Mattia DILETTI

Mattia Diletti, Lecturer of Political Science and Public Policy at Sapienza University of Rome

The conflict between Harvard University and the Trump administration has become the latest battle in three decades of American cultural wars. Since the beginning of his second term, Donald Trump has opened several fronts in the culture wars, and this conflict with Harvard is perhaps the most striking, in part because of the involvement of important institutions. In the field of education, the culture wars are playing out in two distinct ways – against universities on the one hand, and the dismantling of the Department of Education on the other. 

The Trump administration is currently at its maximum strength and is implementing a blitzkrieg strategy to strike its ideological and political enemies through an unprecedented use of executive orders, direct pressure such as the threat of cutting federal funds, and relentless attacks through mainstream and social media.

It was James Hunter who established the contemporary sociological definition of ‘cultural wars’ with his seminal 1991 book Culture Wars: The Struggle to define America. Hunter’s core argument is that American public life is animated by an enduring antagonism between two rival moral cosmologies, which he terms ‘orthodox’ and ‘progressive’. In each of the fields he identified, a specific conflict was taking place over the very meaning of being American. However, it was the paleoconservative Pat Buchanan who weaponised the concept as a political tool in 1992, when he said, in his famous speech at the Republican convention in Houston, that “a war is taking place for the soul of America”. Buchanan denounced the Democratic Party as “one that supported abortion, radical feminism and the homosexual rights movement”. Since then, the culture wars have become a strategic tool for the American right to polarise American politics and foster ideological cohesion within its ranks.

The pillars of the right’s identity politics include white nationalism, Christian nationalism, the traditional family and lower taxes. The fighters of the American culture wars today have identified a natural enemy in immigration, the cosmopolitan elite and globalisation. The Ivy League universities, and the intellectual class more generally, have become a symbolic antagonist, allowing disparate grievances to be channelled into a single concentrated attack. 

Universities encompass experimentation with DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) policies, and the construction of pluralistic cultures and identities. They also act as a springboard for the entry into society of ideas and protagonists linked to those ideas – which sometimes also come from countries other than the United States. The most important American universities, like Harvard, are indeed places where cultural pluralism and new ideas are experimented with, but they are also institutions for the reproduction of social injustice. Thanks to this contradiction, right-wing populism à la Steve Bannon has found fertile ground to oppose the established cultural elites, such as those of the Ivy League. Students belonging to the richest one per cent in the United States are more than twice as likely to attend an elite college as students from middle-income families, even with identical admission test scores. In these years of great resentment, challenging the Ivy League universities has become equivalent to attacking unpopular elites.

Some intellectuals from the national-conservative right have suggested a strategy of control, censorship and subordination of universities. Certain Republican states, like Florida and Texas, have experimented with strategies to control university curricula and hiring policies. The final, extremely ambitious, goal is to downsize the power of the old American idea factories and to promote the rise of a national-conservative intellectual establishment. A close look at the galaxy of intellectuals, policymakers and experts supporting the Trump administration reveals a significant number of Ivy League dissenting voices (such as Stephen Miller and Russell Vought – scholars from minor universities and members of right-wing think tanks) who contested the Ivy League’s ‘liberal culture’ when they were students. This is not simply a war of ideas, but also a strategy for the replacement of cultural elites.

The strategy against Harvard could be summarised as ‘strike one to educate one hundred’. One of the masterminds of this strategy, first in Florida and then across the US, has been the conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who has called for federal financing to the universities to be adjusted “in a way that puts them in an existential terror”, and makes them bend to the current administration’s will. There is little else to add to understand what President Donald Trump is doing. In the same way, the alleged antisemitism of students protesting in favour of Palestine is being used with the same methods as back in the time of McCarthyism – arbitrary accusations and police tactics, which are often illegal.

For the victims of the ‘Trump system’, the first line of defence is judicial. It is hard, however, to believe that the American conflicts, of which this is just one example, will remain confined to the courtrooms.

Photo credits: Shutterstock.com/Phil Pasquini