Soft Totalitarianism Comes Washington

The deeper meaning of the elite university presidents' testimony

She’s talking about whether pro-Hamas messaging is anti-Semitic

I am amazed, and pleased, by the incredible fallout from the Congressional testimony given by the presidents of Harvard, Penn (both Ivies) and MIT. As you will have heard or read, these college presidents disgraced themselves by struggling to answer basic questions about anti-Semitism on campus, and their race policies, in the wake of the Hamas atrocity. It has revealed what blithering anti-white racists these people are, and the institutions they run are. Jews got caught in this because they are white — and are considered by the left to be “oppressors”. The clips are everywhere, and they are devastating. Here’s a link to one example.

As someone noted on Twitter yesterday, what we saw was ordinary bullshit from the academic world, but exposed to public, who can see what a pack of lies and cowardice it is. If you start pulling the thread, you’ll see that this is exactly how soft totalitarianism works. “Soft” because there are no government agents standing over them with guns to their heads forcing them to act on this profoundly illiberal, racist ideology — but it is totalitarianism nonetheless. Many have pointed out that what the three prominent university presidents say — that even offensive speech must be protected — is not necessarily wrong, but that they have all been staggering hypocrites about applying the rule. If a student or professor states that sex is biological and binary, it’s the guillotine for that thought criminal (seriously, this happened at Harvard).

But if a mob of pro-Hamas campus demonstrators calls for genocide? Is that hate speech? “It depends on the context.”

This appalling display reveals once again that the American ruling class is morally bankrupt. A sweeping statement, yes, but I believe it. The billionaire investor and Harvard alumnus Bill Ackman did his own private polling of Harvard faculty, who complained to him that it is impossible to say what you really think at Harvard, without fear of cancellation. Read his entire 1,700 word report, in the form of an open letter to Harvard president Claudine Gay. Last week, interviewing one of the dissidents jailed for opposing the Communist government of Czechoslovakia, I asked for a list of characteristics of totalitarianism. The first thing the man said was, “When you cannot speak the truth about reality out of fear of consequences.”

This is Harvard! It’s a soft-totalitarian madrassa — and the most important university in the world. You wonder why all the American elites are on the same side ideologically? Because they were trained at these institutions. Because the ideology into which they have been groomed is their normal. Because dissent is not allowed.

Once again, I am reminded of what a European friend who spent a year at Harvard on a fellowship a few years back told me about the most important lesson he learned there: that the nascent American elite are too psychologically fragile to deal with ideas that trouble them, and that Harvard accommodates and reinforces that fragility. He told me that none of them doubt that they have the right to rule the world, but that they cannot abide dissent.

John Sailer of the National Association of Scholars explains in an important tweet what’s going on here. Click on the tweet to watch his seminar going more in-depth:

We can’t understand what’s going on at universities right now without understanding what's happened to faculty hiring. I’ve become convinced that this is the crux of so many issues in academia today. After investigating and writing on faculty hiring for over a year, I’ve found an evidence of widespread viewpoint discrimination and rampant racial preferences. (See my seminar at Stanford, which is linked below.) On civil rights law, universities act with a sense of impunity combined with a seeming ignorance of what the law actual requires. Even more concerning, they regularly adopt and encourage policies that perpetuate a narrow orthodoxy on campus.

In practice, the use of DEI litmus tests functions as a wide open call for weeding out scholars and scientists with even moderately controversial social and political views — and especially those with the wrong beliefs on issues of social justice. To put it more concretely, universities regularly give additional points both in faculty hiring and in the promotion and tenure process for “contributions to DEI.” At times, they gives a significant weight to DEI criterion, such that a bad diversity statement could sink a candidates' prospects, including in the hard sciences. It would be consistent with the most common guidance for a scientist or scholar to be rewarded for showing how they’ve conducted research on decolonization, hosted decolonization seminars and reading groups, and attended protests on and off campus for the cause of decolonization. (If you don’t believe this, take a look at Emory University’s rubric for evaluating diversity contributions, which I cite my seminar.) I strongly suspect that some young PhDs on the job market right now have noted in their diversity statements how they attended anti-Israel protests.

At the same time, the guidance provided by many universities (see UC Berkeley’s rubric for assessing DEI, which I discuss in the seminar) would very clearly penalize a job candidate for the following statement: “I believe in treating students as individuals, not as members of groups. Because of this ideal, I strive to treat all of my students equally. I object to the practice of identity-based affinity groups, because we should never separate students on the basis of race.” I’m not speculating about this (watch the seminar). At many universities, this would unequivocally land a job candidate a low DEI score.

The end result: a massive echo chamber, where dissenting voices are weeded out, self-select out, or simply decide that speaking up is too costly. We shouldn’t be surprised when American university faculty members applaud Hamas’s attack or valorize the image of a paraglider. University professors should be allowed to say whatever they want, even abhorrent nonsense. But they should be in an environment where espousing abhorrent nonsense will ultimately embarrass them. That’s clearly not the case, in large part because institutional policy at universities favor narrow range of acceptable views. And while right now, the aftermath of the Hamas attack is the most salient example, this dynamic extends broadly.

From an excellent tweet by psychology professor Geoffrey Miller:

The situation at Harvard is not unusual. The leaders of academia are not typically leading academics, in the sense of highly productive researchers or widely respected teachers. One might say they are career bureaucrats - but that would misunderstand their crucial ideological function. The American people need to understand that in modern universities, both public and private, administrators function more like party political officers in communist Russian or Chinese universities. They are selected, throughout their careers, largely for their political commitments, and their willingness to enforce them. Like Cold War commissars, their allegiance is to the party, not to academia where they happen to work.

I mean 'party' quite literally: the Democratic party. Most American university administrators are loyal Democrats, and can't really imagine why anyone wouldn't be. Very few are Republicans or Libertarians. And an increasing proportion of them are fully woke identitarian Leftists: they often launched their careers with a short series of papers on woke topics, using woke ideological frameworks, published in woke journals - before turning to the administrative track that offers much more political power to propagandize, indoctrinate, and control. '

So what?', you might ask. I've seen many calls for university administrators to enforce the rules of classical liberalism and free speech more fairly. This is like asking a Soviet-era commissar to abandon their Communist party allegiance, and to develop an entirely new identity and ethos grounded in an ideology that they have spent their entire career fighting.

It will not happen. Political animals do not change their spots.

What do we do about this? I don’t know, but I do know that this is a crossroads for our country, and indeed for our civilization. It’s all in Live Not By Lies. As it is at Harvard, Penn, MIT, and other top American universities, so it is, and will increasingly be, throughout American life. Again: soft totalitarianism does not require the state to enforce its ideology. It only requires that institutional elites in business, media, academia, and elsewhere adhere to the same basic totalitarian ideology, and enforce it voluntarily.

This is what the immigrants to America from Communist countries saw years ago. No one listened. When are we going to wake up?