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political science
Beware the Academics Bolstering the Fascist Violence of Trump-Vance
When, if ever, will these reputedly serious and sober thinkers join other conservative Republicans and reject the politics of hate and violence?
Sep 23, 2024
During the recent presidential debate, former president Trump claimed that Haitian migrants living in Springfield, Ohio were stealing pets from their neighbors—cats and dogs—and eating them. This completely fabricated story originated from nether regions of the far-right. Then the lies were mainstreamed by Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. After the debate, Vance continued to advance the lies, even though repeated investigations by officials on the ground found nothing, not even missing geese.
Vance and Trump have doubled down on their accusations, with predictable results—bomb threats to schools in Springfield, personal threats against officials who have told the truth about the fabricated claims.
Such ugly utterances are not primarily designed to be believed. Vance himself suggests that the lies are of value because they attract attention to an issue he and Trump want to highlight, the alleged mortal danger that immigrants present to “real” Americans. This is an old tactic for Trump. Many Trumpists who loudly applauded his 2016 promise at rallies that Mexico would pay for the wall also said to interviewers they did not believe they would. Wild applause without belief. Such reiterated pronouncements, rather, activate and intensify racial resentments already installed in certain white audiences. The dog and cat legend—as Vance now calls it—both activates and intensifies visceral hatreds in the audience installed in the soft tissues of life through years of insistence and repetition. And it places immigration at the center of debate, rather than allowing sufficient light to be shed on other issues such as inequality, climate, and gender. So, belief is not the key issue here, as students of fascist rhetoric have discovered. And factual correction is not enough to erase the pegs upon which racial, gender, and immigration hatred hang.
We note this incident, not only because it is so odious and typical of the campaign the Trump-Vance ticket runs, but also because Vance himself embraces the ideas of far-right academics, hailing from such places—to name a few—as Princeton, Notre Dame, Hillsdale College, Harvard University, and the Claremont Institute. Some of these academics have pedigrees connecting them to students of Leo Strauss and Harry Jaffa. Some are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation. Some are legal theorists of “natural law.” Many have overlapping affiliations. Names such as Robbie George, Adrian Vermeule, Charles Kestler, John Eastman, and Hadley Arkes are more familiar to insiders to the world of legal and political theory than they are to the more general public.
As Haitian-American children in Springfield face bomb threats, as new reports of women dying after being refused care for suffering incomplete abortions or miscarriages, as the death threats against election officials multiply, as Trump promises to jail his opponents and to introduce mass detention camps, has not academic support for Trumpist ideas descended into gaslighting?
We are familiar with these people ourselves, because we too are political theorists. Of course, ideological differences have long been in play among various schools of political theory in the American academy. And there has regularly been crossover between the rarified heights of the academy and the world of public intellectuals. But rarely have pronouncements of those considered to be conservative academic thinkers departed so far from the norms and ideals of a democratic society.
Recently, we traveled to Philadelphia to attend the American Political Science Association annual meeting. While there, we discovered that a series of panels were being sponsored by the Claremont Institute. Since many Claremont fellows have openly embraced Trump’s politics, we were surprised to see their panels listed, because we recalled that in the wake of the insurrection of January 6, Claremont had withdrawn from the convention in the wake of protests against them. Now it is timely again, not to oust such participants from the program but to actively expose and protest the damage they do to democracy.
Think, for instance, of Patrick Deneen, a non-Straussian figure. Perhaps the single most prominent political theorist to embrace the idea of the establishment of a new post-democratic “regime,” to use the term favored by Straussians, Deneen’s book from 2018, "Why Liberalism Failed" asserted that the more liberalism succeeds as a practical political agenda, the more it fails to achieve the goals of a better and freer life for those governed by it. In that book, Deneen didn’t embrace a positive political agenda.
But then Deneen accepted an invitation by Victor Orban, the authoritarian ruler of Hungary. He now embraces a version of “illiberal democracy” akin to what Orban has established there. Deneen’s most recent book, "Regime Change," has become a must read for intellectual members of the far right in the MAGA universe. There, under the cover of “populism” that seems to eschew the need for democratic institutions of representation, he presents a vision of what might be called “degraded Straussianism,” that is, an authoritarianism in the form of a radical right Platonism embracing secret rule by philosophers.
We mention Deneen because he has been cited repeatedly in reports on the intellectual influences on JD Vance. Vance has shown himself to be a misogynist and a fervent anti-abortion Catholic (like Deneen). Vance’s attacks on women who are not mothers supports his deeper argument against sexual and gender equality, in favor of a patriarchal order, and a general return to an older social order.
Vance’s attack on women is consistent with the underlying substance of Deneen’s argument: The liberal logic of progress results in a “disintegration of how we live. . . Ideals and ends of integration must confront and defeat liberal disintegration." This is how to return to the common good.
His recommendations to achieve that common good are anything but common. What is needed, Deneen suggests, is a return to “traditional culture,” though he does not discuss the violence and degradations that will be needed to force women, gays, Blacks, transgender people, and other minorities to accept such a return. Perhaps that part is to be left to Trump? He even recognizes that such an argument may sound bad to many, bound as it is to a tradition of racism. But he suggests that such a charge provides a liberal excuse to besmirch the good values associated with the binding force of tradition. He writes, “Today, the very power of the accusation is now extended to accusations of those who defend such institutions as family defined as a man and a woman; the desirability of children born in conjugal marriage; orthodox biblical religious beliefs; and against those who seek limitations on sexual licentiousness, such as pornography.”
And so it goes. Deneen defends the idea of a tightly woven, exclusionary nation, opposing it to globalism and cosmopolitanism. He, like so many other Trump academic legitimizers, endorses nationalism as a form of civic religion. He attacks toleration as leading to a general intolerance, that intolerance further leading to a more generalized relativism corrosive of the common good, producing a practical totalitarianism based upon what he identifies as the most fundamental separation of all: “. . . the so-called separation of church and state.” In short, for Deneen as for Vance, Christianity is the vilified source of what is best, and what is best is a nationalism that binds everyone in a hierarchy, with his version of Christianity at the top. The only democracy Deneen in the end supports is what he calls a “democracy of prayer.”
Why bring all that up now? Well, as the presidential campaign enters its final phase the racist attacks, the misogynist rhetoric of insult and hate, the homophobic and transgender-hating advocacy of repressive policies, the aggressive embrace of a particular, exclusive form of Christian faith, the threats of arrest made against political opponents, and the threats of violence by supportive MAGA mobs--all on the part of the Trump/Vance campaign--have reached new levels of intensity and fervor. Democracy itself is threatened. Professors who have embraced Trump in the past, calling him a populist, can no longer credibly do so without also condoning the violence that Trump and Vance constantly incite.
Where does this leave those intellectuals who contributed to the Project 2025 playbook? What about theorists who have embraced doctrines propagated by the fellows of the Claremont Institute? Where does this leave political theorists such as Patrick Deneen? To our knowledge, none has so far condemned either Trump or Vance for their dangerous, destructive statements, let alone ask themselves how their political cover sustains that violence. As Haitian-American children in Springfield face bomb threats, as new reports of women dying after being refused care for suffering incomplete abortions or miscarriages, as the death threats against election officials multiply, as Trump promises to jail his opponents and to introduce mass detention camps, has not academic support for Trumpist ideas descended into gaslighting? When, if ever, will these reputedly serious and sober thinkers join other conservative Republicans and reject the politics of hate and violence?
Unfortunately, we aren’t too hopeful that the radical academic right will respond to such a call. They seem, in a metaphor employed by a fascist predecessor, to be prepared to ride the tiger. Of course, we know how that story ends.
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