The Limitations of Partisan Politics

It'd be great if we could just vote our way out of social problems, but that's not the world we live in.

I don’t vote.

As I explained to Nick Gillespie, I stopped voting as I transitioned into social science. Putting on a jersey and rooting for a team was messing up my work (and that of my peers), so I decided to take a step back from participation in horseraces (although I still vote for ballot initiatives, etc.).

What I told Nick was true. But, perhaps, it wasn’t the whole truth. If I’m being fully honest, another part of my reason for abstaining was the growing realization that, when the chips are down, and the rubber meets the road, the Democratic Party is basically useless. Often, in fact, they’re a big part of the problem. This reality shone through clearly to me while researching my book.

The core puzzle We Have Never Been Woke tries to grapple with is that, from the beginning of our professions, symbolic capitalists have defined ourselves in terms of altruism and serving the common good. We have higher pay, prestige and autonomy than most other workers in America. We have a lot more cultural and political influence too. We have consistently insisted that it’s necessary to preserve and enhance these benefits – not for our own sake, but to empower us to help everyone in society, including and especially the least among us.

In terms of moral and political affiliations, the slice of Americans that are most likely to self-identify as antiracists, feminists, environmentalists or allies to LGBTQ people are also the same slice of society that dominates the symbolic professions. Symbolic capitalists overwhelmingly self-identify as “liberal,” “progressive,” or “left.” We vote overwhelmingly and increasingly for the Democratic Party.

Given how we tend to define ourselves, what one might expect is that as more wealth and power was consolidated in our hands, we’d see longstanding social problems getting ameliorated, inequalities would shrink, social tensions would be eased thanks to the adjudication of experts who make decisions based on “the facts” and “merit,” and we’d see growing trust in institutions because of all the great work we’re doing. This is what previous generations of symbolic capitalists promised would happen – and it’s a story we continue to tell.

Over the last 50 years, there were significant changes to the global socioeconomic order that radically enhanced the affluence and influence of symbolic capitalists relative to everyone else in society. However, the results from this transition are very far from what we promised. We see growing inequalities. Longstanding social problems have festered and, in some cases, grown worse. We see growing affective polarization and mistrust in institutions. The core puzzle the book is trying to work through is, “what went wrong here?” Why is it that the world we inhabit is so far from the world we promised?

Of course, symbolic capitalists recognize that the world we live in is very far from what we ostensibly hope for. We have stories we like to tell ourselves about why this is the case. Ultimately, these stories tend to boil down to two villains: “the millionaires and the billionaires” and “those damn Republicans.” In a previous post, I addressed the “blame the actual capitalists,” narrative at length. Here, I want to address the deficiencies of the partisan political narrative we gravitate towards.

Republicans are not the main obstruction to social justice

I began my journey through the symbolic professions subscribing to what you might call the “banal liberal” view of social problems. If you had asked me who was responsible for most issues, I would have answered “those damn Republicans” just like many of my peers continue to do. I imagined that, if only people in my hometown could be more like the enlightened denizens of New York, the world would be a much better place. And then I moved to New York. As I describe in the introduction to the book, what I witnessed there profoundly shook up my political convictions.

Zooming out beyond my personal experience: New York State has the third-largest economy in the nation (real GDP), edged out only by California and Texas. It’s the state with the fourth largest population. Despite the huge number of people in the state, 1 out of every 13 residents belongs to a millionaire or a billionaire household. The state is host to two Ivy League schools (Cornell, Columbia). In terms of ideological self-identification, it’s one of the most liberal states in the country.

Yet, despite these concentrations of wealth and progressivism, nearly 1 out of every 7 residents of the state falls below the poverty line. New York has the highest levels of within-state inequality in the country. New York is the 10^th-worst state in the nation for racial equality (looking at poverty, homelessness, labor participation, homeownership, income, and more). It’s one of the worst states in the nation for social mobility (ranking 44/50): the rich stay rich, and the poor stay poor.

As bad as pronounced as these tensions are in New York state, they’re magnified in New York City.

The city is a key worldwide hub for many symbolic industries (banking, finance, consulting, media, publishing). Roughly 1 out every 24 residents is a millionaire or a billionaire. New York City has the largest concentration of millionaires and centimillionaires in the world, and the second-highest concentration of billionaires (second only to the Bay Area). Nonetheless, nearly 1 out of every 5 residents of the city falls below the poverty line (18.2%). NYC is one of the most culturally diverse cities in the country. It also has the most segregated schools in the country, and is one of the most racially segregated cities in the nation overall. The city has seen some of the largest population declines in the country in recent years because growing numbers of people find it unsustainable and undesirable to remain there.

As these contradictions pressed themselves ever more firmly into my mind, I was desperate to understand who was to blame for these social conditions. Why do such extraordinary levels of much poverty, suffering and segregation exist in New York state and the city despite their unparalleled concentrations of symbolic and financial capital? It quickly became clear who wasn’t to blame: “those damn Republicans.”

In New York’s city council, Democrats outnumber Republicans by 9:1. The mayor of New York City is also a Democrat.

In the state legislature, Democrats have a 2:1 majority in both chambers and also control the governorship.

In terms of our federal delegation, both of New York’s senators are Democrats — one of whom is the Senate Minority Leader.

New York’s delegation to the House of Representatives is overwhelmingly Democrat too.

Democrats control NY State and City to a degree that approaches one-party rule. In most races during most cycles, the actual electoral contest is the Democratic primary. The general election is pro forma — a foregone conclusion.

Put simply, the problem in New York is clearly not that Democrats lack sufficient political power to address social ills. They lack the political will.

New York not alone in these respects. When I do talks around the country, I run the stats for whatever symbolic hub I find myself in, and the picture is always the same: immense concentrations of wealth, paired with especially high degrees of human suffering, stratification and segregation — even as Democrats dominate every branch of government in the city and the state.

If aliens came down to earth and abducted Donald Trump and everyone who ever voted for him in 2016, 2020 and 2024 —almost nothing would change in any of these states and cities with respect to the dynamics described above. I suspect that surprisingly little would change at the national level either in terms of social inequalities and other major issues.

We like to tell these stories about how Republicans are the big spoilers, but given the current concentrations of population and financial and cultural capital into the communities and institutions symbolic capitalists dominate, it is well within our power to significantly upend the distribution of wealth and opportunity in the United States writ large purely through how we allocate our own resources, manage the organizations and institutions we are embedded in, and leverage city and state governments that our preferred political party firmly controls.

In practice, however, the Democratic Party has played a key role in driving many of the unfortunate dynamics that have come to a head under Trump. We can see this clearly, for instance, in the campaigns currently being waged against universities.

The War on Terror comes home

The Trump Administration has declared war on the universities, and it’s shaping up to be a quagmire. Vice-President J.D. Vance has called for a “debaathification” strategy for these institutions, and it’s an apt metaphor. This U.S. policy in Iraq played central role in creating the insurgency in Iraq, undermining America’s abilities to actually achieve its objectives in the country. In a similar way, despite an easy “shock and awe” victory at Columbia University, Harvard is gearing up for a fight – and will likely inspire others to follow suit -- largely as a result of the White House’s own actions.

Much like the war in Iraq, Trump’s pretext for his war on higher ed is largely misleading. For instance, previous work of mine has demonstrated that professors are not indoctrinating young people. There is no evidence that teachers regularly punish students for expressing conservative or religious views. Universities are not hotbeds of antisemitism. In reality, higher ed institutions are some of the spaces in the U.S. where antisemitism is least prevalent, and attending college is robustly associated with reduced likelihood of holding antisemitic beliefs or engaging in antisemitic behaviors. It’s simply not the case that universities are making hiring and promotion decisions primarily on the basis of identity and at the expense of “merit.” In fact, faculty hiring is demonstrably more competitive, transparent, open, standardized, and metrics-focused than it’s ever been.

That said, my work has also shown that higher ed institutions are not representative of the society they ostensibly serve. The professoriate, especially in the humanities and social sciences, is ideologically homogenous in a way that interferes with our ability to accurately understand contentious social phenomena. Although academics have extraordinary freedom on paper, universities tend to be highly censorious places due cultural factors. These tendencies grew more pronounced after 2010. This significant constriction in acceptable opinion tends to most adversely affect scholars from already-underrepresented backgrounds. Meanwhile, many initiatives carried out in the name of diversity, equity and inclusion are not just ineffective, they’re demonstrably counterproductive relative to their stated goals.

Put simply, there are real problems with higher ed institutions. However, the Trump Administration is not poised to make progress on any of those problems. White House moves at Harvard and Columbia cleanly illustrates the self-defeating nature of their approach to higher ed reform.

The Trump Administration began by withholding $400 million dollars in federal funds from Columbia University and vowing to cut even more if White House demands were not met. Columbia has an endowment of $14.8 billion and an annual operating budget of $6.6 billion. The cuts amount to roughly 6 percent of their annual budget – a non-trivial share. Yet it was within the capacity of the university, through its trustees, to unlock part of the endowment in order to cover any lost funds. They had enough money to do this over the next four years until Trump is out of office, if they wanted to. But the university decided to instead work with the White House to unlock the funds – a decision that cost the university much more than money.

The Trump Administration demanded that Columbia adopt a number of illiberal measures. They’d need to put their Middle East, South Asia and Africa Studies department into academic receivership; they’d need to change their admissions policies to reduce admits of people from those countries and increase admissions of Jewish students; they’d need to grant campus police more power to include giving campus police far more power to surveille, detain and remove people from campus without following the usual due process. They’d need to accept permanently heightened restrictions on campus protest and speech. They’d need to actively facilitate (or, at the very least, passively comply with) unlawful orders to detain and deport people without probable cause or due process, as the Trump Administration is currently trying to do with Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil.

Let me do a little sidebar here to illustrate how extreme the White House position is. Mahmoud Khalil is a lawful permanent resident of the United States. His wife is an American who, at the time, was close to giving birth. Prior to studying at Columbia, Khalil had been thoroughly vetted by multiple governments because of the work he did, with no evidence of any ties to, or support of, terror organizations. Khalil initially faced disciplinary sanctions during the “Ivy League Intifada” of 2024, but Columbia University not only cleared him of wrongdoing but formally apologized for suspending him during the crackdown against protestors because he, in fact, violated no university policies. Even the federal government has acknowledged that Khalil has not been confirmed as committing any crimes and is not suspected of committing any crimes or being involved with any militant groups. In their own telling, they want to deport him solely for his political beliefs. Yet, Columbia University offered no defense of their alumnus, and no objections when he was arrested on Columbia property, apparently without a warrant. The federal government is demanding further silence and compliance of this nature in order to have access to federal funds, and Columbia has accepted those terms.

On March 21, university leaders formally granted Trump everything he asked for, ahead of their imposed deadline, without resistance of any kind.

I have previously stressed, and I maintain, that the tumult at Columbia University and other elite schools is of little consequence to the people struggling in the Middle East. However, what happens at Columbia is of immense consequence to the overall landscape of higher education in the United States because of a phenomenon sociologists describe as “institutional isomorphism.”

In conditions of genuine uncertainty and dynamism, especially when paired with high apparent stakes, and a lot of competing demands and tradeoffs, institutional leaders often find themselves at a loss on how to proceed and try to defer decision making as long as possible. However, circumstances often force someone to be a first mover. If the first mover also happens to be an institution that others look up to or aspire towards, then institutions will often tend to rapidly copy that institution – assuming that, for, instance, Princeton must know what it’s doing. Everyone wants to be like Harvard, and few university leaders would be faulted for emulating Yale. Consequently, Ivy+ policies end up becoming the de facto policy of most other schools too – starting with elite peer institutions and then trickling down.

We saw this dynamic at work in university hiring: a couple of non-elite state schools announced a freezes in the wake of budget uncertainty. Then Stanford University adopted the policy, and it promptly exploded throughout elite private universities and “public Ivies” like the UC system. Similar patterns have played out in graduate admissions. And the same dynamic was set to play out here, too. Other universities are desperate to avoid falling into the Trump Administration’s crosshairs, and they were closely watching how Columbia University navigated the situation to see how they should respond to similar pressures.

The fact that Columbia folded quickly was, therefore, a big opportunity for the White House. If they wanted to incentivize other universities to follow suit, they should have acknowledged Columbia’s compliance, thanked them for their conciliatory posture, and unlocked some portion of the funds (even if they wanted to reserve some of the money for continued negotiations). Put simply, the smart move in this situation is to reward schools who provide easy compliance and make an example out of institutions that resist.

Rather than doing this, the Trump Administration responded to Columbia’s concessions by escalating their criticisms of the university. Far from recognizing or rewarding the university’s uncontested compliance with their orders, the administration is now working to put the private university under direct federal oversight through a consent decree. By showing the administration that they will not resist, they invited the White House to turn the screws harder.

This is something the university should have understood well from its own recent history.

During the encampment protests, former university President Nemat Shafik did everything GOP hardliners asked of her: she threw her faculty under the bus at a Congressional hearing, while offering absolutely no defense of her institution and its value. She suspended student groups like the Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. She unleashed administrative punishments on protestors, and then sicced the cops on them. The school has been since transformed into a veritable fortress – it’s more secure than a typical military base, as I learned first-hand when I did a series of talks there recently (and speaking as a military brat).

What did all this capitulation yield? Still more demands for capitulation! Shafik was driven out. The demonization of the campus has continued apace, and the coercion ramped up further when the Republicans won the White House.

Learning nothing from any of this, apparently, Columbia rolled over yet again. Trump has not released any funds, and White House officials suggest still more demands will be made in the near future of Columbia and other universities. Anticipating this reality, Columbia University’s interim president has characterized full compliance with the initial demands as merely an “opening bid” in negotiations with the federal government. It is, shall we say, unconventional to deploy full appeasement one’s opening bid in a negotiation. But what do I know?

Drunk on this easy victory, the White House ratcheted up the demands made to other universities even further — beyond the point where compliance was possible, even for schools that desperately wanted to comply.

For instance, Harvard University’s leadership initially planned to capitulate like Columbia. They initiated anticipatory compliance measures the moment Trump won the election. In it’s lawsuit against the Trump Administration, Harvard whines at length about how it already went further than any other university in suppressing dissent and advancing the Administration’s ideological and political agenda, and they express frustration that they got zero credit for these efforts. Instead, the White House threatened to freeze even more money from Harvard than they did at Columbia, and provided a list of demands that even more aggressively interfered with the integrity and basic functioning of the institution. The demands were so invasive and wide-ranging, they directly conflict with one-another.

For instance, the Trump Administration demanded that the university review the ideological composition of its faculty and students and, for any unit deemed to have insufficient diversity, the university would be obliged to admit more students or hire more faculty explicitly on the basis of applicants’ ideological views. This is an affirmative action and quota system for conservatives, despite Trump being vociferously opposed to these policies in all other contexts.

Moreover, the White House demanded that Harvard screen prospective students for their views about the United States and international affairs, denying admission to those whose perspectives are insufficiently aligned with the administration’s domestic and foreign policy objectives. The university was instructed to marginalize or remove faculty and administrators who seem “more committed to activism than scholarship.” Yet, despite mandating that Harvard engage in several new ideologically-based litmus tests for admissions and staffing, the same document also mandates the university to “abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests.”

It is literally impossible to comply with this order – to simultaneously eliminate all ideological litmus tests while imposing even more ideological litmus tests.

Other demands were starkly illegal. For instance, the Administration demanded that Harvard screen students for antisemitic views as a condition of admission. The Supreme Court recently ruled that universities are not permitted to factor ethnicity into their decisions about admissions. It seems to be a clear violation of the spirit and letter of the ruling if institutions are not considering applicants’ own ethnicity, but are conditioning admission on aspirants’ opinions about one particular ethnic group. This is still using ethnicity as a core criteria for college admission, which the Supreme Court has expressly forbidden.

The demand also seems to be a clear violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14^th Amendment. The White House cannot mandate that institutions condition admission upon aspirants demonstrating sufficiently warm feelings about some ethnicities but not others, or some religions but not others. Hence, unless the White House is going to demand universities to condition acceptance based on whether or not applicants demonstrate sufficient warmth towards other ethnic and religious minority groups too, they can’t mandate that they accept or reject people based on their views about Jews. And, of course, the Trump Administration would not countenance schools screening applicants for whether or not they’ve been sufficiently supportive of towards African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims and atheists. Consequently, this policy would easily get struck down by the courts.

The demands that the administration report non-criminal disciplinary records to the federal government is also a violation of FERPA laws: absent a targeted court order for a specific student, in a specific case, and adhering to due process (for instance, a student is supposed to be notified in the event of any records sharing), universities are not legally permitted to share sensitive data about students with any other government or private entity.

In short, the White House has set up a situation where Harvard literally cannot comply with their demands. It is literally impossible to comply with many of the demands because they directly contradict one-another. Other demands are starkly illegal.

Worse, even if it was actually possible to comply with the Administration’s orders, the response to Columbia University’s capitulation – and to Harvard’s own preemptive capitulation -- strongly suggested there is no point to continue rolling over. The White House rewards cooperation with further demands, punishments and villainization. So why comply?

The legal and practical impossibility of following the orders, paired with the lack of actual incentives for cooperation, left Harvard with few plausible options other than defiance. The university announced they would not comply with the White House orders and promptly sued the federal government to get their funds unlocked instead. And they are strongly positioned to come out on top, when it’s all said and done. Harvard has the money to make due without the federal funds while they fight this out in court, even to the point of riding out this administration altogether. The university is older than America. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. They have the time and resources for patient and disciplined action.

Critically, now that Harvard has chosen the path of resistance, other institutions are following their lead. Hundreds of other university leaders signed an open letter declaring that they stand with Harvard and will try to emulate their model if the White House comes for them. Towards that end, they’ve formed a private collective to help trade resources, advice, and information to resist the Trump Administration.

The institutional isomorphism wave is going in the exact opposite direction that Trump wants, largely as a result of his Administration’s own actions.

Notice, however, that throughout all of this, Democratic lawmakers did not lift a finger to save universities. In fact, virtually all of the illiberal measures currently being implemented by Trump were first piloted by Democrats during the Obama and Biden Administrations.

This is nothing new: Democrats were key allies in the Bush Administration’s War on Terror too. Policies that radically undermined Americans civil rights and civil liberties sailed through with overwhelming Democratic support. Nearly two decades later, these policies were again reauthorized with strong Democratic support.

Democratic lawmakers such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden played a pivotal role in marshalling support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although Barack Obama coasted into the White House on the promise of ending those wars, the U.S. was still in Afghanistan at the time he left office, and under his tenure America launched new interventions in Syria, Yemen, Libya and beyond. His chosen successor planned to open up even more fronts in the worldwide conflict. And perhaps the most enduring legacy of Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, will be the depopulation of the Gaza Strip.

The reason Trump could plausibly refer to Gaza a “demolition site” is because, for more than a year prior to the Orange Man’s reelection, his Democratic predecessor (urged on by the aforementioned Chuck Schumer and others) supplied unlimited weapons to Israel to carry out a campaign of destruction that has few modern equivalents – a campaign that was not just restricted to Gaza, but also the West Bank, Iran, Yemen, Lebanon and Syria. Biden’s planned successor, Kamala Harris and her surrogates repeatedly stressed to voters that these policies would continue roughly unchanged under her watch.

And in the face of student unrest against the U.S. directly enabling and supporting this campaign, it was Democrats who pioneered the crackdown that has been extended into the current administration.

Democrats won’t save universities

Campus protests against the war in Gaza broke out roughly six months prior to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. In principle, they could have provided an opportunity for Joe Biden to draw a contrast with his rival on issues like civil rights and academic freedom. Instead, Democrats and Republicans tried to outflank one-another in adopting a maximally hawkish approach to the protests.

Even before Trump had a chance to weigh in, Joe Biden immediately characterized the demonstrations at Columbia as “antisemitic” and declared to that “order must prevail” on college campuses. Democratic lawmakers put aggressive pressure on former Columbia University President Nemat Shafik to crush the campus protests. She ultimately carried out these orders with the assistance of Democratic mayor Eric Adams. The pictures and videos of students getting roughed up by the NYPD were enthusiastically celebrated by Trump and, upon reclaiming the White House, he interceded on behalf of Mayor Adams – making his criminal investigation go away in exchange for the mayor adopting a more aggressive posture on immigration.

There was no rivalry here. It was cooperation, all the way down.

In a similar vein, it was Joe Biden who enshrined the IHRA definition of antisemitism into federal guidance, despite the definition’s author repeatedly describing it as a “travesty” to use this definition to regulate speech and behavior. Building on Biden’s introduction, Trump is poised to sign a bill that would implement this same definition into federal antidiscrimination law – and in the meantime, he’s insisting Columbia University and other schools adopt this definition for their own codes of conduct. NYU and Harvard have already taken this step, overriding concerns by civil rights and civil liberties organizations — from the ACLU, to FIRE and the AAUP, to Israeli civil rights groups — who stressed that IHRA’s definition is extremely vague and provides strong leeway for institutional stakeholders to censor most critical discussion of Israel, Zionism or Judaism more broadly, by Jews and non-Jews alike.

Likewise, before Trump called upon Columbia to put their Middle East Studies programs into receivership, Democratic governor Kathy Hochul took the extraordinary step of demanding that CUNY eliminate a job posting for scholars who study Palestine. This is the same type of overreach Trump is currently carrying out at Columbia – politicians setting the agenda for what can be taught and who can be hired – justified on the exact same grounds.

Indeed, before Trump even ran for office, Obama used federal funding as a cudgel to police speech on gender and sexuality. His mandates likewise led to students and faculty being punished by their universities without due-process, upon pain of the school being defunded. It was a straightforward blueprint for Trump’s current actions trying to suppress speech and attitudes he doesn’t like, and to impose his preferred ideologies on institutions of higher learning.

Mere days after Trump was elected, months before the Orange Man stepped back into the White House, Democratic Congressman Ritchie Torres expressed anticipatory support for defunding elite schools on the basis of alleged anti-Israel bias and antisemitism, “It is one thing for a free society to permit the poisoning. It is something else to subsidize it. Why do we?” Upon taking office, Trump’s moves to defund Columbia University were explicitly defended by Democratic Senator John Fetterman. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for his part, expressed qualified concern (albeit, only because some non-woke professors were being defunded too. His main problem wasn’t that Trump was using the federal government to censor, punish and intimidate political and ideological opponents, but that the president wasn’t targeting said opponents as precisely as he could) — yet, even in the midst of expressing mild and only partial disapproval, Schumer also characterized the White House’s actions as Columbia’s chickens coming home to roost.

Even after Harvard rediscovered its spine, triggering a wave of resistance within academia, Schumer and other Democrats waited two weeks to formally criticize the White House policies at Harvard — and only after insisting in the same statement that Trump’s pretext for action is 100% legitimate, a full-blown crisis that is not at all being mischaracterized or exaggerated by the administration. Tellingly, this letter by Democratic leaders focused narrowly on unlocking funds for non-woke scholars at the world’s richest school, with no condemnation of the deportation and suppression of international students and other clear violations of civil rights, civil liberties, due process and institutional autonomy carried out in the ongoing war on universities more broadly. It hardly needs to be said, but I’ll underscore it anyway: no substantive action accompanied this toothless declaration.

Ladies and gentlemen, Trump’s “opposition.”

Put simply, Democrats will not save colleges and universities. They have been key partners and pioneers for all of the higher-ed associated actions undertaken by the current administration.

If universities are to be saved, they will have to save themselves.

The big picture

Trump and his allies are committed to executing a set of punishments on colleges and universities — and espousing particular narratives about institutions of higher learning — independent of what colleges and universities actually say and do in the meantime. This means, institutions can debase and betray themselves ad infinitum and they’ll get the same outcome as if they did nothing.

Unfortunately, debasement is the primary inclination of many university leaders, even when all the available evidence suggests that this is a terrible idea. I saw this dynamic up close after I was dismissed from the University of Arizona following a Fox News smear campaign. I was far from the only scholar who lost a job because of a witch hunt. Whether the attacks came from the left or the right, university leaders consistently think that if they just give the mob a head it will make them go away. In fact, it just makes them hungry for more heads even as it shows them that their tactics work. It’s a strategy for virtually guaranteeing subsequent pressure campaigns downstream. And yet, university leaders continue to comply.

A desire for peace, order, and non-confrontation dominates the academy. Higher ed institutions, in general, are full of people who are risk averse and conformist. People who fall into “leadership” roles are often the most quiescent of all – allowing themselves to get steamrolled by PR teams and lawyers into servile postures, offering limp and half-hearted defenses of the academy and its mission, when they are offered at all. And to their credit, they recognize this about themselves: most university presidents acknowledge they have done a poor job responding to declining faith in their institutions and the accompanying efforts to impose reforms from the outside.

Small wonder the public doesn’t trust academia! Not only are we apparently unable or unwilling to address stakeholders’ concerns, we also seem incapable of effectively communicating our own value in society in the face of adversaries who are out to gut our institutions.

Now is the time to dispense with both of these tendencies. We need to be more explicit about addressing ways our institutions are not, in fact, representing and serving large swaths of America. However, we also need to be more muscular about pushing back against false narratives, asserting our value to society, and defending our institutions from inappropriate forms of political interference.

Institutional neutrality, now the rage, is no shield for cowardice. The Kalven Report, the foundational document of the institutional neutrality movement, emphasizes, “From time to time instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”

We find ourselves in such a moment now.

If, in this moment, faculty refuse to make use of the rights and freedoms we have, then it doesn’t matter if they’re stripped away, and they will be. If “academic freedom,” “free speech,” and “viewpoint diversity” organizations have nothing to say to this illiberalism, or even support these moves, they’re worse than useless. If university leaders cannot muster the strength or conviction to decline to follow unlawful and unethical orders and challenge these actions in the courts, then they should resign in disgrace or be pushed out. If we, as a collective, cannot and will not stand against this overreach and defend ourselves in public -- then we deserve what we get. But others do not deserve to suffer from our failure. And so, we must not fail.

Critically, any resistance to the administration’s illiberal policies, or defense of our institutions and their mission – these must not be framed in banal partisan terms. This is not just a matter of effective praxis (to prevent further polarization and resentment), it’s also a matter of respecting the truth. Again, we got here through bipartisan political actions. Moreover, the chronic failures of our own professions and institutional leaders provided fodder for the “populist” forces now aligned against us. We’ll only get out of this predicament by engaging with those who are currently skeptical of, or alienated from, our institutions – by acknowledging and constructively responding to their concerns.

More broadly, it’s critical for symbolic capitalists to understand that “voting blue no matter who” is not really a solution to the social problems we express concern about. Some of the places where these problems are most pronounced are symbolic economy hubs where Democrats exercise uncontested rule. And when there’s a lot on the line, and it’s critical for the party to have a backbone and take decisive action, you can bank on the Democratic Party to instead make things worse or, at best, to engage in purely sterile forms of #Resistance.

A sit-in on a Sunday when Congress isn’t even in session and most Capitol Hill workers are at home? How “bold”! How “disruptive”!

Matching pink outfits and signs with little slogans? I bet the “fascists” are soooo scared.

As I detail in Chapter 4 of We Have Never Been Woke, symbolic capitalists are more likely to vote and support political campaigns than almost any other block of the U.S. electorate. However, we tend to overrate voting as a means of addressing social problems. It’s convenient to think that we just show up to the ballot box every couple of years, pull the lever for the “blue” candidate, and we’ve fulfilled our obligations to social justice. But that simply isn’t the way the world works.

We can look to the areas Democrats control with one-party rule to recognize the limitations of partisan politics for addressing social problems. Those limitations are severe.

Portions of this article were originally published by The Guardian and Washington Post.