The Academic Trumpists, Part 2

David L. Swartz’s monograph The Academic Trumpists (Routledge) analyzes publicly available information concerning 198 professors in the United States who describe themselves as Republicans, conservatives and/or libertarians and who either publicly endorsed or repudiated Donald Trump as a candidate in 2016. (For more on the size of each grouping and demographic and professional similarities between them, see part one of this review.)

Conservative academics who staked out pro- and anti-Trump positions during his first campaign have mostly held fast to them. (Most in each camp are tenured, perhaps bolstering their ideological intransigence.) Social and political pressures have converted many a never Trumper into a true believer over time—see, for example, Trump’s current running mate—but right-wing anti-Trump academics are a definite exception to this trend. Only one academic in Swartz’s data set who opposed Trump in 2016 endorsed him during the 2020 election. And none challenged the legitimacy of the election’s outcome.

By contrast, Swartz writes that 25 of the pro-Trump academics in his data set “joined Trump in claiming publicly that the election was stolen from him by voter fraud.” They included the economist Peter Navarro and John C. Eastman, the lawyer and sometime academic who argued that Vice President Pence had the authority to disregard certified electors during the Electoral College count on Jan. 6. One pro-Trump professor in Swartz’s database did support Trump’s impeachment for that day’s attempt to overturn the results through mob violence; three others “had distanced themselves from supportive positions” for the president by the end of his administration.

But a sizable majority of academic Trumpists—more than three-quarters of them—have not commented on the events of Jan. 6 at all. This is, in the author’s laconic phrase, “unusual for public intellectuals,” but silence is often the better part of discretion.

What conservative academics think about Trump himself is not the book’s central concern, however. The author pursues what he calls a “fielding framework” toward “political identities and practices”—an approach based on the late Pierre Bourdieu’s work. Fields are, to quote Swartz’s book on the French social theorist, “arenas of production, circulation, and appropriation of goods, services, knowledge, or status, and the competitive positions held by actors in their struggle to accumulate and monopolize these different kinds of capital.”

Defining the field of conservative public intellectuals means identifying and comparing the political and academic institutions in which they work, the levels of prestige and influence they reach, and the strategies that evolve to cope with each other’s drive for recognition.

A good deal of quantification and tabulation is involved—and in summing up the findings, I risk aiming a fire hose of statistics at the hapless reader. The better course here is to describe the patterns that emerge once the numbers are crunched.

Noted in part one of this review is Swartz’s finding about the professors in his study with graduate degrees from universities ranked in the top 50 by U.S. News & World Report. He found that pro-Trump academics went on to hold positions at top-50 institutions less frequently than fellow conservatives who opposed Trump. A similar contrast appears when comparing their publications. The pro-Trumpists’ peer-reviewed research tended to have less impact on others in their field (as assessed by a standard bibliometric index) than the work of the anti-Trumpists.

Correlation does not prove causality, and it is illogical to deduce that anti-Trumpists were rewarded, or pro-Trumpists penalized, for their opinions. By the time Donald Trump made his legendary descent into the political arena by escalator, most of the academics in the study already had tenure. Their opinions on the candidate cannot have influenced their status within institutional or scholarly hierarchies.

Rather, the discrepancies in institutional prestige and intellectual authority—in Bourdieu’s idiom, academic and symbolic “capital,” respectively—put them on different courses in exercising influence outside the university. Think tanks and roles in government are where symbolic capital pays dividends in political influence.

Swartz calls the think tanks of the right “opportunity structures for maintaining political identities and practices for these conservative professors outside of the purview of liberal campus politics.” They are also venues for activism: debating policy, drafting legislation, preparing amicus briefs in court cases, etc. The most prominent think tanks—the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society and the Cato Institute, for example—accommodate both pro- and anti-Trump professors.

But Swartz finds most Trumpist academics located in a cluster of think tanks with lower profiles and greater ideological homogeneity, albeit with distinctive points of emphasis. (At least a couple merit the label “neo-Confederate.”)

The best-established and most influential think tank in this sector is the Claremont Institute, about which one nonadmirer has written that “just about every illiberal, anti-democratic, and demagogic project attempted by the Right in the past few years is connected to Claremont in some way.” Certainly, it is the hub of a subsystem of the think tanks where pro-Trump academics collaborate, and its quarterly, the Claremont Review of Books, puts MAGA arguments into literate prose.

In effect, the political forces of the far right have built up their own intellectual infrastructure—a pole of attraction, and a space of engagement, for pro-Trump professors. That said, it would be a mistake to neglect the other kind of political capital in play: the involvement of conservative academics of both sorts in the practice of government. “Despite a little overlap,” Swartz writes, “the two groups tend to navigate different sectors of the state.”

In general, conservative academics who reject Trump have more experience at the federal and international levels (whether working for the U.S. abroad or for other countries) than do pro-Trumpists, who are more likely to have worked with state or local agencies. “The state and local level roles also parallel the Republican Party strategy of gaining control of state and local governments,” writes Swartz.

To reiterate a point that informs The Academic Trumpists but is easy to lose track of along the way: Trump did not influence the career paths of any of these scholars. They were well along whatever trajectory they followed well before the political earthquake whose aftershocks continue. Many conservative academics, while seriously involved in political life, invested their intellectual capital primarily into research. Some received returns in the form of professional advancement or scholarly influence, or both.

Others did not, or put their energies rather into work with others sharing their political attitudes—hoping to find in this counterculture something not available from academe. And from that vantage, Trump presumably looked like hope itself, where others saw only nightmare.