People Who Know Better

The Dilemma of the “Anti-Woke” Movement

You know what we really need to do to fix the universities? Put this guy in charge!

What happens to the “anti-woke” movement in an era of conservative authoritarianism?

Cathy Young provides an interesting vignette of that debate in a Bulwark report on the most recent conference of the “Heterodox Academy.” (See also a follow-up interview for The UnPopulist.) Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, puts the dilemma most succinctly: “Having worried about the soft despotism of shared opinion, we now have to contend with the hard despotism of ideological tests from Washington.”

Phrased that way, the question pretty much answers itself. Of course the “hard despotism” of actual coercion has to take precedence over the “soft despotism” of people being mean to you because of your opinions.

What stands out from that report, though, is that a lot of the anti-woke types are really trying to avoid answering the question. They want to keep on with positions that seemed reasonable and important in the Biden administration—while Donald Trump specifically targets the universities for coercion by the federal government.

Read the whole report, because this is Cathy’s beat, and she’s good at it. If you ask me, the problem with the heterodox types is that they define themselves by “heterodoxy” and “diversity of thought” rather than by “liberalism.”

I want to draw out a further dilemma she alludes to but doesn’t quite state.

On the one hand, some of the anti-woke types want to blame wokeness for Trump’s attacks. Cathy doesn’t really buy it, and neither do I, and she gives some good reasons for that. But she does make this concession.

While it seems clear that academia’s internal problems with freedom of expression and intellectual diversity have little to do with Trump’s motives for his current power grab, these problems do make it harder for universities to stake out the moral high ground while defending themselves.

Fair enough, I suppose. But the shoe is also on the other foot. If the anti-woke types won’t leap to defend the universities against coercion by an autocrat, what “moral high ground” do they think they’re going to be able to claim for themselves? Cathy puts this more mildly that I would: “[T]he ‘heterodox’ professors may squander their supporters’ trust if, amid a very real assault on liberal democracy and civil society, they appear to be (in Roth’s pithy words) ‘talking about needing a better milkshake when the house is on fire.’”

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Hard Despotism

The question the entire anti-woke movement faces is: Do you oppose “wokeness” because you really care about freedom of thought? Or do you oppose it just because you found yourself outside the orthodoxy? And would you happily defend the orthodoxy and help impose it, if you thought you were included in it?

Unlike the heterodox types, who are agonizing over this question, there is a group of conservative intellectuals who know exactly where they stand, and they just released a short manifesto in favor of imposing a new orthodoxy by the “hard despotism” of presidential edict.