Liner Note 19. All-Out War on the Knowledge Society: Waiting Won’t Work This Time

Ephesus, Türkiye on August 23, 2005

The subtitle to this post was originally “Five Ways to Counter It”—the Trumpian war, that is. But in the meantime, I’ve had disturbing exchanges with some senior humanities officials and colleagues that suggest that they will take no particular action at this time. 

 

The general strategy I was suggesting to one group was lawfare. I asked, why not start collaborative litigation to seek a temporary restraining order to stop the Department of Education from closing the International and Foreign Language Education (IFLE) office and laying off all staff on March 21st. 

 

IFLE supervises the Title VI programs that are required by statute since their creation through the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958.   The lawsuits against the NIH reduction in indirect costs haveblocked that policy for the time being. NIH grants are nonetheless in a state of “utter and complete chaos,” but the complaints behind the TRO have brought illegality to light in a way that will help this and other litigation. I suggested that the MLA, Mellon, AHA, ACLS et al. collaborate on a lawsuit against the Department of Education aiming at a TRO on the closure in the hope of keeping the office.  

 

Some professors responded positively. The lead in the group of officials suggested that I buzz off.  As far as I know, no substitute plan is in place.

 

At around that time, Trump forced National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) chair Shelley C. Lowe (Navajo) out of the job. Lowe was the first indigenous person to hold that position.

 

I spent that same day at an AI summit at the Royal Academy of Engineering in London. While chatting with an administrator from an Ivy League university, I learned that their office is starting to think about how to fight an anticipated move from the senior administration to eliminate the campus-wide writing requirement. “In today’s world, students need to learn to use AI,” especially to replace writing at work—you are already hearing the lines they expect.

 

The default humanities trajectory has been clear for some time: to furnish service departments, those which offer skills but aren’t expected to produce research knowledge because they aren’t seen as disciplines that create academic knowledge. They hire non-tenure track instructors and help spread adjunctification.  This humanities fate doesn’t rest on knowledge reality: of course humanities knowledge is generated in abundance and variety. The trend rests on academic down-classification of qualitative knowledge in general and fields without research funding in particular. It has been fueled by a decades-long hate campaign known as the cultural wars.

 

The humanities establishment has long responded to this familiar trend by letting it happen.  The strategy has been to live quietly off trickle-down from STEM disciplines which in turn lived off the positive reputation of technology and of higher education as a whole.  The latter too were eroding, and by 2017 Trump had renewed the Bush II administration’s attacks on science, gradually expanding to the whole university sector. These escalated again while Trumpism was out of the White House from 2021 through 2024.

 

I joined the MLA Executive Council as 2^nd Vice President in 2020, and began then to ask to develop a systematic response to the discipline’s research funding crisis as a root cause of its employment crisis. Five years later the Association is no closer to having a response.

 

Of course, the passivity party is not irrational. As M. Gessen put it, 

The tension is between surviving right now and, plainly, being able to exist in the future. For most universities, the best tactic is probably to try to stay under the radar. This means being careful with language (D.E.I., etc.) on their websites, hoping that they don’t have particularly noticeable protests or especially outspoken students or faculty members . . .  This would probably allow most universities to continue functioning, substantially as they have been, for a couple of years. 

 

This stance makes traditional sense. But it’s not going to work.  Gessen continues.

 

But in the end — and by the end I mean in two, three, four years — federal funding cuts to financial aid and research and the White House’s meddling in the politics and policies of education will be devastating for all institutions of higher learning.       

 

This is particularly the case for the humanities. Their research funding is devastated going in, as a matter of national policy that NEH et al. have in effect endorsed with a policy of silence. (See for example, “The Humanities Decline in Darkness.”) So addressing the current condition requires a radical break with establishment humanities tradition.

 

It’s a bit like the problem with the Democrats, as Rana Foroohar reminded me this morning.

 

I[I]f you believe that unfettered markets fail to provide key public goods, then you have to think genuine economic populism — not the fake Maga kind — will be the winning formula for the Democrats. But that means rich liberals must think beyond their own interests.

 

This tension is painfully evident right now in the failure of the party to fight against Trump’s tax cuts which, if the Democrats ever regain power, will place suffocating fiscal and budgetary constraints on their ability to get anything done. They didn’t speak out strongly enough in 2017, either, because wealthy donors like tax cuts.

 

The small number of people who decide national humanities policy are not wealthy donors. But they break towards Chuck Schumer rather than AOC.  

 

There’s also a Democratic Party-style split between the national leadership and the humanities rank-and-file across the country.  During the 2010s, I spoke about higher education, funding, and the humanities at dozens of universities. I learned that the rank and file everywhere want much better support structures from their administrations, their states, and the federal government.  But generally they cannot even get data from senior managers about their actual situation, much less start a discussion about how to get what they need.

 

Time has now run out. The Trump regime is systematically degrading universities starting with the most prestigious and undermining STEM disciplines starting with the most powerful. As they cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the budgets of the country’s most prominent research universities, crushing the humanities is an afterthought.  Yet crushing remains the default outcome. Trump’s core social strategy is dehumanization as a justification for any despotic and/or illegal measure, even as humanities scholarship rests on the terms Trumpism negates.  These disciplines need plans, resources, and serious countermeasures, and they need to come from their national organizations. 

 

The wait-it-out strategy was never good, but had surface plausibility during the 40-year-old Neoliberal Bargain.  Trumpism has now negated the bargain in its entirety and brought that period to an end.

 

The Bargain was bipartisan: the Reagan-Bush-Trump 1.0 lineage would tee off against government, bureaucracy, liberalism and the liberal arts and sciences, to the delight and fury of their base, while letting the Clinton-Obama-Biden lineage hang on to a (privatized and marketized) version of these things, to the resignation and complacency of theirs.  

 

The Bargain began to crumble with Obama’s mishandling of the Global Financial Crisis. He bailed out Wall Street not Main Street, igniting both Occupy and the Tea Parties. The latter was an opening for Trump’s rise in 2015-16. Trump converted the Tea Party to MAGA by embracing and harnessing its negative revolutionary energy, meeting it with his own. (For one of the root of vengeance, see Capitalism: A Love Story 1’10” to 1’13.30”). 

 

Trump found a familiar channel in US politics, diverting hatred from Wall Street and big business onto brown and Black migrants—and citizens.  Behind it all, he explained, lay liberalism and their endless explaining and their rules and their do-nothing government.  Trump 2025 promised to go after all of it—the incoherent vagueness of the mission was the promise of its totality.  The MAGA base still wants destruction. They will not brake the havoc they’ve been wanting for fifteen years, even when it comes for their Medicare.  It’s the end of the cycle.  

 

The mainstream media too now grasps the “authoritarian endgame.” That endgame is the destruction of the Neoliberal Bargain, followed by Trump’s dominance of the “sultanistic oligarchy” that he seeks to replaces our current “civil” version. MAGA 2025 targets all of the powers of (diverse) society over business and the wealthy. The powers of the Democratic party inhere in study, analysis, research, and reporting, and he is gutting these deliberately.  

 

Thus he and his people are destroying knowledge and knowledge workers, knowledge agencies (the National Institutes of Health, the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Consumer Financial Protection, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Bureau . . ), knowledge careers, knowledge structures. In other words, it’s all-out war on Richard Florida’s “creative class” from the Clinton era. 

 

The Trump regime is firing and humiliating scientists who work for the Forest Service or a national lab or who come up with better ways to forecast tornado trajectories or who are paid at a university on a federal grant. The regime is doing the same to data analysts and managers in the Department of Education who maintain statistics about, for example, racial disparities in college attainment.  

 

The regime is doing the same to the people who managed the near-beer equity programs we lump under Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, whose job was to prevent racism both overt and covert, sexual harassment and abuse, and other forms of identity-based tyrannies in the workplace that still require constant vigilance.

 

There are multiple payoffs, financial in particular, but also psychological.  The destruction of knowledge work and workers is the liberation of what Mark Zuckerberg called “male energy” from the chains of mutual respect. The powerful should be able to do whatever they want, especially in their companies, and be revered, certainly uncriticized, for what they do, both in the company and in national discourse. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s interview with Ross Douthat convinced many people that top tech executives viewed the social values of big tech’s employees as a de facto insurrection.

 

It’s hard to miss the male rage at the basic protocols of citizenship and life in common. There’s rage at unionization and union-like opining in tech companies, in which it becomes clear that workers are as or more thoughtful and often more competent than the ownership class. These employees at the very least expect massive organizations to be run with some collaboration, if not actually democratized.  In contrast, the control that several dozen top tech executives have over the global communications infrastructure—over knowledge circulation negates democratization. If you think about it, about their proprietary algorithmic control of information distribution, their surveillance, their dependence on exploited labor in the Global South and also North, then tech appears as a kind of world tyranny.  And the wholesale endorsement of Trump and Trump’s masculinist theory of power suggests a tech executive focus on retaining those absolute powers over the system that their platform ecosystems control. That control must certainly include the knowledge workers inside their companies.

 

All this flies in the face of the needs of our era. The needs are for more cooperative capabilities, more distributed intelligence, and a higher order of intelligence regarding radically divergent information and diverse peoples.  The U.S. is at a cooperative disadvantage—its political system undermines collaboration, and so does its political culture.  Big-tech culture has been making this worse, first with its social media practices and now with its most powerful men lining up literally behind Trump and grooving on his contempt for other people.  

 

Their example is profoundly dysfunctional on the level of the socio-cultural knowledge required to address climate change and everything else. It’s a disaster for it. The same is true for their blanket hostility to socio-cultural disciplines in higher education—see Bret Stephens parroting vicious dismissals that go back to Reagan, Nixon, and Agnew and later DeSantis, Trump, Rufo, Stefanik.  The same goes for rabid hostility to basic equity programs, and to minimal protections from discrimination for racialized and variously gendered people. This categorical, even pathological contempt forfeits their authority, though in our coherent conceptual world rather than our physical one. And they hate the intellectual and professional types for refusing to defer to their authority on the level of ideas.

 

In short, this is a war on both knowledge and the ability to use knowledge properly across the full spectrum of our dissimilar societies.  Its goal isn’t the reduction but the annihilation of the authority of independent knowledge of the kind associated both with public schools and with universities. Discovery, learning, and the use of knowledge all require relatively egalitarian capacities of listening, working through confusing or ambiguous or offending information, communicating endlessly across antagonisms and gaps, and more. All of it is annihilated by the despotisms of DOGE deletion of units and people, by hatred for divergent identities, by rage at the processes of study, learning, research, discussion, revision—the neutralization of this is the point.  It threatens immigrants and trans people yesterday, lawyers and climate scientists today, all professional expertise tomorrow, really most people in different ways all of the time.

 

This is an all-out war on the knowledge class and its complex network of institutions.  Knowledge practices go far beyond higher education to encompass people who work and strategize in social movements, non-profits, medical and legal clinics, farming, plumbing, manufacturing, unionizing, construction, you name it. And yet full-timers in this world of knowledge creation across the arts and sciences, whose jobs are defined by and identified wholly with it, are the special targets.

 

 In the US, Trumpism thus involves the nullification of

·      The autonomy of universities

·      The First Amendment (the Khalil arrest is one prominent example)

·      Academic Freedom itself. 

The current reach-in to core academic decisions goes beyond McCarthyism: I know of no precedent in U.S. history. The government is deleting topics of research and words that are acceptable to use about them. The General Services Administration letter to Columbia University demands that it put a specific department in receivership, change admissions policies, define antisemitism so that it can punish anti-Zionists.

 

This campaign is bigger and more dangerous than anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes. It  requires an organized, planned, funded, collaborative response. I’ll discuss lawfare and other countermeasures next time.