The university lies in ruins because the humanities, the “core curriculum” of higher education since its modern incarnation in the 19th century, are decrepit remnants, mere fragments of disciplines once admired for their claims to, ahem, universality. For example, enrollments in History and Literature, where the cool kids used to hang out, are down 60%, at least, since the Great Recession.
But as Bruce Robbins and John Guillory have recently suggested—Robbins more creatively and effectively than Guillory—this decadence may well disguise a dispersal of critical intellectual capacity from the narrow purview of the ivory tower to the wider vistas of the surrounding society, and with it, the ignition of new ideological and thus political possibilities. The implication of Robbin's’s argument in Criticism and Politics (2022), for example, is that Cultural Studies, the hothouse hybrid graft of traditional disciplines (History, Literature, Sociology, Musicology, et al.) has migrated from the campus to the hundreds of websites and little magazines that have appeared in the literary revolution determined by the Internet: we’re all cultural critics now. And this in accordance with the “passive revolution” or “war of position” postulated by Antonio Gramsci as the process by which “organic intellectuals” would be planed from the crooked timber of a thoroughly bourgeois education. [1]
No matter how we read the current crisis in higher education, though, the culture wars are still with us, on campus and off—especially off, where right-wing politicians now specialize in cultural criticism rather than public policy. Public intellectuals of the liberal kind have responded energetically, of course, with a fusillade of manifestos intended for the general public, trying, or rather hoping, to convince their fellow citizens that if they’d just pay attention to the facts, the truth, the objective reality produced by the diligent research of accredited academics or serious journalists, why then, we’d all understand that Donald Trump and his benighted minions are peddling lies, myths, and stereotypes! [2]
The newest entry in this pious, pointless enterprise is Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past (2022), a collection of essays edited by two Princeton historians who want, desperately, to set the record straight. These editors make no bones about the polemical purpose of the volume—it’s all about the Orange One. Their introduction begins with a lament that has become so familiar that it sounds like a memorized catechism: “We live in the age of disinformation. . . .Unlike past eras in which myths and misunderstandings have clouded our national debate, the current crisis stands apart both for the degree of disinformation and for the deliberateness with which it has been spread. Crises never have a single cause, but in this instance a good deal of blame can be attributed to the political campaigns and presidency of Donald Trump.”
The problem, as the editors see it, is that we can’t even agree on the facts anymore. They conjure a time in the past when we could, but that was the time, they acknowledge, when the credentialed experts—the professors—produced the facts and delivered them to the public, as lectures to students in the first place, but more importantly in “the longer written forms of books, articles, and edited collections that allow us [sic] both to express our thoughts with precision in the text and provide ample evidence in the endnotes.” What happened?
“In the past, Americans have argued about which facts were more important in their explanatory power or causal emphasis; in the present, we are often reduced to arguing about which facts are even facts. . . . This shift has been driven by the rise of a new generation of amateur historians who, lacking any training in the field or familiarity with its norms, have felt freer to write a history that begins with conclusions and works backward to find—or invent, if need be—some sort of evidence that will seem to support it.” That dangerous new generation is composed of precisely those unpredictable “organic intellectuals” who, without diplomas or pedigrees, have been able to take the methods of cultural studies and its antecedents beyond the campus.
So we live in the age of incommensurability, which constitutes a crisis because without a common purpose or set of premises—something hitherto determined by the professional gatekeepers in the disciplines—peaceful political discourse becomes inconceivable, and even scholarship is animated by the will to power: “Unmooring our debates from some shared understanding of facts makes constructive dialogue impossible because there is no shared starting point.”
A year ago, Rebecca Solnit rehearsed the Princeton performance, by now the master liberal text, in an op-ed for The New York Times called “Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies.” She borrowed the language of the "new atheism" to decry all those "gullible" brutes who keep the Trumpian faith, to wit: They're irrational! They don't believe in science! Nor in facts! Their stories make no sense because they're not tethered to reality: “Without the yoke of truthfulness around their necks, they can choose beliefs that flatter their world view or justify their aggression.” Or, “Too many Americans now feel entitled to their own facts.”
By implication, the inverse is true. We, us liberals and lefties who read the paper of record, we're obviously rational, we believe in science, we rely on the facts, and our stories make sense because they're grounded in reality. Why don’t they, the benighted minions, stick with the truth—why won’t they believe us?
Begin with the simple truth taught us by Thomas Kuhn, then amplified by Alasdair MacIntyre, Richard Rorty, and many others. There are no facts independent of the model or method (paradigm) that produces them and makes them actionable. “No cognition without purpose,” to paraphrase Charles Peirce, the original pragmatist, or, to get more provocative about it, let me quote William James, the epitome of pragmatism: “Day follows day, and their contents are simply added. They are not themselves true, they simply come and are. The truth is what we say about them.” [3]
In other words: there is no difference between what we say about the past and the past as such because all we know about the past is what we’ve said about it. Proceed from there. Science as such is no less irrational than faith because it, too, is based on and animated by "the conviction of things unseen" (Hebrews 11:1) like, say, the Big Bang--many of its premises can't be empirically verified except by mathematical proofs, but they nonetheless determine scientific research agendas like, say, the itinerary of the James Webb Telescope now launched to "see" that invisible origin of the universe.
So much for the Big Science that informs our fears. Isn't it then obvious that there is another master text which ties together all the supposedly irrational, unfounded, and anti-factual stories told by the Trumpian faithful? And isn't that text well-grounded in historical reality? Kruse, Zelizer, Solnit, et al., hint at it in passing, but treat it as just another idiocy. It may approach factuality, they imply, but it's not for real.
Or is it? Let me spell it out. White male supremacy is under siege from many and multiplying sources on the liberal Left. If they win the battle for the hearts and minds of the American majority, the USA is over. Their victory will erase the rights-bearing individual, the traditional family, and the constitutional order they have sustained over 250 years. Is this scenario so far-fetched? Not really. The "end of men" is already upon us according to several sociological treatises (not to mention labor force participation rates)—and the end of white majorities in the electorate and the larger population is an impending, inevitable reality.
The Trumpian faithful believe accordingly, truthfully, and correctly I think, that they're engaged in a life and death struggle. They're not at all irrational because the facts are on their side. Us liberals and leftists agree, after all, that white male supremacy is under siege—the difference between us and them, the so-called conservatives, is that we think this deviation from the American norm is long overdue, and will make for a more perfect, more democratic union.
So enough already with the endless, inane accusations against the Trumpian faithful. Their stories make sense because they're grounded in the reality of historical fact.
__________
“What Is Called History At the End of Modernity?” (2015) is a much longer, more considered and detailed summary of my approach to the writing of history; it can be found at the website of the Society for US Intellectual History, S-USIH, in four parts (the link to Part I is below). Part II takes up the practical questions raised by my remarks here at Substack. Parts III and IV are studies in the historiography of the relation between slavery and capitalism in Western Hemisphere. My explanation of the culture wars is The World Turned Inside Out: American Thought and Culture at the End of the 20th Century (2009), chaps. 2-3.
https://s-usih.org/2015/02/what-is-called-history-at-the-end-of-modernity/
[1] Robbins as cited in text, and John Guillory, Professing Criticism (2022). To my mind, Robbins’s book is the better of the two because it assumes without apology that literary study—history, criticism, chronicle, canon-making—is inherently political; for it is by its nature a way of articulating a usable past and an actionable future. (Full disclosure: Robbins is a dear friend and erstwhile colleague at Rutgers.). On the literary revolution of ca. 1750-1850, which created a mass market for books, pamphlets, broadsheets, caricatures, and which scandalized the gatekeepers of that era because the proles and the slaves—”the people” out of doors—had begun to represent themselves, see Jacques Ranciere, The Politics of Literature (trans. 2011).
[2} Earnest, exemplary attempts along these lines are David Greenberg, “The War on Objectivity in American Journalism,” Liberties 2 (Spring 2022): 112-46; and Rebecca Solnit, “Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies,” The New York Times, January 5, 2021, which I discuss in the text. See also Olufemi Taiwo, Elite Capture (2022), a valiant but unsuccessful attempt to reconcile the competing claims of identity and class-based, state-centered politics.
[3] See Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962); MacIntyre, “The Relationship of Philosophy to its Past,” in Richard Rorty, et al., eds., Philosophy in History (1984), and “Relativism, Power, and Philosophy,” in Michael Krausz, ed., Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (1989); Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (1991).
You put your finger here on something that folks in our world just really have a tough time understanding, even when they have all the intellectual scaffolding required, which is that some very significant proportion of the Trumpist coalition are fighting not for their lives exactly but to maintain their position and interests (and in fact to extend their position and interests further). So yeah, constantly coming at this moment as if we have to correct misinformation and all will be well is wrong-headed both in that it (ironically) is a factually incorrect understanding of what's going on AND a completely ineffective way to enter into this struggle, an actively counter-productive tactic.
Steve Bannon's three-hour daily streaming video show "War Room" (also a podcast) is a very watchable presentation of alternative reality. It's stage-managed by the former Hollywood producer/Goldman Sachs vp/White House chief political strategist. The audience (Bannon calls it his "posse") gets a daily lesson in how the deep state (which runs from Davos to the Wall Street Journal) coordinates what we (in the Overton window) are supposed to believe. I thought of Bannon's show when I read the attached analysis: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/family-capitalism-and-the-small-business-insurrection