Why Populism is a Problem for the Intellectual Right

In my last piece for Mere Orthodoxy, I ended with a vague complaint about intellectual ecosystems (e.g., Christian scholarship) that become defined excessively by a particular tradition (e.g., a certain conception of theology). This tendency extends beyond conservative Christian circles to much of the broader Intellectual Right of today. Insofar as many Christians are part of or closely adjacent to the Intellectual Right at large, it bears articulating some of that criticism more precisely.

Ironically, a neutral observer might very well perceive that the Intellectual Right presently has the upper hand, not least as regards the institutional setting of the university. In some corners, there is a perceptible change in attitude: that maybe American higher ed need not be a total loss, that reform is possible, and that some measure of ideological balance might be possible after all, entrenched leftist incumbency notwithstanding. Certainly, many left-of-center academics have taken alarm at recent turns.

A number of developments contributed to this sea change. For starters, political winds have turned sharply against that social phenomenon called “Wokeness,” which originally sprang from the university itself. In turn, the Trump administration has applied considerable pressure upon institutions such as Harvard and Yale to make ideological reforms. More locally, Florida’s educational overhaul has dramatically altered the complexion of schools such as the University of Florida and New College. Other red-state legislatures are applying increased scrutiny to their respective public university systems, which is one force behind many of the new civics centers appearing in other places, such as Ohio and Tennessee.

Or, on a smaller scale, one could point to the most right-leaning school in the country, tiny Hillsdale College, which has kept plugging along with a hefty endowment, low admission rates, and an ever more prominent national footprint. Its successes have demonstrated there is still some demand for a rigorous, conservative college education. Furthermore, in the last decade alone, Hillsdale administrators have increasingly engaged in high-profile publicity events and collaborations with Republican officials at both the federal and state level, drawing praise or criticism depending on one’s political leanings but magnifying the school’s profile in any case.

Having spent most of the last decade moving to-and-fro between conservative spaces and mainline academia— a Hillsdale alum who attended grad school at Ohio State during Peak Woke and returned to Hillsdale for his first teaching job— I have had something of a front-row seat to witness the present “vibe shift.” It has churned up more than a few reflections on the disconnect between these two worlds, their respective intellectual virtues and weaknesses, and where those elements have shaped my own formation.

In aggregate, some of the recent developments, such as the civics centers, encourage me more than others. Even so, I have serious doubts about the Intellectual Right effecting durable reforms. This is only partly due to the obstacle of progressive incumbency in education. In point of fact, there are even deeper structural problems that restrict the Intellectual Right’s ability to change American academia. This is particularly so in the context of larger universities and especially in disciplines with more obvious ideological stakes, such as the humanities and social sciences. One obstacle is the conservative intellectual temperament itself. The other is populism.

Temperament

Many conservative academics and intellectual types are not keen on specialized, empirical research, knowledge production, and what we might even more loosely call “data.” Almost definitionally, conservative intellectuals prefer to operate within inherited traditions and conventions, which means they gravitate more to synthesized Big Ideas and away from empirical particulars. The Big Ideas here concern first principles and fundamental philosophical questions, tending especially toward matters of theology and political philosophy.

In a liberal arts college or even a classical high school, there can also be a strong pull toward becoming a generalist conversant in the broader “Canon.” Working in these institutions, one can start to sense that it’s insufficient to know Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin: one really ought to be able to hold an intelligent conversation about the Gospel of Thomas and Thomas Jefferson as well. To be clear, that generalist tendency is perfectly suited to those institutional settings, and it often midwifes some truly excellent outcomes for grateful students (like myself) who received their principal intellectual formation there.

So far, none of this description would strike conservative intellectuals as a scandalous secret. These same tendencies—focus on Big Ideas and the Canon—are even a mark of pride on the Intellectual Right over and against unreflective forms of knowledge production. But there is a tradeoff here: in the broader academic landscape, these interests often lead to self-ghettoization, as Steven Teles observed recently. If one’s core interests are constantly circling back to theology and political theory, that’s actually a pretty narrow niche.

While the minutiae of Aristotle’s Politics or Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica may ever excite a certain kind of conservative philosopher or religious studies prof, there is, in my experience, only a small slice of American university students who will share that interest. Meanwhile, even good-faith liberal or progressive faculty have even less interest and more suspicion—often justifiable—about a lurking ideological agenda. One way of bridging this disconnect is to master broader “data”: fresh material uncovered in research that is not immediately linked to the Big Ideas and that is further removed from charged topics of ideology and identity. One can, for example, share an interest in medieval codicology with a friend who radically diverges in their politics or religion. That in turn can supply a low-stakes entrée to broader and deeper conversations.

But if if you as a conservative intellectual believe—perhaps correctly—that civilization has already bequeathed to you “the right answers,” you might be naturally disinclined to do the difficult work of looking into anything fundamentally new or revisionary, much less to question or critique the civilizational heritage. Or if you’re a graduate student, you might be inclined to produce a thesis on an understudied aspect of a canonical author than to do new work on a lesser-known contemporary. Of course, some conservatives do break these tendencies. Even so, I seriously doubt a legion of rightist doctorates stands ready to fill even some significant minority of the humanities and social science posts that exist in the American university system—and that’s acceptable, as long as the Intellectual Right stays honest with itself about the tradeoffs.

Populism

If there are healthy tradeoffs to be had in the conservative intellectual temperament, it is harder to take the same view of the more timely and acute problems posed by populism. To misquote that canonical wordsmith Costanza, “If Populist George walks through that door, he will kill Intellectual George! A George divided against itself cannot stand!”

It is true that many of the apparent recent successes fostering current optimism owe something to a broader populist wave in the Western world, which has directed its ire at many institutional centers and upended the political status quo. By the same token, it doesn’t take a prophet to foresee reversals when the electoral winds inevitably shift in the next few years. Perhaps a bit further off but still in the not-so-distant future, the broader populist wave will also subside.

Now, there’s an unpleasant irony lurking here. What populism does best is break things. Thus, while it lacks the political capital (and attention span) to reform mainstream higher ed, in the shorter term, populism does have the power to mangle the Intellectual Right and those institutions it controls, both in the collegiate sphere and beyond.

Historically, education and the life of the mind are aristocratic and counter-egalitarian pursuits; I (and others) would argue this is inexorably so. So what exactly happens to right-leaning classical high schools, colleges, centers, institutes, think tanks, and magazines if they become possessed by populism’s naked anti-intellectualism and its mean online egalitarianism? Can the Intellectual Right serve two masters in populism and the virtues of the mind?

I must say, leaders of conservative academic or academy-adjacent institutions don’t seem too interested in that question. Instead, many appear to be lashing themselves to the mast, intending to ride out and even harness the populist wave while they can.

Take an exaggerated hypothetical. What happens at a conservative college when, say, an untenured professor or administrator writes something slightly impolitic—let alone overtly left-of-center—in a public forum that offends the rightist demos? We can picture a modest social media storm brewing; a few opinionated donors and parents take umbrage and begin writing lengthy emails to the chancellor’s office. If the school has enough prominence, maybe some right-wing media figures start taking notice and pressing the issue. Does the school show a little spine and let the storm blow over? Does it maybe let some open debate take place that poses alternative arguments to those in the impolitic opinion piece? Or does it make the offending employee recant and retract under pain of hemlock?

Let’s get riskier and less hypothetical. One may, in good hope and Christian charity, commend Charlie Kirk’s soul to the Lord and still wonder about the motives and foresight of schools that endorse his legacy overtly and conspicuously. What kind of ethos does that instill in the institution? What does it say about the school’s sense of its own telos? What kind of students or donors does it hope to attract?

Fair-minded observers (and less fair-minded future historians) might come to suppose that these kinds of choices say an awful lot about who (and what) is really running the college, the think tank, or magazine.

What’s puzzling is that this is not just any Faustian bargain between the Intellectual Right and populism: it’s a lousy one, even as Faustian bargains go. The Intellectual Right lacks the necessary horsepower to shift the ideological needle meaningfully at Big State U, though cultural and electoral currents have made it seem more possible at present than ever before. On the other hand, those same cultural and electoral currents have more than sufficient voltage to denature the relatively small conservative academic and intellectual ecosystem.

Solutions

If this outlook seems grim, there are some sensible steps available that wouldn’t require divine intervention to have a chance at success.

First, if conservatives do want to change the coloring of broader academia, then more of them will need to step out of the Politics-cum-Theology box. For historians like myself, that will mean venturing beyond intellectual history, which (fairly or not) was left for dead by the larger discipline well before the current crop of grad students was even born. It may also entail looking beyond the traditional borders of Western Civilization, and it will certainly necessitate a more critical—or simply less reverent—posture toward the Canon of the Western and American heritage. If that sounds a little subversive and potentially dangerous to conservative ears—well, that’s the problem. Healthy, well-rounded intellectual communities entertain and even pursue such lines of inquiry.

A less ideologically loaded means of achieving that same end would be for the Intellectual Right to triple down on teaching languages. Strategically, this is low-hanging fruit. Interest, institutional investment, and training in languages is dying even at the R1 level. They require good teachers, willing students, and much painstaking work from both over the course of years. Languages, however, open up all kinds of research opportunities in the humanities, which makes them difficult to ignore in grad school and job applications, even when the applicant might not have the desired ideological and/or sociological profile.

Second, a more diverse ecosystem of right-leaning colleges doing this kind of work would be salutary. Donors who care about education (and by extension, culture and politics) should play the long game and invest their money here instead of burning cash in political campaigns: found a few more schools like Hillsdale, Grove City, and University of Austin; offer generous scholarships to boost recruiting; fight grade inflation aggressively and advertise academic rigor accordingly. A broader range of such colleges will offer substantive education to a greater number of high-quality students who might otherwise choose one of the better state schools. In just several semesters teaching dual-enrollment courses at Hillsdale, I met dozens of excellent high school students who would have attended and flourished in a Hillsdale-style education but would not be admitted due to limited slots.

Some more healthy competition between right-of-center colleges might also guard against ideological capture by one particular rightist faction, intellectual sect, or political fad. And that naturally brings us back to populism itself.

Consider the parting words of an old American statesman:

It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. . . . Who that is a sincere friend to it can look with indifference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric? Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened.

The collective American Right is earning a failing grade here. Some institutions ostensibly devoted to cultivating and diffusing knowledge have put at least some of their chips on a different strategy: stoking fear, resentment, identitarian grievances, and conspiratorial suspicions corrosive to the very idea of res publica. Rather than cynically (and shortsightedly) cozying up to populism to harness its effervescent anger, the Intellectual Right and its institutions should be the very ones teaching and leading rather than going along for the ride. They should encourage a panoply of moral and intellectual virtues, including currently unfashionable ones such as patience, circumspection, moderation, and meekness. But to do that, the Intellectual Right will have to take more deliberate steps to stay in its institutional lane and manage a narrower set of ends: pursuing truth comes first and anything else is a far distant second, including activism, public relations, donor cultivation, and “relevance.”

That will also mean ignoring and even explicitly saying “no” to certain vocal, energetic factions and actors. There simply must, in my view, be more healthy distance between the Kirks or Carlsons of the world—whatever you think of them—and conservative intellectual institutions. They occupy entirely distinct tracks with conflicting incentives, they apply incongruent metrics of success, they reward dissimilar skill sets, and they operate along incommensurate time horizons. Simply put, their ultimate aims diverge sharply.

Or they ought to diverge, anyway. In gloomier moods, one despairs that the Intellectual Right can so discipline itself. And if it cannot, it seems doomed to shrivel into an appendix of the right-wing industrial complex. Bitterer still, its choices will seem to have confirmed a standard plank of the Intellectual Left. Namely, ideas and truth themselves are never really the driving force of intellectual pursuits or ideology: they ever and always serve as mere post hoc justifications for pursuing power.

Yes, there are some genuinely fruitful branches on the tree of the Intellectual Right. But conserving them will mean throwing away the populist ax set against the roots.