Know-Nothings vs. Classical Liberals

This month, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd interviewed James Chandler about The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning for the podcast American Campus.

After providing a comprehensive overview of the Know-Nothing movement, Chandler unpacks Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment of education in America and its influence on John Stuart Mill.

Shepherd pushes back against the framework that classical liberals are the best foil to the Know-Nothings, noting that many of today’s conservative intellectuals aligned with Bannon and the new Know-Nothings have an affinity for Mill and other classical liberals. The point opens a spirited discussion about the state of American universities.

Chandler also offers some up some useful further reading: Tyler G. Abinder’s Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (Oxford University Press, 1994), Laura K. Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right (Princeton University Press, 2025), Richard Hofstadter’s classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage 1966), and Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918)—plus Tocqueville, of course.