Preface
It was not until I woke up on the morning of Wednesday, November 6, 2024, that I received the news of Donald Trump’s election to a second term. I was in London at the time to teach in the University of Chicago’s Study Abroad program, including a course on “the age of democratic revolutions” in Europe and America from the 1640s through the 1830s. The last book we read was Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, with its trenchant analysis of unbridled populism under then-President Andrew Jackson and admonition that, for all its promise, the country stood in need of a system of advanced education. The eloquent liberalism of Tocqueville’s writings about Jacksonian America could hardly fail to resonate this past year as I bore witness to an order of things under attack for being, precisely, “liberal”—the term having long since become, in certain quarters, a common slur.
When I returned home in late March, I confronted what a colleague called “the burning wreckage of American democracy” and, more particularly, what Trump—with the help of his soon-to-be abolished Department of Education—was already doing to universities. Claiming Title VI violations, the federal government had begun threatening them with the loss of federal funding, but without following the relevant Title VI procedures. I didn’t understand why, collectively and individually, universities wouldn’t defend themselves on both legal and academic grounds. Law firms and media networks were also, mystifyingly, caving without a fight. And corporate leaders and cabinet members, foreign leaders and international sports moguls, would soon be prostrating themselves, sometimes preemptively, to this president’s insatiable need for fawning and flattery. But back in early April 2025, when—with the notable exceptions of Harvard, Princeton, and Wesleyan—no American university had risen to defend itself against an onslaught of questionable legality, I was dumbfounded. What was going on?
I soon recognized a dark irony of our situation: The current attempt to take over the universities was both raising the specter of the German 1930s and simultaneously masking itself as a campaign against antisemitism. I published an essay detailing the recent history of the issue as I saw it, going back to the rampant antisemitism of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia (and Trump’s response to it) and to the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. Even before this piece appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books (June 6, 2025), I realized that my general take was already becoming widely shared, especially in the American Jewish protest movement “Not in Our Name,” which had begun that spring to take to the streets and campuses.
Still, it seemed worthwhile to offer a factual account of a deeply implausible scenario, a narrative not just about Trump and his people crusading against antisemitism but also about the mainstream media’s seeming acceptance of the ploy at face value. I followed this story up with another piece in the LARB (July 9), about the strange entanglements of the Trump administration and the “kayfabe” world of professional wrestling, with its distinctive ways of blurring realities. It centered on former World Wrestling Entertainment President Linda McMahon, now Trump’s Secretary of Education, and her recent posturing in that role toward institutions like Harvard. The dark irony at the center of this second piece resides in the absurdity that such a person should be making any decisions whatsoever about American education—and McMahon was not the most egregiously outrageous of Trump’s cabinet picks. At this point, I decided to build on these essays for a pamphlet about what I call the “new Know-Nothing” movement and its increasingly bold crusade against higher learning in America.
The first Know-Nothing movement, in the early 1850s, was pivotal for the history of American party politics. Its story provided a helpful frame, not least because certain powerful figures behind Trump, like former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, have explicitly invoked the first Know-Nothings. Bannon has of course long pressed for “America First” anti-immigration policies under a far-right “brand” that also seems to challenge learning as such—though his weirdly ironized identification with what he calls “Know-Nothing vulgarians” comes partly from his illiberal understanding of American history itself. Strange ironies abound as well in the early history of the Know-Nothings: by the 1870s, their’ American Party had long since disbanded, but its legacy lived on as oppressed Irish and German Catholic immigrants became oppressors of others in their turn. Celebrated cartoonist Thomas Nast wickedly lampooned that development. The record shows, in other words, that the grand hypocrisies of these immigrants’ descendants, Bannon and Trump, are by no means unprecedented.
“Higher learning”—a major target of the new Know-Nothing movement—might call for a gloss. A little more than a quarter-century ago, the esteemed Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, founder of this pamphlet press, recruited me for a special commission he had instigated, in the midst of a policy crisis at that university, to reflect on its mission and its future. Within this commission, three of us—Sahlins, historian William Sewell, and I—formed a little research group on higher education in the modern world. One of the texts we read and discussed was The Higher Learning in America, a 1936 publication by the thirty-seven-year-old Robert Maynard Hutchins, who by then had already been president of the University of Chicago for seven years. Hutchins’s book advocated for the private American research university, at a time when he judged many public universities to be too badly funded to fulfill their missions, especially with America’s most gifted students. But as Sahlins was quick to remind us, Hutchins borrowed the title of this book from one of the earliest and most trenchant critics of the American university, Thorstein Veblen, also a former member of the Chicago faculty. Still republished and discussed to this day, Veblen’s assessment was explicitly grounded in firsthand observation of the University of Chicago under its inaugural president, W. R. Harper. Veblen offered a precocious critique of what we now think of as the neoliberal effort to corporatize higher education, both private and public, with students understood as economic assets rather than moral or political subjects.
I have taught at the University of Chicago for nearly a half century, and, at least in certain moments, have accepted its proud self-understanding as the embodiment of the American research university—a claim that rests in part on its commitment to preserving, as many such institutions do in this country, a liberal arts college as its undergraduate “core.” In The Great American Research University (2009), sociologist (and former Columbia provost) Jonathan Cole actually singled out Chicago as its ideal type, but one doesn’t need to go that far to accept that it has long been a place where the very idea of “higher learning” has been both actively embraced and hotly contested.
The contemporary American university clearly had its share of critics before Trump came along. From the right, the culture wars salvos of Allan Bloom and Dinesh D’Souza and the pro-Israel lobbying efforts of Daniel Pipes took aim at a range of targets, from hate-speech codes to Afrocentric curricula, deconstructionist literary criticism, and “political correctness.” From the left, the renewed Veblenian critique about the corporatization of the university has grown more intense than ever: This past year’s reporting on higher education has cast the University of Chicago as a notable casualty of this trend. Marshall Sahlins could not save Chicago from falling prey to the dangers he foresaw, including those resulting from overspending. Even more than many other universities, it is now (literally) paying the price—and suffering reputational damage in the bargain.
To be clear, then, in exposing the motives and tactics of the Trump administration’s campaign against higher learning and its liberal foundations, I don’t deny the problems that plague today’s universities or downplay the contestations that animate the current debates about higher education. I do maintain that these attacks, prosecuted in such bad faith, form no part of the solution to these problems. Instead, they represent an unprecedented threat to the core values and virtues that constitute the modern university’s best hope and highest promise. A central goal of this pamphlet is to make these tactics, and the motives behind them, better understood.
One form of understanding that I offer here is simply journalistic, sorting the news in a time of rampant misinformation and deliberate efforts to “flood the zone.” By academic training, however, I am a critic and cultural historian. So I have relied on my training as a critic to engage situations marked by ironies so dark that satire itself seems at once indispensable and impossible. But I have also relied on my training as a cultural historian. The five sections of this pamphlet each attempt to come to terms with a particularly urgent threat to our institutions of knowledge, including education at all levels in addition to public media, museums, and libraries. By placing those threats in broader historical contexts, I seek to make them legible as part of the current campaign--launched by Steve Bannon and his friend and fellow conservative activist David Bossie but sustained by their successors in the Trump administration--to Make America Know-Nothing Again.
These historical contexts are ranged along different scales. Some are relatively recent, such as the Trump administration’s relation to antisemitism and its connections to the norms and practices of professional wrestling. Others reach back many centuries, to the long tradition of political satire and its distinctive ways of knowing and showing. It is the always-crucial middle distance of history, represented by the mid-nineteenth-century Know-Nothing movement, that returns as the relevant context for the last section of this pamphlet, where I consider the emergence of the modern American university in relation to the classical liberalism of Tocqueville and his friend John Stuart Mill.
In the 1830s, these two thinkers had already begun to address the seeds of tyranny in populist rhetoric during the presidency of Trump’s hero Jackson, fully two decades before the Know-Nothing movement found its moment. I remain convinced that the best version of the modern American university, now under such unprecedented attack, is a fulfillment of Mill’s early liberal hope to reconstitute institutional authority toward the end of that long “age of revolutions” on the dual foundation of principled discussion and scientific method. But I also follow UC Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown in distinguishing this classical liberal university, especially in its public form, from a new version that began to have its values hollowed out by neoliberalism long before Trump and Bannon and McMahon came along. Brown’s critique, which dates to a decade ago, itself looks back on the 1960s as higher education’s heyday.
I began with a mention of my teaching in Chicago’s Study Abroad program. I want to end by rejecting any suggestion that such an experience turns the students who share it into “elitist globalists” or counts on students who already are. Study abroad may still, alas, be considered a relatively privileged experience in expanding intellectual horizons, but what matters most in it is inseparable from a sound curriculum in liberal education. One three-hour class in my democracies course was given over to the students’ reenactments of the various positions in one of the earliest debates about democracy in the Anglophone world, carried out by members of Oliver Cromwell’s army after his defeat of the Royalist forces and the capture of King Charles I in 1647. The victorious army stopped at Putney on the outskirts of London and, for three days in St. Mary’s Church on the south bank of the Thames, aired the arguments of those early modern democrats called the Levellers, radical Puritans whose parents had not gone to America in 1620 but stayed behind to fight their battles at home.
How should modern political representation be structured after the defeat of Royalism? What should be the fate of a king in an aspiring republic? Was owning property an appropriate basis for electoral participation? I assigned students to teams representing various roles in the debate irrespective of their varied socioeconomic backgrounds and ideological proclivities. Some left-leaning students argued the republican (lowercase) position on grounding the right to vote in property. Some right-leaning students argued the Levellers’ case for universal franchise. After the morning’s class in Central London, we took the Tube out to the church in Putney to be in “the room where it happened.” Once there, the students began to play their morning roles all over again, spontaneously speechifying to one another. In the intellectual space of the classroom, and again in the historic space of St. Mary’s church, they were opening up new vistas on their previously settled views—historical, geographical, and ideological—and of course on the lives they’d soon return to back in America.
This kind of horizon expansion is one of the greatest benefits of the modern liberal arts, as Tocqueville and Mill were among the first to see. For democracies to succeed, such benefits must be pursued with zeal and made available to ever-widening citizen cohorts. The problem is not that this experience, at home and abroad, is available to too many students, as the illiberal antiglobalists insist. The problem is that it is available to too few. Would it cost a lot of money—public and private—to scale it up for broader participation? Yes, an educated citizenry is an expensive proposition. But what better cause to spend the money on—another energy-guzzling AI data center? a new fleet of jets for ICE deportations? a $400 million gilded ballroom for our royal family?
