders who also laid claims to their ideas. This only made their ideas more seductive: they could enjoy the chicness of radicalism, without the baggage that accompanies the political ethic of responsibility. For those with a psychological predisposition to antinomianism, but skeptical of Marxism, anti-foundationalism was a way to reject “the man” while steering clear of the obvious failures of dialectical materialism as a live political project. This intellectual impulse arguably reached its apogee during 1990s, as the collapse of institutionalized Communism in Eastern Europe put the Marxist project into bad odor.

Varieties of Anti-foundationalism

Almost everywhere in American academia, and certainly at almost all the most prestigious universities, the central political schism, then, has been between the liberals and the radicals (in these two varieties).

For the most part, the liberals have been the predominant force, certainly within the administrations, but also within the faculty as a whole. At the university I know best — Berkeley, where I spent the whole 1990s in college and graduate school, and then later in the mid-2010s served as a senior administrator — the radical faculty probably never have amount to more than ten or fifteen percent of the total, albeit with much heavier concentrations in some fields and departments than in others.

But that ten or twenty percent has tended to be very noisy, thinking of themselves in many cases as “activist-scholars,” for whom criticizing the fecklessness of their liberal colleagues and resisting the neoliberal administration of their universities is a core part of the public identities. Many of the nuttiest things various academics have said over the years — which have been cherry-picked by rightwing media to tar the whole of academia as radical leftists — have come from this relatively small segment of the faculty. These people, it should be noted, are generally loathed (or sometimes pitied) by the mainline liberals.

Now, my friend

David A. Bell

recent posted a piece, reflecting on the incipient frontal assault on academia that the Trumpniks are about to commence with the goal of neutering the woke academy (something I have also written about in a previous post this winter), in which he makes the following observation:

Back in the 1990’s, an earlier generation of conservative critics, up in arms about the academy’s “political correctness,” warned that literary studies had been taken over by deconstructionism and other versions of “French theory” that supposedly undermined the very concept of truth. Thirty years later, the influence of this theory has faded sharply…

As an assessment of the place of anti-foundationalist epistemic radicalism within literature departments, David is of course correct. But it would be misleading to take this as a more general statement of the fate of epistemic radicalism with contemporary American life. In fact, deconstruction’s “undermining of the very concept of truth” is flourishing — specifically in vulgarian-populist-materialist form on the reactionary right. Indeed, it turns out that the epistemic radicals won, they just turned out to be not the anti-foundationalists of the left, but rather the anti-foundationalists of the right.

Signal examples of this rightwing anti-rationalism and anti-empiricism are Steve Bannon’s calls to “flood the zone with shit” and to “deconstruct” the administrative state, as well as Kellyanne Conway’s infamous line about “alternative facts.” But everything the Trumpniks are doing, from the forms of their communications to their attacks on empirical science, are essentially rooted in an anti-rationalism and anti-science that would be more embarrassing than unfamiliar to your average Latourian.

So here’s where we get to my bill of indictment, based on my own lived experience (ahem) of these debates way back in the 1990s. In those days, when I was in college and grad school at Berkeley, a standard normie liberal critique of poststructuralism was that the anti-Enlightenment epistemic radicalism of the left, while overtly trained against the complacencies of small-l liberalism, would eventually “make space” for right wing critiques of liberalism.

This was a point that Jurgen Habermas made over and over again in his many debates with the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, and others. Having been raised in Hitler’s Germany, Habermas understood very well the risks associated with abandoning discourse ethics and embracing epistemic relativism, cynicism, or even nihilism. Habermas argued that the ideas these men were promoting, allegedly “from the left,” were sapping the epistemic foundations of democratic practice, which depended on the “regulative ideal” of reasoned, good faith discourse as a mechanism for achieving a “fusion of horizons.”

I remember getting into heated arguments with fellow Berkeley students who styled themselves too “radical” for the normie compromises (and, let’s be frank, the generally lugubrious writing) of Habermasian liberalism. They scoffed at the idea that they might be serving as a cat’s paw for the emergent reactionary movement’s own anti-scientism and anti-empiricism. And yet, here we are: the epistemic radicals’ critique of liberalism set the stage for the same ideas to be adopted and weaponized by the right in the service of their own anti-liberalism, while at the same time cognitively disarming any ability to resist.

They won’t be the first or the last radicals to be consumed by their own politics.

1. With Marxists prioritizing material analysis and epistemic radicals embracing relativism, there has historically been little love lost between these two radical factions. The rubric of “intersectionality” was an attempt to form bridges between feminist “standpoint theory” and other forms of identity politics, on the one hand, and various marxisant forms of class analysis, on the other. Some forms of post-Adorno critical theory also attempted to reconcile Marxian analysis with post-foundationalism, but a lot of more old school Marxists — the sort that the critical theorists would call “vulgar” — were always skeptical if not downright hostile to the varies of “effete” Frankfurt School Marxism that had the temerity to blame modern woes on “the dialectic of Enlightenment” rather than the organization of the means of production. But they both were at least united in scorn for the lily-livered liberals and their failure to endorse a wholesale, system-level indictments of the structures of oppression.