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First They Came for Harvard

The right's long and all-too-unanswered war on liberal institutions
claims a big one.

What was right-wing super-saboteur Christopher Rufo up to in leading the
conspiracy to get Harvard president Claudine Gay fired? That's not a
tough question to answer. He sees Ivy League universities and their peer
institutions as among America's most powerful xxxxxxs of liberal
power; he and his colleagues consider liberalism evil; so Harvard had to
be gutted like a fish.

Can we have the forthrightness to allow that Rufo is one-third correct
here? That, however often they might honor liberal values in the breach,

**liberalism**, in its broadest and best sense, is what great
universities are all about. Whether it's pursuing scientific truth as
governed by the impersonal eye of peer review; or pursuing critical
scholarship and education on America's democratic prospects
;
or inculcating cosmopolitan values; or opening opportunity to talent and
not just incumbent privilege (that one, alas, is oh, so honored in the
breach
);
or chartering projects to repair injustice
-or
simply by subsidizing human curiosity and creativity independent of what
the capitalist marketplace thinks of the results: These are the things
that make liberal education actually

**liberal**. And most of all, universities are crucibles for young
adults to forge their own values, try on identities, and choose their
own way in life-even if a student comes out the other end as a
conservative. Which is perfectly OK, if you're a liberal, because
providing tools for individuals to become themselves is another core
value of liberalism in that best and broadest sense.

Dig beneath the surface claims and the sophistry of why conservatives
attack universities, and it is this, the

**liberalism**, that they cannot abide. So Rufo was doing what movement
conservatism has always done, as long as movement conservatism has been
a thing: go after institutions that uphold liberal values. Then degrade
their ability to flourish, the better to degrade

**liberalism's** ability to flourish. For movement conservatism,
it's a political imperative.

Great universities have been a target from the first, the middle, the
last:

**Harvard Hates America**, as one right-wing tome put it in 1978. The
1951 book that made William F. Buckley famous at the age of 26,

**God and Man at Yale**, took on not merely the content of what postwar
Sons of Eli were learning-anthropology that relativized Christian
faith , Keynesian
economics-but the very idea that professors should teach based upon
their curiosity and conscience: that scholarship should be

**creative**. Instead, Buckley argued that Yale's curricula should be
set by the rich, and presumably America-loving and religiously orthodox,
businessmen who sat on its board as trustees. That would denude Yale of
its accursed liberal proclivities for good. It would become, as
universities were centuries before, a more nearly feudal institution.

Buckley claimed to be writing, as conservatives often claim, a

**defense**of liberal values, which actual liberals (those hypocrites!)
supposedly evade. He argued that what Yale calls

****"academic freedom" (he mostly puts it in quotation marks) is
actually indoctrination in an "orthodoxy
"
(one of the more frequently used words in the book to signify what he
claims to be fighting against).

The

**New York Times,**likewise, let Rufo publish an essay

calling for "abolishing D.E.I. programs on liberal grounds." Rufo cares
about the actual values that sustain a liberal vision of freedom and
justice in same way that Israeli war-cabinet minister who calls for
"voluntary resettlement of Palestinians in Gaza, for humanitarian
reasons" actually cares about humanitarianism.

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Conservatives are remorseless and creative in deploying that Jedi mind
trick. As they are remorseless and creative in the pursuit of the next
liberal bastion to degrade. In my first book
,
I wrote about what happened when they did it to an organization called
the National Student Association. In the mid-20th century, NSA's main
activity was holding annual conventions to which student leaders from
around the country would tromp to pass symbolic resolutions. These then
would be reported in the media as all-but-official X-rays of the Mind of
American Youth. By 1960, they were passing resolutions in support of
things like the anti-segregation lunch counter sit-ins in the South. So
in 1961, via stealth, disguise, and parliamentary cunning, agents of the
conservative youth group Young Americans for Freedom sabotaged the
voting on that year's resolutions, to make it look like college
students were

**not**becoming increasingly liberal.

(Ironically, in 1967 the radical magazine

**Ramparts**revealed that the NSA was funded by the Central Intelligence
Agency
.
Which actually only emphasizes the point: This was a time when
displaying to the rest of the world that the U.S. was a tolerant,
dynamic, creative, and non-philistine-

**liberal-**society was a central CIA Cold War project
. Another story for
another time, but in its early years, that was one of the reasons many
conservatives despised the CIA.)

But back to our story.

No bastion of liberal ideals has ever been too large or too small, too
central or too obscure, for conservatives to target. In the early 2000s,
a clandestine organization called the Institute on Religion and
Democracy sedulously sought to infiltrate liberal mainline Christian
denominations, planting agents inside individual churches as "members"
in order to "divide and destabilize congregations, foment dissent and
silence pastors," as the authors of a neglected 2007 exposé

of such "steeplejackings" explained it. They were seeking to build power
over the long term to erode entire denominations' liberal commitments
altogether.

Small beer, considering how politically feeble this world is these days
in the grand scheme of things. More ambitiously, they've sought to
erode the dangerous Enlightenment idea of disinterested inquiry into
reality itself-what Steve Bannon revealed he was going after in his
infamous 2018 quote: "The real opposition is the media. And the way to
deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."

Democrats do things differently. The people with the most power in the
party act as if long-term strategizing to degrade institutional
conservative power is something that is downright distasteful. When
Roger Ailes launched an entire cable network transparently devoted to
advancing conservative Republicanism, and cynically announced "fairness"
and "balance" as its foundational values, activists on the left pointed
out that all it would thus take to disintegrate its self-arrogated
credibility was for Democrats to refuse to participate on its programs;
then it couldn't continue to claim said "balance," and Fox News would
be discredited as what it actually was: a propaganda factory. The
activists calling for this were mocked or ignored.

Until, a dozen years on, the Obama administration belatedly tried just
that: "We're going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,"
White House communications director Anita Dunn announced. "As they are
undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don't
have to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations
behave."

What happened next?

The policy lasted approximately 15 seconds, in the teeth of a
twin-barreled hue and cry from both Republicans and mainstream media
bigfoots, who defended the honor of their Fox peers by arguing the
patently absurd notion that Fox, outside of its evening opinion-host
lineup, was just another legitimate news organization. Out of the
kerfuffle, Ailes won one of the Obama White House's vaunted "summits"
of reconciliation-then bragged that the network's ratings went up
from the controversy.

**The**

**New York Times**' account, meanwhile, led by accusing the White
House of undue quarrelsomeness. The Gray Lady framed Fox as just an
ordinary news organization: "Attacking the news media is a time-honored
White House tactic but to an unusual degree, the Obama administration
narrowed its sights to one specific organization." As if they had picked
Fox at random.

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Next, Glenn Beck twisted
an anodyne quip
from a speech Anita Dunn gave in a church-"The third lesson and tip
actually comes from two of my favorite political philosophers: Mao
Tse-tung and Mother Theresa [who both said you had to ] figure out how
to do things that have never been done before"-to claim that Mao was
her "hero," that she "thinks of this man's work all the time," and
that she advised fighting "like Hitler did." Wouldn't you know it,
Anita Dunn was soon White House communications director no longer. Fox
News, rightly or wrongly, claimed the scalp
.

Round these parts, we call that the Infernal Triangle
:
ruthless Republicans, a mainstream media that accommodates their frames,
and a Democratic Party whose timidity lets them both get away with it
time and again.

Then there are those myriad moments when liberals weaken their
institutions themselves, at the Republicans' bidding-as Harvard just
did. But we'll have to save an account of that part of the game for
another week. For now, just this conclusion: For the Democratic Party,
institutions that sustain liberal values and liberal power simply
aren't seen as political ground worth defending. You can make your own
list, from decades of taking the labor movement for granted, devoting
the barest minimum of political capital

to policies to sustain and grow it, to letting the voter registration
juggernaut ACORN die the instant Republican bad actors hustled up a scam

to unfairly discredit it.

Acorns. Metaphorically speaking, that's just the sort of thing that
certain sorts of Democratic mandarins despise: anything that seeds

****long-term potential for the party to truly grow its power.

When it comes to Harvard, the Democratic Party doesn't, and can't,
technically,

****have anything to do with the mission of keeping an individual
501(c)3 like a university healthy. My point is that it's just about
inconceivable that they would try. Conversely, if some liberal activist
went after, say, the Southern Baptist Convention, for its systematic
cover-up

of its epidemic of sexually abusive pastors (in a way, actually quite
consistent with its rigidly patriarchal values), do you not think that
Republican politicians wouldn't figure out a way to turn it around
into an attack on its attackers? Even given how the SBC was nailed dead
to rights on sins a thousand times worse than Claudine Gay's ambiguous
offense?

I'm no huge Harvard fan; the opposite, really. I have classic Midwest
populist opinions about that Hedge Fund With a College Attached by the
Charles. Indeed, when I was an editor in New York in the 1990s, I would
occasionally come across conspicuously uninspiring people in
surprisingly prestigious jobs, which was how I learned about the power
of that special brand of affirmative action attaching to networked Ivy
League connections-not all that liberal a state of affairs.

But ...

**First they came for Harvard, and I said nothing**, and all that. Your
own beloved liberal institution might be the next target of opportunity.
Or the next one after that, or after that. Because they won't stop.
The fever will not break until we make it break, by no longer acceding
to their oh-so-predictable game.

______________________________________________________________________

Postscript: A kind reader pointed to a mistake from last week's column
.
Timothy Crouse was not a playwright. His father was. I had misremembered
something Crouse had told me, which was that

**after**he published

**The Boys on the Bus**,

****he himself got involved in theater. I've gone back and corrected
the error in the body of the column and acknowledged it in a footnote.
Shoot your corrections and calumny my way at
[email protected] .

~ RICK PERLSTEIN

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