Conservatives’ Long War on Free Thought

He has sought to deport law-abiding international students, especially left-wing ones, over protesting or writing op-eds, serving the triple function of cutting cash-strapped universities off from the important revenue source of international student tuition; driving out unwanted foreign nationals; and silencing a potential site of activist opposition.

His aides and advisors are also working to build an alternative higher ed model that doesn’t even pretend to teach impartially but follows the model of schools like Michigan’s Hillsdale College, a private Christian school and a bastion of right-wing politics.

Many of these attacks have been justified by claims of fighting campus antisemitism or DEI programs that the Right has cast as antithetical to meritocracy and inherently discriminatory against white men (conveniently ignoring the role that money and connections have always played in college admissions for the privileged).

In many ways, our current moment is the climax of a generation-long campaign against everything from affirmative action to the diversification of the student body and the materials they study.

But there’s a deeper reason for this animosity towards universities that can be seen in the Right’s longstanding wariness of ​“excessive” intellectualism and the potential of critical thinking — a suspicion that extends across the spectrum of conservatism, and has flowered into unique hostility on today’s U.S. far Right.

The Right’s Attack on Intellect

Far from a novelty, the Trump administration’s recent attacks on higher education represent a deep tradition among the U.S. Right. In 1951, ​“moderate” conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of the flagship conservative journal National Review, openly endorsed ideological indoctrination, writing in his influential book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of ​“Academic Freedom,” that he wanted to ​“dissociate myself from the school of thought, largely staffed by conservatives, that believes teachers ought to be ​‘at all times neutral.’”

The role of an undergraduate education, in Buckley’s eyes, was not to encourage a Socratic examination of all sides an issue, let alone teach students critical thinking, but to instill in them the correct values — correct as judged by Buckley, who once argued that white Southerners were entitled to block the will of the Black majority since they were ​“the advanced race.”

Eight years later, in his classic 1959 essay ​“Was Athens Right to Kill Socrates?,” conservative philosopher Willmoore Kendall mused that the demagogues of ancient Greek democracy had acted wisely in executing Socrates, whose criticisms and unrelenting search for justice and truth they found not just irritating but potentially revolutionary.

In 1980, conservative philosopher Roger Scruton’s book The Meaning of Conservatism praised ​“unthinking people” who accept life’s burdens without complaint and don’t seek to politicize their grievances.

These positions grew out of even longer-standing principles on the Right, dating back to the foundational thinkers of conservatism. As political scientist Don Herzog notes, in his 1998 book Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, leading conservative thinkers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries warned that educating ordinary people would make them less content with their lot and more likely to demand political power, transforming passive subjects into active citizens — a horrifying prospect to figures like Edmund Burke, the British statesman widely considered the father of philosophical conservatism.

In a sneering 1790 pamphlet, ​“Reflections on the Revolution in France,” Burke declared that the ​“swinish multitude” was not entitled to equal political rights as the wealthy, let alone the possibility of governing. Arguing that the occupation ​“of a hair-dresser or of a working tallow-chandler cannot be a matter of honor to any person — to say nothing of a number of other more servile employments,” Burke wrote that, ​“Such descriptions of men ought not to suffer oppression from the state; but the state suffers oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are permitted to rule.”

A similar dread of democratic rule informed arch-reactionary’s Joseph de Maistre’s avowal, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, that critical philosophy was a fundamentally destructive force, since it undermines popular respect for authority, and dogmas and prejudice should instead form the basis of society.

The same drive to kill the Socratic spirit has also appeared in the most extreme right-wing movements in history: those that can fairly be called fascist and which combine the broader Right’s wariness of ordinary people thinking too much with a more distinct revulsion towards intellectualism as unmanly.

In Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, Italian fascist Giovanni Gentile — the court philosopher for much of Benito Mussolini’s regime — scoffed that too much intellectualism: 

…divorces thought from action, science from life, the brain from the heart, and theory from practice. It is the posture of the talker and the skeptic, of the person who entrenches himself behind the maxim that it is one thing to say something and another thing to do it; it is the utopian who is the fabricator of systems that will never face concrete reality; it is the talk of the poet, the scientist, the philosopher who confine themselves to fantasy and to speculation and are ill-disposed to look around themselves and see the earth on which they tread…

These arguments were reiterated and extended in Mussolini’s foundational 1932 essay, ​“The Doctrine of Fascism,” ghostwritten by Gentile, which rejected liberal ideas of free speech and debate as inherently corrosive, warning that too much critical discussion erodes a nation’s spiritual unity. The manifesto called for an ​“organic” state that controls the country’s educational and spiritual forces in order to preclude too much diversity of thought and to mold the Italian people into a compliant instrument of Il Duce’s will. 

But while fascism abhorred the notion of academic freedom, they also recognized that institutions of higher education could play important roles in bolstering the regime’s intellectual prestige. In The Third Reich in Power, Cambridge historian Richard Evans describes how the Nazis systematically worked to banish university faculty who were perceived as disloyal, while simultaneously appointing party cronies to positions of influence and recruiting prestigious academics (like philosopher Martin Heidegger and jurist Carl Schmitt) into the party, so that they could provide a scholarly gloss to Nazi policies. 

Generic Fascism with Neoliberal Characteristics 

All this gives significant ideological and historical context to what we’re witnessing now, or even an outright sense of déjà vu.

During the 1960s and ​‘70s, universities were frequent sites of contestation between activist students and faculty and the state — just as they are again today. In 1972, then-President Richard Nixon privately told his aides that the ​“professors are the enemy” — a sentiment Vice President JD Vance repeated verbatim several years ago, to a national audience and wild conservative acclaim. Through the Reagan years, conservatives cited Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind to warn that a combination of foreign intellectual ideas and too much exposure to the Rolling Stones’ sensual hips were turning students into unpatriotic nihilists — just as conservatives today claim that left-wing ideas, from critical race or gender studies to ​“cultural Marxism,” have indoctrinated a generation.

Likewise, much as the Nazis installed loyalists into university leadership and enlisted academics to create an intellectual sheen for their movement, today, it’s easy to surmise that the Right wants to swap reading J.S Mill’s On Liberty for sparkling intellectual works like The Collected Thoughts of Ben Shapiro or Curtis Yarvin’s The Tabletop Mencius Moldbug.

Universities fascinate and infuriate the increasingly radical U.S. Right because their feelings about higher ed are conflicted, viewing it as both a dangerous site of free inquiry as well as a useful system to sort society’s winners and losers. In the Trumpist Right’s goal to completely reorient higher education, there are consequently two goals in mind. One is following the prototype established in Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis and right-wing activist Christopher Rufo have systematically strongarmed the university system into adopting a hagiographic and skewed version of U.S. history, in order to better indoctrinate the next generation. The other is trying to recreate a college system that elevates white, male elites, to restore them to the top of the pecking order, and then calling it ​“meritocracy.”

These dueling aspirations reflect something that’s unique about U.S. fascism — a fascism with neoliberal characteristics — in how readily it combines a competitive neoliberal emphasis on achieving power and status with a push for anti-intellectual indoctrination, of the sort that has always characterized generic fascism. What gets lost in all this is the commitment to truth and justice, even where that means challenging existing authorities and sacred cows, which Socrates understood to be what education should actually be about.