[SPEAKER_02]: From the nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weiner, later in the show, a tanking Harvard is not unique to Trump. [SPEAKER_02]: For decades, indeed for centuries, American politicians have made hay by going after Harvard. [SPEAKER_02]: Historian Beverly Gage will talk about [SPEAKER_02]: what's familiar and what's new in Trump's efforts.
[SPEAKER_02]: Based on a reconsideration of Richard Hofsteader's classic 1963 book, Anti-intellectualism in American life. [SPEAKER_02]: But first, how we defeated Trump in his effort to silence Jimmy Kimmel. [SPEAKER_02]: Last week after Trump's approval ratings hit new lows, he made it clear he's trying to stop speech that criticizes him in his administration.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was a week that began with J.D. [SPEAKER_02]: Vance complaining about an article in the nation that criticized the ideas of Charlie Kirk. [SPEAKER_02]: Then two days after that ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel and on Monday a protest movement forced ABC to put him back on the air. [SPEAKER_02]: For comment we turned [SPEAKER_02]: He's president of the nation magazine.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's also founding editor of Jacoban, author of the book, The Socialist Manifesto, regular contributor to the Guardian, also writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, lots of other places. [SPEAKER_02]: Baskar, welcome back. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, the big news this week is that the boycott of Disney, demanding that they bring back Jimmy Kimmel succeeded. [SPEAKER_02]: ABC started airing Jimmy Kimmel again on Tuesday this week in response to a wave of protest.
[SPEAKER_02]: at least five Hollywood unions, collectively representing more than 400,000 workers, publicly condemned the screenwriters' guild organized a picket line outside the main gate at Disney headquarters in Burbank. [SPEAKER_02]: 500 celebrities signed the ACLU's Open Letter, [SPEAKER_02]: In defense of free speech, it included big names like Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, and a consumer boycott began of Disney streaming.
[SPEAKER_02]: The boycott against Disney, the parent company of ABC, as measured by internet searches for cancelled Disney Plus, [SPEAKER_02]: was four times as large as any similar boycott over the past five years, and Disney's market value dropped by almost $4 billion. [SPEAKER_02]: So if you said to me a week ago, let's organize a consumer boycott in defense of free speech. [SPEAKER_02]: I would not have been very optimistic about it.
[SPEAKER_02]: So how do you think this outpouring of protest defeated Trump? [SPEAKER_00]: To begin with, there's a reason why we all believe in liberal values like free speech. [SPEAKER_00]: But why many of us go beyond that sort of negative freedom, because obviously in our society, [SPEAKER_00]: you need some sort of money or claim to resources in order to truly exercise your freedom of speech. [SPEAKER_00]: In the case of ABC, they got pressured by some right wing affiliate owners of theirs.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were afraid about the lost income from advertisement if they weren't running Kimmel's show. [SPEAKER_00]: They were also pressured by the government, which is obviously more disturbing. [SPEAKER_00]: Or more uncommon, I should say, [SPEAKER_00]: And now, of course, they're facing pressure from the other side. [SPEAKER_00]: They're facing pressure from a labor union and they're facing pressures from consumers.
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess they wait that they're more afraid of the latter than the former. [SPEAKER_00]: So I would say that in general, I think consumer boycotts are only useful if they're connected with some sort of tied labor or some sort of organized progressive group. [SPEAKER_00]: So of course, this is not the United Farm Workers campaign. [SPEAKER_00]: But at the very least, does show a willingness in civil society to resist what Trump is doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think we should be cynical about that. [SPEAKER_00]: We shouldn't take it for granted. [SPEAKER_00]: If you look at other countries, you look at Turkey, you look at a Brazil under Bolsonaro, you look at India under Modi. [SPEAKER_00]: We shouldn't take for granted that this civil resistance will exist. [SPEAKER_00]: We're seeing it now in the United States, but at the very least, it's demonstrating to Trump and its supporters that there are limits to what they can do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we're in a situation where I both don't want to overstate how far along the road to fascism or authoritarianism the US is. [SPEAKER_00]: But it is deeply disturbing the Donald Trump wants to take us along that road. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think [SPEAKER_00]: that in itself, she should be very boring to us, but I am happy to see any sort of civil resistance to his agenda.
[SPEAKER_02]: And then let's talk about the article in the nation that J.D. [SPEAKER_02]: Vance was attacking. [SPEAKER_02]: It was by Elizabeth Spires. [SPEAKER_02]: It was headline Charlie Kirk's legacy deserves no mourning.
[SPEAKER_02]: And she concludes quote, I won't celebrate his death, but I'm not obligated to celebrate his life, [SPEAKER_02]: Vance said, quote, it made it through the editors, and of course, liberal billionaires rewarded that attack, close quote, and he cited in particularly George Sorris' open society foundations and the Ford Foundation as funders of the nation. [SPEAKER_02]: And then other Trump people suggested they would go after all the liberal foundations.
[SPEAKER_02]: trying to deny their tax-exempt status as a non-profits. [SPEAKER_02]: But you're the president of the nation, let me get this straight. [SPEAKER_02]: You sent that article about Charlie Kirk to George Sorrows for his approval, and then he sent a check. [SPEAKER_00]: Well, John, I think you and I know this better than most, but it's worth saying that the nation would love to receive money from George Soros or any other donor that respected our editorial independence.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not, in fact, funded by the Open Society Foundations. [SPEAKER_00]: We were funded once, I believe, a one-time donation in 2019 in the amount of $100,000. [SPEAKER_00]: It's all public record by the Ford Foundation to support our interim program. [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, we're deeply grateful for that, but that amounted to about 1% of our budget that year.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the nation's a publication that has run losses and all but I believe three, [SPEAKER_00]: of its 160 years. [SPEAKER_00]: So the 100,000 really does make a difference. [SPEAKER_00]: It does change what we're able to do. [SPEAKER_00]: But I think what J.D. [SPEAKER_00]: Vance was trying to do is one. [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, the anti-Semitic dog whistle against George Soros.
[SPEAKER_00]: Through some magic trick, the right has turned a Hungarian banker who is a lifelong anti-communist into a Marxist pop and master. [SPEAKER_00]: And the slide of hand, the magic trick of, of course, just a classic trove of antisemitism and kind of Judeo Bolshevism and Vance's too smart to really believe that, but he's going along with it to cater to his base.
[SPEAKER_00]: But they're saying that also in part because they want to make it seem like there's no organic audience for left-wing opinion in the United States. [SPEAKER_00]: When we look at the media ecosystem in the US, I think neither of us are afraid to say that [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there's a real audience for places like Breitbart in the Daily Collar.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of people who are politicized by issues of immigration, by all sorts of cultural and economic issues, and are on the Trump aside. [SPEAKER_00]: That's a political problem. [SPEAKER_00]: We have to confront kind of whenever those that can be won over and how to politically isolate the others so they can't cause damage to [SPEAKER_00]: to the American, you know, Republican or broader egalitarian, you know, agenda.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, uh, but I think on the right, there is a tendency to depict everything that happens left to center as being astro-turfed but big foundations and big money when an honest accounting would say that, [SPEAKER_00]: you know, the institutions like the nation are not particularly well funded, especially in comparison to our peers on the right, like turning points, USA and also our more centrist pairs in the media ecosystem.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that's the first thing that warrants correction. [SPEAKER_00]: But as for the article itself, [SPEAKER_00]: the difficulty of writing something about someone who so recently died. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think there's a reason why we publish on someone like Charlie Kirk. [SPEAKER_00]: It's because he's a public figure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And immediately when that assassination happened, like a lot of Americans, my first thought turned to [SPEAKER_00]: Just the fact that this is a horrible thing for a republic for someone engaging in politics and debate to be gunned down, especially in front of an audience of students and people we want to engage in politics and exchanging ideas. [SPEAKER_00]: It was horrific at so many different levels and I think I think bad for our society.
[SPEAKER_00]: the right is going to immediately and did immediately turn him into not only a martyr but a saint. [SPEAKER_00]: And at that point because he's a public figure, we need to examine while all the attentions on him and while the rights creating a narrative of what he was about are analysis of what he stood for and what he devoted his political life to.
[SPEAKER_00]: This isn't a tax on his personal life or anything, you know, this is a debate about the life and legacy of a public figure. [SPEAKER_00]: who tried to do mass politics, and I think it's very much fair game, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like any topic like this, it should be a pro-sensitively, with an eye towards winning over not just a 20% of left-wing partisans in the country, a 20% of right-wing partisans, but this 60% of Americans in the middle who were looking at this tragedy, probably didn't hear about, or know about Charlie Kirk before he died. [SPEAKER_00]: But our sensitive to the hyperpolarized tone of a lot of commentary and just discussion about politics in the country.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the more significant aspects of all of this was the Trump administration. [SPEAKER_02]: suggesting at least that they were going to go after the liberal foundations and try to deny them of their tax exempt status because they support groups that are critical of Trump supposedly.
[SPEAKER_00]: The disturbing thing is that he wants to use the tools of the state to clamp down on descent, and I think the institutions of American republicanism are holding up this time around to some degree. [SPEAKER_00]: I think it held up better in his first term. [SPEAKER_00]: It's holding up a little bit worse in his second term. [SPEAKER_00]: But what's going to happen in 20 years or 30 years?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, this is the trajectory that the [SPEAKER_00]: As far as how they've traditionally gone after organizations of the left before and publications in particular, almost every publication in the US that's in print is dependent on the periodical status from the US Postal Service. [SPEAKER_00]: So that's another tool that has been wielded in times during the first red scare. [SPEAKER_00]: They actually prohibited the post office from sending out certain publications.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of avenues I can use. [SPEAKER_00]: The nation thankfully is not organized as a non-profit organization. [SPEAKER_00]: We are dependent on periodological status and our mailing privileges, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: Reagan did believe in his administration try to go after mother Jones's non-profit status and then mother Jones beat back that attempt to [SPEAKER_00]: So I do think that we need to be prepared to defend the first organization, or probably won't be the nation, but the first organization that is targeted unfairly by the Trump administration. [SPEAKER_00]: Also, we have to be consistent across all lines.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Obama administration, a lot of these Tea Party nonprofits were engaged in very explicit politicized activity. [SPEAKER_00]: So the Obama IRS did go after them as far as I could tell, I didn't have it studied it deeply. [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of there was some merit to some of these these cases. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, obviously we don't want, believe in a kind of a tit-for-tat attack on either side and civil society.
[SPEAKER_00]: But my big worry, John, is when I think about my own politics, so the people that I know that have come out of far-left mil-use, we're essentially [SPEAKER_00]: Liberals to some degree, right? [SPEAKER_00]: We are, we have reconciled socialism and liberalism. [SPEAKER_00]: So in my case, I come from a socialist political background as you as you know, so in other words, if you give us absolute power, that was still be tomorrow a free speech.
[SPEAKER_00]: The liberal rights will be protected and you would still have multiple party democracy. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, you might not like what will do to property rights or this that or the other policy, but that would happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you gave someone like Donald Trump or a lot of these figures in the right, especially figures like Stephen Miller who just flat out, form were scary than Donald Trump just in terms of his rhetoric and the sorts of things he invokes, I honestly believe we would live under fascism. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I really don't believe they have any respect for liberal norms or rights. [SPEAKER_00]: And that's deeply disturbing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The polarization in the country is not even. [SPEAKER_00]: One side is radicalized a lot more than the other. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, one of the key steps that's particularly ominous, the Trump has just taken was on Monday when he declared Antifa a domestic terrorist group. [SPEAKER_02]: Now, the United States does not have a domestic terrorism law. [SPEAKER_02]: There is no such thing as a list of domestic terrorist groups which are banned.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Trump doesn't have any authority to designate what he calls Antifa. [SPEAKER_02]: is as a foreign terrorist organization without approval of Congress, but let's go back a step is there an organization in America that calls itself in Tifa. [SPEAKER_02]: I thought it was more an ideological term. [SPEAKER_00]: There's no organization that calls itself an antifa. [SPEAKER_00]: It is an ideological anti-fascist term.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about opposition to right-wing politics, opposition to fascism. [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of these people who have used that identification in the past are anarchists, some are communists or socialist. [SPEAKER_00]: There's been, you would say mass movements, particularly in German, post-war Germany, and other places that have used a lot of the banner.
[SPEAKER_00]: anti-fascism, I think there's a willingness to engage in direct action by a lot of these people with this ideology to disrupt fascist marches and organization, just basically, I think part of their theory is we can't afford to kind of let fascism grow and be acceptable as political opinion.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to kind of try to stomp it out in its grassroots and we can agree or disagree without a approach, I think generally, [SPEAKER_00]: I think that the banner and defense of free speech is not only, you know, a free speech of course, short of direct excitement is not only a good in and of itself, but I also think it puts a left in the long run on a better political terrain. [SPEAKER_00]: But there certainly is no organization or no hierarchy.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no movement structure here. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, these are very loose networks. [SPEAKER_00]: These are networks that are ideologically anarchists. [SPEAKER_00]: So it's like, by nature, they're not trying to elect some sort of central committee and take marching orders. [SPEAKER_00]: And some sort of Lenin's way. [SPEAKER_00]: So both in theory and practice, it doesn't make any sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And also, it doesn't take [SPEAKER_00]: money to organize a protest and and can go after a fascist group. [SPEAKER_00]: It just, it doesn't make sense at any level. [SPEAKER_00]: I think from what I can tell the vast majority of anti-fascist activity in the U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: is legally protected activity to the extent anti-fascist and gauge in direct action that crosses certain lines. [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, that's individual questions and individual police issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: even with organizations that have had real form. [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know anyone in the left that believes in a band for even like the KKK and outright band. [SPEAKER_00]: So I think that historically we've been at least since the 1950s, the left has formerly been on the right side of a lot of these free speech issues and we should continue to be.
[SPEAKER_02]: A lot of people say that what's happened in the last week is a significant escalation of Trump's efforts to move in a fascist direction. [SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's important to ask, why is this happening now? [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's because Trump's popularity continues to decline. [SPEAKER_02]: He's incredibly unpopular. [SPEAKER_02]: His favorability ratings have dropped 23 points since he took office, according to this week's polls.
[SPEAKER_02]: He's the most unpopular president in American history. [SPEAKER_02]: Americans oppose pretty much everything he does. [SPEAKER_02]: Let me just give you a couple of highlights from the approval polls. [SPEAKER_02]: Do favor or oppose Trump sending troops to American cities? [SPEAKER_02]: Favor 42% oppose 58%. [SPEAKER_02]: Do you favor or oppose Trump's tariffs? [SPEAKER_02]: Favor 38% oppose 62%. [SPEAKER_02]: Do you approve or disapprove of the way Trump is handling free speech?
[SPEAKER_02]: Approve 35% disapprove 55% and this extends even to the people who are part of his coalition. [SPEAKER_02]: Young people, Latinos, independence, all disapprove of him by dramatic margins right now. [SPEAKER_02]: Even among Republicans, among Republicans 45 or younger, 61% this week said the country has [SPEAKER_02]: knows this. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, I think it's very clear that he has a minoritarian agenda.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very clear that there's a lot of opposition to what he's doing. [SPEAKER_00]: It's very clear that even when those violence in the country that people can't attribute to the to the right wing or the Trumpist right, [SPEAKER_00]: a lot of people associated with kind of the breakdown and extreme polarization that Trump has has fostered.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look now when he's doing the very erratic public health messaging around vaccines and so when it's really undermining a lot of institutions in the U.S. [SPEAKER_00]: and this is all before the true impact of his economic policies are felt by ordinary Americans. [SPEAKER_00]: So the tariff policy, a lot of the impact hasn't been felt yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: a lot of the impact of what he's doing to the deficit and the cuts to the social safety net, at the same time we're giving massive giveaways to the ultra-rich. [SPEAKER_00]: This won't be implemented and really seen for a couple years to come. [SPEAKER_00]: So I think Trump will be long gone by the time we were dealing with a lot of these consequences and the consequences might manifest itself in the fact that we might have a democratic administration in Congress.
[SPEAKER_00]: some time in the early 2030s, it's unable to get anything done. [SPEAKER_00]: The can't do the kind of deficit spending that Biden did. [SPEAKER_00]: The can't do the kind of big ambitious plans that at least Obama said he was going to do early on in his term. [SPEAKER_00]: So I think there's a lot bad here.
[SPEAKER_00]: where I worry about just following the numbers is the general trend of American politics is towards a kind of rejection of politicians of all types across the spectrum. [SPEAKER_00]: Democrats are very unpopular, Congress is very unpopular. [SPEAKER_00]: Democratic politicians are not there ready to kind of step in and fill the void.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we might just be at a point where [SPEAKER_00]: even though Trump is historic levels of disapproval, we have to also factor in the net, how far below the median Democrat is he or the median member of Congress is he? [SPEAKER_00]: I think we're kind of getting to the point where there's a lot of distrust and governments in the state as a whole. [SPEAKER_00]: And along with, obviously, this terrain benefits the right.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it will only encourage a certain tendency of American politics to say we need a stronger executive. [SPEAKER_00]: people don't trust this civil service and the civil service is all gutted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then maybe people one day want not I kind of good smart social democratic government but instead they might want a better different version of Trump who's willing to cut through the bureaucracy and deliver things for the people and I think unfortunately that's a trend that American democracy is headed towards. [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think I think Zaron is a generational politician and his ability to communicate with people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I sometimes get the pleasure of when we have members of Congress visiting from DC, they come to New York and whenever they want to do a meet and greet with members of the kind of social movement left and others. [SPEAKER_00]: a few of them at least trust me to arrange these meetings. [SPEAKER_00]: So I arranged a meeting, I won't say with whom, but with a couple, two members of Congress, Zoron, and some social movement activists.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after that meeting, this must have been December 2023, or January 2024, I told Zoron, he was the best national politician at the table. [SPEAKER_00]: You know, he was the most impressive one. [SPEAKER_00]: Just a, it is charisma and speaking whatever and I suggested that, you know, maybe you should run for Congress soon and obviously he had bigger and better things planned for himself, but I think he's a truly dynamic figure.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of enthusiasm around politics in New York and I should say this is what a politicized society looks like that that is, that is a good one. [SPEAKER_00]: people are wearing their own shirts, but the messages are all friendly and inclusive. [SPEAKER_00]: If you look at even his favorability rate and one poll among Republican voters, he was plus one in favorability, so not that favorable, but all things considered plus one.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you talk to ordinary foreign voters about who their number two is at some sort of glib personal level, they're like, well, courtesy what the Republican candidate seems to get honest guy. [SPEAKER_00]: It kind of is a throwback to what politics could be. [SPEAKER_00]: which is, you know, better about a positive program isn't about trying to hunt for enemies. [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it just makes it an easier thing to do. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a fun thing to go to as a run event.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, he had thousands of people doing a scavenger hunt that his team put together on last minute. [SPEAKER_00]: It is basically, I hate to use this word because I feel like the Harris campaign almost ruined it. [SPEAKER_00]: But it's a joyful campaign. [SPEAKER_00]: and it's one that I think we should really be proud of and I think we're gonna be studying for many years to come on the left. [SPEAKER_00]: It really is a landmark that, you know, seemingly came out of nowhere.
[SPEAKER_02]: Buscar Sincara, he's president of the nation. [SPEAKER_02]: Buscar, thank you for talking with us today. [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me, John. [SPEAKER_02]: Trump intensified his attacks on Harvard last week, placing the school under something called heightened cash monitoring, and threatening further enforcement action if the school does not turn over records to prove it's no longer considering race in admissions.
[SPEAKER_02]: And of course this comes after Trump cut 2.6 billion in research funding to Harvard, and after Harvard has been winning a court case to get those funds back. [SPEAKER_02]: but attacking Harvard is hardly unique to Trump. [SPEAKER_02]: For decades, indeed for centuries American politicians have made hay by going after Harvard and indeed going after professors and intellectuals in general. [SPEAKER_02]: For comment, we turn to Beverly Gage.
[SPEAKER_02]: She teaches history at Yale, and her book on J. Edgar Hoover titled G-Man, received the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. [SPEAKER_02]: We talked about it here. [SPEAKER_02]: Factors, one of our best segments of the year. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's a pleasure to say. [SPEAKER_02]: Beverly Gage, welcome back. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, John. [SPEAKER_01]: It's great to be here.
[SPEAKER_02]: You wrote recently about anti-intellectualism in American life, but that's not an original idea of yours. [SPEAKER_01]: That's correct. [SPEAKER_01]: I was writing about a very famous book by the historian Richard Hofstatter, anti-intellectualism in American life.
[SPEAKER_01]: The book came out in 1963 in a very different political moment, a very different moment for [SPEAKER_01]: higher education, but I thought it would be an interesting time to return to that book and see what it had to say that might be useful today. [SPEAKER_02]: Well, we don't want to say there's nothing new about Trump's attack on Harvard and all of higher education, but before we talk about what's new, let's talk about the pattern that we find in history.
[SPEAKER_02]: How far back did Hofstra der Goe [SPEAKER_01]: He went back before there was a United States of America. [SPEAKER_01]: So criticism of Harvard, of higher education, suspicion of educational elites, he really traced back to very early in the country's history. [SPEAKER_01]: Before it was even a country, [SPEAKER_01]: And I think there were a couple of things that were quite interesting to me about the book that on the one hand. [SPEAKER_01]: He's tracing a lot of these continuities.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, when this book usually comes up in conversation, it says, shorthand, you know, Americans, they're all a bunch of rooms and always have been. [SPEAKER_01]: They've never liked their professors, but actually half-stutters book is much more interesting than that. [SPEAKER_01]: And that was the piece of it that I really wanted to lean into. [SPEAKER_01]: and think about and write about in our moment.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's note that eight presidents of the United States have graduated from Harvard or at least different parts of Harvard. [SPEAKER_02]: They include theater Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush, in Barack Obama, George W. Bush actually went to Yale [SPEAKER_02]: There you go. [SPEAKER_02]: And Obama, of course, went to Columbia, but then went to Harvard Law, so he counts too.
[SPEAKER_02]: You have a favorite sentence in Hofstetter's book, Anti-intellectualism in American Life. [SPEAKER_02]: Please read it to us. [SPEAKER_01]: This was one of the senses that really struck me as an essential theme of the book. [SPEAKER_01]: As I said, it's often talked about as Hofstetter's great critique of ordinary Americans, but a very large part of the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: is a critique of his fellow academics and intellectuals, and this sentence really stood out to me in that context. [SPEAKER_01]: He said, quote, it is rare for an American intellectual to confront handedly the unresolvable conflict between the elite character of his own class and his democratic aspirations. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's hard for you and me to deny that this is true in our own day as well as in 1963.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think that he articulated very well one of the challenges of being an academic and intellectual in a broad democratic society, which is that certain forms of educational training are by their very nature, the creation of a certain kind of elite. [SPEAKER_01]: a certain kind of expertise, a certain kind of authority at least in theory, and of course one of the things that we were seeing in Hothsteader's moment that we're seeing today.
[SPEAKER_01]: Again, is a debate about whether that expertise and that authority and that elite nature is deserved, is worthwhile, [SPEAKER_01]: is something that anybody actually wants. [SPEAKER_01]: And I think we're having a deep contest over that in the way that they were, especially in the 1950s, which is what Hofstetter was responding to. [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so historians love historical context.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's talk about the historical context in which Hofstetter were, [SPEAKER_02]: wrote anti-intellectualism in American life. [SPEAKER_02]: You said it was published in 1963, but his concern really was the 50s and, of course, Joe McCarthy, who had actually fallen from power almost 10 years before the book was published.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he was writing the book at a moment when many of the battles he was describing had had in some sense been resolved at least temporarily for a few years or for a particular generation. [SPEAKER_01]: But what really concerned him was the rise of McCarthyism, the kinds of pressures that that put on universities and particularly on questions of speech in the 1950s.
[SPEAKER_01]: particularly for those on the left, but also the ways in which that was a kind of bottom-up phenomenon and had produced all sorts of critiques of intellectuals, educated people, not only as Marxists and Stalinists, but as a feat, as worthless, as undemocratic, a whole range of critiques that we see that resonate throughout a lot of other periods of American history, too. [SPEAKER_02]: There was one presidential election during the heyday of Joe McCarthy.
[SPEAKER_02]: That was 1952 where we had a conflict between one candidate who was at least regarded as an intellectual and one who was not, Adly Stephenson, the governor of Illinois versus Mike, who had been president of Columbia but was thought of as a military man more than as a scholar. [SPEAKER_01]: Right, it's a little funny to look back on the Eisenhower Stevenson campaigns of which there were two as these high dramas, right, to us there may be a little bit of a punchline.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe among the least interesting presidential campaigns of the 20th century, but the stakes seemed very high at the time. [SPEAKER_01]: And in fact, the repudiation of Adley Stevenson was considered to be a repudiation. [SPEAKER_01]: of the thinking man as Hofstetter would have put it. [SPEAKER_01]: And as many mid-century liberals understood it. [SPEAKER_01]: Now, of course, Eisenhower turned out to be pretty great for higher education.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so, I really think Eisenhower's getting a bad rap here. [SPEAKER_01]: He certainly helped produce some of the federal funding system that came to be so important. [SPEAKER_01]: But for Hofstetter in that moment, this was a ferocious contest and he really felt that the intelligentsia had lost. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I was trying to remember, was Stevenson actually an intellectual? [SPEAKER_01]: Well, he, I think, liked to present himself as a man of ideas.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I think he was quite beloved by liberal intellectuals in particular in his moment. [SPEAKER_02]: He, I think he spoke in long sentences and paragraphs. [SPEAKER_01]: Right. [SPEAKER_01]: He might be the worst kind of intellectual. [SPEAKER_01]: He didn't win elections. [SPEAKER_01]: And he was pretty incomprehensible, so. [SPEAKER_02]: And even in the 1950s, Hofstetter could see that the attacks on the campus Marxists were really about something else, please explain.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, during the 1950s, of course, at the height of the red scare, the accusation that universities were harboring communists in literal sense, right, that there were members of the Communist Party on the faculty, primarily, to some degree, in the student population. [SPEAKER_01]: But also that universities were hotbeds of communistic, [SPEAKER_01]: ideas much more broadly conceived.
[SPEAKER_01]: This was really the central charge of its moment during the Redscare and the Cold War. [SPEAKER_01]: And Hofstetter's case is that, look, there were some communist professors, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: There are ways in which he openly acknowledged that, [SPEAKER_01]: universities tend to lean more left than a lot of other sectors of society, but he also saw the attacks as very politically motivated, in that case partly a matter of partisan politics, being deployed by the Republican Party, by figures like Joe McCarthy, and then also part of a much broader attack on kind of liberal authority on the new deal.
[SPEAKER_01]: particularly on this whole generation that had really come into power with the New Deal all these professors, economists, and sociologists, and thinkers, and commenters who had entered the New Deal state, had played such significant roles, and he saw this as part a matter of going after that world and not the, you know, the six actual Marxists on campus. [SPEAKER_02]: and of course Eisenhower was the first time the Republicans had been in power since FDR had been elected in 1932.
[SPEAKER_02]: The new deal had been triumphant. [SPEAKER_02]: FDR served four terms then his vice president Truman served one at last the Republicans were back and they wanted to reopen the [SPEAKER_02]: question of the new deal, which had dominated American society for much of the lifetime of a lot of Americans at that point. [SPEAKER_02]: So the new deal was very much on the agenda of the Republicans at their first moment that they could try to overthrow it.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's right, and in that first Eisenhower election, it wasn't just that Eisenhower was elected as the Congress of the Canadian Republican for the first time, and actually only quite briefly, by 1954, the House had gone back to being a democratic majority, which it would stay until 1994.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, for 40 years, we had a democratic majority in the house, a different world of politics, certainly than people are used to today, but that moment in the early and mid-1950s was a moment of really fierce partisan contest in controversy. [SPEAKER_02]: And you say that in the face of McCarthyite attacks on the university in the 50s, Hofstetter worried that his fellow academics were no good at defending themselves in the real world of political power.
[SPEAKER_02]: What did he say about that? [SPEAKER_01]: think I mentioned already how much of the book is actually about that kind of critique.
[SPEAKER_01]: He felt that the left in particular was much more interested in first of all its own internal [SPEAKER_01]: And in feeling like it had the righteous position rather than coming up with a set of ideas and coalitions that we're going to make it really effective in American politics and effective at defending what it was that he thought was so important about intellectual life and the place of the university in democracy.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, we can see many ways in which Trump is following a time-worn Republican strategy in attacking Harvard and universities in general. [SPEAKER_02]: But there are some parts of Trump's campaign that are completely new and extremely dangerous. [SPEAKER_02]: seems to be first on the list of is the massive cuts in research funding. [SPEAKER_02]: Our obviously number one never before has a president cut funds for curing cancer.
[SPEAKER_01]: One of the strange things about this moment is that it is the dismantling of that earlier moment. [SPEAKER_01]: Right, so that part of what ended up happening in the 1950s is that the broader context changed the Soviets put Sputnik up into the sky and Americans got worried and so even though the 50s were in some ways this moment of [SPEAKER_01]: anti-intellectualism as Hofstetter put it.
[SPEAKER_01]: They became a moment where there was a very fast turn toward science in particular, toward these new structures of federal funding, toward the expansion of higher education. [SPEAKER_01]: And so when we look back on that now, many people see [SPEAKER_01]: the moment that he's writing actually as the golden age of American higher education and it really is the roots of the system of federal funding particularly for science that is now being dismantled in so many ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: And Trump says his goal in cutting billions of scientific and medical research runs is to punish Harvard and other schools for failing to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism on campus. [SPEAKER_02]: That was not exactly a theme of Joe McCarthy's. [SPEAKER_01]: That was not a theme of Joe McCarthy's, that is a hundred percent true.
[SPEAKER_02]: And while Trump says he wants to protect Jewish students, that goes along with this attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion in his demand that universities abolish DEI policies as a condition of receiving federal funds. [SPEAKER_02]: Now that, of course, is an attack, first of all, on admitting non-white students, the idea [SPEAKER_02]: white students was really never made explicit in the 50s in the way that Trump is doing it now with the campaign against DEI.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do think the question of who deserves access to higher education in this country. [SPEAKER_01]: whether you're talking about race, whether you're talking about gender, whether you're talking about class, and then within the world of higher education, who deserves access to the very top, the most elite institutions.
[SPEAKER_01]: We are seeing particular variations on that struggle right now, but that fundamental set of questions has been very contested, and is only becoming more contested as higher education, [SPEAKER_01]: In some sense becomes more important in American life, one of the reasons that we are seeing this debate about higher education is in part that over the last 20 or 30 years so many people have been told that it's the only way to access. [SPEAKER_01]: the American good life.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so it's, in some sense, no surprise that the question of who can afford it, who has access to what's taught in these institutions would become a political issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: So we are seeing a particularly intensive, and in many ways, quite troubling variation on that now, but that has been a really important question for a long time, and it's fundamentally not only a question [SPEAKER_01]: about universities and what they do, but it's a question about the broader society and what it values and how it understands itself as a social system.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of McCarthyism's goals was to purge [SPEAKER_02]: people with radical ideas from government employment, and this was something actually that Democrats went along with in some respects, and McCarthy did get thousands of people fired from government jobs on the grounds that they were radicals, also in the grounds that they were gay. [SPEAKER_02]: Trump, of course, has fired many more people from government jobs, but just on the grounds that they had government jobs.
[SPEAKER_02]: There were no individual loyalty hearings case by case of the kind that we associate with McCarthyism, and that seems to be a significant difference. [SPEAKER_01]: the scale of what's happening now is quite different, but from the moment that the new deal was created, its political opponents had a critique of the bureaucracy of the administrative state, first of all, as itself being undemocratic, as being full of unaccountable bureaucrats, as being full of experts who only talked
[SPEAKER_01]: to each other and work responsive to politics and in particular for Republicans that the executive branch, the administrative state, was a kind of boondoggle for liberal due gooders who were going to vote democratic. [SPEAKER_01]: So it is true that the scale of what we're seeing now looks quite different, but that fundamental critique, which is so present in our own time, has a pretty deep history.
[SPEAKER_02]: In your piece in the New York Times, you give the Hofstetter the last word. [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I love this quote because it is, it's a sort of two cheers for intellectuals kind of quote in which he is both trying to affirm with everything he has and everything he holds dear how important education intellectual life in the freest possible way is to any democratic society.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, his, his friends and comrades should maybe engage in some of the critique and self critique that they are so happy to apply to other people. [SPEAKER_01]: So I just really loved this quote, which I will read to you. [SPEAKER_01]: This is from Hofsteader. [SPEAKER_01]: I have no desire to encourage the self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon.
[SPEAKER_01]: But one does not need to assert this or to assert that intellectuals could get sweeping indulgence or exercise great power in order to insist that respect for intellect and its functions is important to the culture and the health of any society. [SPEAKER_02]: Richard Hofsteader gets the last word. [SPEAKER_02]: Beverly Gages essay on Richard Hofsteader's book, anti-intellectualism in American life, is titled, The American University is in crisis, not for the first time.
[SPEAKER_02]: It appeared in the New York Times where it's available online. [SPEAKER_02]: Beth, thanks for this piece, and thanks for talking with us today. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me back. [SPEAKER_02]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from The Nation magazine. [SPEAKER_02]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer, Jack Merkinson is Executive Producer.
[SPEAKER_02]: Baskar Sunkara is President of The Nation, Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of The Nation. [SPEAKER_02]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobe, License by Creative Commons. [SPEAKER_02]: You can find out more about Start Making Sense at The Nation.com. [SPEAKER_02]: And you can subscribe to start making sense on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm John Weener. [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for listening.