It is a pleasure to comment on James Chandler’s weighty and lucid reflections on the state of higher learning in the United States. It is important for all of us to take on board the incisive ways in which he relates his arguments to a wider debate about the character of liberal democracy.

The term “liberal” is commonly used to qualify two concepts: democracy on the one hand, and education on the other. Chandler wants to liberalize both entities in the context of recent assaults on two essential institutions – the university and the constitution. His fundamental argument is that the latter (the constitution) relies on the former (the university), and I agree with him. The implicit question that his pamphlet poses is how these two edifices ought to relate. There is much common ground between us with respect to this complex terrain. There are also issues arising on which we differ. My hope is that highlighting these divergences will lay a foundation for future agreement.

Chandler describes himself as operating both as a critic and historian. In the first capacity, he is interested in language. He proceeds, appropriately, as a philologist, sensitive to meaning. In the second, he is interested in context, in the temporal horizons in which meanings are expressed. He puts this pair of skills together to assess the import of public rhetoric. The principal examples of rhetoric under examination are expressions put out by what Chandler calls the “new Know-Nothing movement.”

Chandler has in mind a set of illiberal postures, revived by Steve Bannon and adopted by Donald Trump. Before Bannon, Chandler reminds us, “Know Nothing” rhetoric emerged  in the 1840s, and soon became a staple ingredient of the American Party. Among its targets were the rising immigrant numbers of Irish and German Catholics, assumed to be flooding electoral polls with hordes of unqualified voters. The plea on the part of anti-immigrant agitators to “know nothing” (as they put it) was meant to signal a pact of silence surrounding clandestine activities. However, more recently, especially in the hands of Bannon, the phrase has become associated with the attitudes of “vulgarians,” and so with a style of anti-intellectualism more generally.

Bannon is seen by Chandler as an exemplar of MAGA attitudes. These include opposition to a variety of modern actors – for instance, globalists, bankers, liberals, neoliberals, and neocons. As Chandler depicts them, MAGA supporters represent an anti-elite “awakening”—a (counter-) woke insurgency against an establishment that is antipathetic to sections of working-class America committed to protectionism and patriotic values.

As Chandler sees it, Trump himself is an empty vessel chosen to channel this aggrieved nationalism—more a pawn in a larger game than a player in his own right. If anything, according to Chandler’s portrait, he is a hapless vector, assumed by his adherents to be playing “six-dimensional chess” while in fact limited to witless strategies guaranteed to deliver long-term losses.

At the same time, Chandler is keen to underline the authoritarianism of the man, and consequently the danger he poses to the American republic. Chandler compares the current situation to Germany in the 1930s, when a despotic regime conspired to dismantle liberal constitutionalism while also successfully destroying the vocation of German universities. Now (as then), Chandler concludes, “professors are the enemy.” He characterizes both movements as advocating fascism.

The cumulative effect of Chandler’s presentation is to pit a learned clerisy against an ignorant underclass. He invokes the standards of nineteenth century European liberalism to criticize prevailing US populism. Just as Tocqueville and Mill chastised the tyranny of the unlettered, so Chandler also highlights the dangers of an “uninstructed” populace.

My worry is that Chandler has under-estimated his opponents while at the same time exhibiting too much faith in the university classes. He also, it seems to me, over-extends his criticisms. There are certainly growing threats to the US constitution, but these look nothing like the collapse of Weimar in the 1930s. Equally, assaults on university freedoms fall some way short of the radical purge engineered by National Socialism after 1933. Chandler is right that the White House has punished universities under “bogus pretenses,” but is this enough to excuse the practices of the Ivy Leagues since the 1960s?

Towards the end of his pamphlet, Chandler confesses: “I don’t deny the problems that plague today’s universities.” Yet he limits these to the sin of “neoliberalism.” In censuring this, Chandler overlaps with Wendy Brown – but also, interestingly, with Steve Bannon. It is true that interpretations vary on what neoliberalism means. Nonetheless, “globalists, bankers, liberals, and neocons” are not objects of suspicion among right-wing nationalists alone. They have long been in the sights of the university mainstream, where a scatter-gun animosity to forms of power prevails.

Chandler calls into question “anti-DEI conservatives,” but it is hard to see that “diversity” has delivered economic justice. Nor have America’s elite universities promoted (as Chandler would wish) “an education that opens a mind to free discussion and new ideas”? On the contrary, some of us see a profusion of dogmatic hostility to liberalism, and a self-cannibalizing animus against the norms of free inquiry. In institutions of higher learning, “critique” is produced without much regard to real-world consequences: its proponents are in a position “to win either way.” Given the record of mounting estrangement between universities and the public, it is time to turn our propensity for criticism against ourselves.

Richard Bourke is Professor of the History of Political Thought at King’s College, Cambridge. He is the author of Empire and Revolution: The Political Life of Edmund Burke.