[The right’s long and all-too-unanswered war on liberal
institutions claims a big one.]
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FIRST THEY CAME FOR HARVARD  
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Rick Perlstein
January 10, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ The right’s long and all-too-unanswered war on liberal
institutions claims a big one. _

Claudine Gay, then dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences,
addresses an audience during commencement ceremonies, May 25, 2023, in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, Steven Senne/AP Photo)

 

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
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or inculcating cosmopolitan values; or opening opportunity to talent
and not just incumbent privilege (that one, alas, is _oh, so honored
in the breach
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or chartering projects to repair injustice
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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 [[link removed]], 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
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(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
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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.

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
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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
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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
[[link removed]]. Another story for
another time, but in its early years, that was one of the reasons many
conservatives despised the CIA.)

Rufo was doing what movement conservatism has always done: go after
institutions that uphold liberal values.

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
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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.

Next, Glenn Beck twisted
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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
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Round these parts, we call that the Infernal Triangle
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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.

Your own beloved liberal institution might be the next target of
opportunity. Or the next one after that, or after that.

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

_Rick Perlstein is the author of a four-volume series on the history
of America’s political and cultural divisions, and the rise of
conservatism, from the 1950s to the election of Ronald Reagan. He
lives in Chicago._

_The American Prospect is devoted to promoting informed discussion on
public policy from a progressive perspective. In print and online,
the Prospect brings a narrative, journalistic approach to complex
issues, addressing the policy alternatives and the politics necessary
to create good legislation. We help to dispel myths, challenge
conventional wisdom, and expand the dialogue.  American Prospect,
Inc., is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation headquartered in
Washington, D.C.  You can support our mission with a subscription or
a tax-deductible donation._

 

* Liberalism
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* Ivy League
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* Harvard
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* US Right Wing
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* media
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* Education
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