Are Canada’s universities heading towards an epochal crisis of relevance? Writing in The Hub, a university administrator in a “senior leadership position” at a “well-respected university” worries that they are. Her concerns are not directed at the rising costs of post-secondary education for students, the funding crisis plaguing the institutions of some provinces (especially Ontario), or budget models that tie resources to enrollments and enrollments to employment. She instead focuses on the purported weakening commitment to scholarly excellence and academic freedom. The culprit: woke obsession with the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion agenda, students who need coddling and are incapable of rising to the challenge of higher education, an expanding cohort of student support functionaries with no background in higher education, and the rule of group unthink amongst senior administrators. I think that she raises legitimate concerns, but also exaggerates the extent to which contentious debate has been suppressed within Canada’s universities.

There have been, to be sure, egregious exceptions to the principle of academic freedom. The most serious is the firing of Frances Widdowson from Mount Royal University. According to Widdowson, she was fired because of her criticisms of the school’s Indiginization initiatives. Her case is currently being argued in front of an arbitrator in Alberta. She has received the support of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, a group who traces its origins to the struggle for academic freedom. CAUT was also involved in protesting the decision of the administration at the University of Lethbridge to cave into student and faculty pressure to cancel a talk that Widdowson was supposed to give on campus. She had been invited by Philosophy professor (and my former colleague at McMaster University) Paul Viminitz to speak on her case and the surrounding issues of academic freedom.

The concerns that the administrator raises in her essay have some basis in reality. I have argued consistently and will continue to argue that any student or faculty member who is incapable of listening to and responding with cogent argument and criticism to positions that differ from their own because they assume that their position is necessarily true, just, and beyond rational dispute contradict the ethos of free inquiry upon which the university depends. Universities cannot exist without the free exchange and articulation of arguments. As the poet and University of Toronto English Professor George Eliot Clarke wrote in a recent edition of the CAUT Bulletin, the “cancellation” and “gangstalking,” i.e., bullying and harassment conducted to censure, censor, or silence academics (and other intellectuals, including writers) … are strictly heinous when backed by other members of the intelligentsia– citizens whose work relies upon free speech guarantees.” (CAUT Bulletin, 18 Vo. 70, No. 6, Sept-Oct, 2023, 18).) Clarke is correct to insist that no one group has the right to decide what positions are publicly articulated and defended. As I have said before, the truth will out, if and only if differing positions can be freely analyzed and criticized. There is no higher value in the university than free exchange, analysis, and criticism of ideas and arguments concerning all of the dimensions of human experience: the natural world upon which we depend, the social worlds that we construct, and the systems of thought and expression (science, philosophy, spirituality, artistic sensibility and practice) through which we try to understand and interpretet. The political value of universities is not determined by any party line. Their political value is that they educate people to think clearly and critically, to evaluate and marshal evidence in support of a position, to rationally convince others or be rationally convinced themselves. Self-righteous posturing and preaching to the choir supports an ethic of indoctrination to which the value and power of human thinking must always oppose itself.

Universities must reject, as Hegel said, “the conceit that refuses to argue.”

The question is: are DEI initiatives necessarily expressions of that conceit.

But are DEI initiatives opposed to academic freedom? Writing in the same issue of the CAUT Bulletin, Executive Director David Robinson acknowledged that there are real tensions between some interpretations of DEI initiatives and academic freedom. “We have … seen more prescriptive requirement that ask candidates to submit statements demonstrating how their work aligns with the institution’s specific EDI strategy. This can violate academic freedom.” Where there are grounds to worry about the transgressions of the principle of academic freedom, faculty unions need to do their job and have demands for such statements removed from application requirements. That is not to say, Robinson adds, that the mere existence of DEI requirements violates academic freedom. “CAUT policy has long stated that all hiring and promotion decisions should be based only on considerations relevant to .. effective performance .. Arguably, such professional responsibilities today include the ability to teach an increasingly diverse and inclusive student body.” (CAUT Bulletin, Vol 70, No. 6, 7). Agreed. Therefore, there is no necessary contradiction between institutional efforts to more fulsomely include historically marginalized voices and the right of academics to organize their courses according to their expertise and professional judgment.

In a related vein, the president of PEN America Suzanne Nossel argued in a recent essay that the university system in a pluralistic society has a responsibility to ensure that there is space for the expression of all socially relevant perspectives on the problems of human experience and knowledge. Both Robinson and Noessen bring to light what to my mind is the key to resolving the conflict between DEI and academic freedom: academics have a responsibility to teach the state of the art in their disciplines. This responsibility obligates them to revise their own curriculum in light of changes in the field. Academic disciplines cannot be determined solely by political forces outside the academy, but they do not float free of those forces either. Therefore, where pervasive social struggles, such as the renewed struggle against racism in the wake of the George Floyd murder steer academic work in new directions, everyone working in fields so affected have a responsibility to inform themselves of that work and incorporate it, where relevant, into their course designs, not because some bureaucracy, but because good teaching, demands it.

The anonymous administrator invokes the Enlightenment in defence of her position, but the Enlightenment was contradictory, typically (but not always) invoking different standards for the judgement of European and non-European societies. The French Revolution proclaimed the universal rights of “man and citizen,” but executed Olympe de Gouges when she demanded that the rights of women be equally recognized. As great an anti-imperialist as the Marquis de Condorcet could, in the same work (Sketch for Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind) both denounce the violent racism of slavery-supporting tyrants and argue that the best fate for Indigenous people in the Americas was assimilation.

The political legacy of the Enlightenment is thus highly ambiguous. Methodologically, what was most valuable is the opposite of the good administrator’s assumption. The Enlightenment began the process of freeing thought from attachment to eternal natural kinds and fixed moral hierarchies. The key thinkers of the French, Scottish, and German Enlightenments began to ask crucial questions about how societies came to be organized the way that they are, who benefits from that organization, and how people came to be convinced that the way things are now is the way that they naturally should be? When we understand the Enlightenment as the origin of critical-historical thinking, feminism, critical race theory, and the critique of colonialism become continuations of its methodological heritage, not its opposite. “The Enlightenment” was a historical period, contradictory like all historical periods, and not a crystalline structure of truth floating free from social interests.

That said, everyone who teaches or studies at a university must treat their work as an argument and not as gospel truth to be preached and never questioned. Refusal to treat opponent’s positions as arguments but as anathema to be banned is a direct violation of academics’ and students’ duty to treat the institution as a space for open inquiry and free debate. That duty applies equally to everyone: again, the political function of universities is not to promote some undefined and therefore meaningless “social justice agenda” or to combat the deep structural inequalities of the world. Universities educate, that is all, but under the assumption that educated people can weigh evidence, detect contradictions between principle and practice or within principles, develop coherent arguments to justify the claim that there is a contradiction, suggest alternatives, all the while remaining open to counter-argument and to the incorporation of sound criticism into revised thinking.

That is the hope, in any case. And while I agree that there have been egregious examples of cowardly administrators caving in to some students and faculty’s misplaced political demands to regulate the free play of argument on campus, I do not see that this problem has reached a point where the very existence of the institution as a space for free inquiry has been threatened. The author of the piece lists a now familiar set of concerns: targeted hiring of historically underrepresented groups, Indigenization initiatives, and students more concerned with mental health support than intellectual growth.

But there is no detailed meat of analysis and evidence put on these bones of critique. She does not prove, for example, that targeted hiring of underrepresented groups compromises the quality of research and teaching or that there is a contradiction between such hiring initiatives and academic excellence and commitment to choosing the most qualified candidate. The author is a woman, and she would know better than me that exactly the same arguments were launched 40 years ago when institutions began making systematic efforts to increase the proportion of women academics. Does she regard herself and her female colleagues hired over the past 3 or 4 decades as as a mere “equity hires? I would guess not. So why does she think that black or Indigenous colleagues hired more recently are not equally fit for their positions? If, as she implies, she thinks that (at least some of them) are, she needs to provide some evidence.

As for students today, well, students today are who they are and they are different from the author and I when we were students 30 or 40 years ago. Her elders told her, I am sure, as mine told me when I was an adolescent, that I would grow old enough to be driven crazy by teenagers and young adults, and they were correct. The tone of the essay too often sounds like late middle age grousing about “kids these days.’ Now I admit, there is both necessity and pleasure in late middle age grousing about “kids these days’ (if it was so much better in our day, we can reconcile ourselves more easily to getting old) but grousing is not proof that there is a systematic problem. Before one condemns contemporary students, one must look at the social and economic context in which they are trying to study (high tuition, the consequent need for many to work and try to go to school, uncertain job prospects, to name only the most significant).

We oldsters must also remember that those of us who became professors were bookworms and lab rats: a very small proportion of our graduating classes. Now that we teach or administrate we have to keep in mind that the vast majority of students do not want to be scholars and intellectuals. To be effective teachers we have to come down to where most of our students are in order to encourage them to take a few steps up to where the ideas live. We also have to keep in mind that our study habits were forged before the internet, before people held the power of real time instant global communication in the palm of their hands. Our social identities were formed in a vastly different cultural-technological matrix.

As we were different from our parents, so too are today’s students different from us. They are not, I do not think, a catastrophe that will destroy the institution, but they will force the institution to change. As the Gang of Four sang in “I Found that Essence Rare,” “the worst thing in 1954 was the bikini.” I can imagine academics in “senior leadership positions” in the 60s fussing about the complete corruption of the nation’s morals in response to student demands for co-ed dorms.

Again, there are serious concerns raised in this essay and there are examples of institutions abdicating their responsibilities to protect academic freedom. However, I want to suggest– gently, and with respect– that if the problems really are as serious as she argues, she has a perfect duty, as a “senior leader’ to open her mouth in meetings and challenge her colleagues. And a further part of that duty is to sign her name to articles that call into question the academic integrity of the university institutions that have given her a career. If that which we depend upon not only for our paycheque but our existence as intellectuals is threatened, and we believe that the institution’s social value is in jeopardy, then we have a duty to protect it, or resign from a “leadership” position and go back to the faculty ranks. It is not only the communists of the world that should disdain to conceal their views, it is all concerned citizens. If one is afraid to sign one’s name, why should anyone believe what they say? After all, an essential part of the free exchange of ideas that the author claims to value is answering criticism of your arguments. But if one does not put name to paper, one cannot be held to critical account.

Chuffed by his role in forcing former Harvard president Claudine Gay to resign, Christopher Rufo has just penned a call to arms to “new right activists” to “win back the language, recapture institutions, and reorient the state toward rightful ends.” He does not tell us what “rightful ends” the state should serve or what those who disagree with them whatever they turn out to be should do. As a manifesto, it lacks the poetry of Marx and Engels. Its fussing over the capture of American institutions by the “far left” is derivative of the anxieties of late 60s and early 1970’s conservatives worried about the anti-war, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist youth. And its plea that the right emulate the political left’s strategy of capturing the leadership of major social institutions is ironic, given that many leftists (Srnicek and Williams, for example) have argued that leftists need to take a page from the way the right recovered from their defeats in the 1960 to dominate the 70s and 80s.

In short, the content and tone is predictable and superficial, but Rufo does raise important questions about the purpose of public institutions that are worth thinking through.

Rufo’s screed begins by telling his fellow travellers that both the old (nineteenth century) liberalism and conservatism are dead. Warming the right-wing heart with memories of Reagan will not work; the new right needs a new action plan for new times. He does not mention Trump and I do not know what his position is on MAGA Republicans (they certainly have organizing power, but Rufo is perhaps too much of an intellectual to go in for their manifold absurdities). Rufo focuses on stopping “establishment conservatives” from retreating any further from the core values of the “political tradition of the west– republican self-government, shared moral standards, and the pursuit of eudaimonia.”

I found the inclusion of eudaimonia next to ‘shared moral standards’ in a conservative argument odd. Without saying anything more about what ‘shared moral standards’ he has in mind (Judeo-Christian morality, I presume) the value of flourishing (eudaimonia) pulls in the direction of individual difference and self-creation, not shared substantive values. Aristotle could assume shared moral principles, but in a pluralist country like the United States, shared moral standards are the problem, not the solution. Individual flourishing presupposes access to resources and, therefore, (if you ask me) any society that prioritises flourishing must institutionalise the principle (common to socialism and egalitarian liberalism but foreign to the classical liberalism or libertarianism) that everyone should be able to access the basic resources, relationships, and institutions that the flourishing of their lives requires. But as for religious beliefs, cultural traditions, and the content of the lives people choose to pursue, those would necessarily differ. Without further unpacking his thought, Rufo leaves his position open to questions about its normative and political coherence.

However, as I noted, the essay is a short call to arms and not a political philosophy paper. “The Right doesn’t need a white paper,” he argues, it needs activists willing to go to battle– as he did in the Harvard plagiarism scandal– to take back institutions. Unless the right takes back control of schools and statehouses, all talk of ‘righteous ends’ is just academic hot air.

But a battle against what forces? Rufo provides further support for an argument that I have made for decades concerning the connection between postmodern critiques of objective truth and the right-wing. Rufo argues that “while postmodern theorists who reduced politics to “language games” may have overstated the case, … they were right in one respect: language is the operative element of human culture. To change the language means to change society: in law, arts, rhetoric, and common speech.” Rufo (and the postmodernists) are correct that language is the operative element of human society, but they are wrong to infer that political power is a function of control over language. Power does not stem from control over the OED or the barrel of a gun (Mao), but from control over the resources (natural, technological) upon which everyone’s lives and livelihood depends. Control over the language is often used in a purely ideological way make it seem as though substantive social changes have been made when in reality the class dimensions of political and economic power have not been changed at all.

Such is the case with the language of ‘Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” that drives Rufo so crazy. Let us confine our attention to the universities for a moment. Rufo believes that the leadership of universities has been seized by a far left cabal bent on destroying academic standards and turning America’s halls of academia into madrassas of political correctness. I have worked in universities for thirty years and can assure everyone who is worried that they are not led by far left activists and that the biggest threat to academic freedom is the role of private money (as l’affaire Harvard also proved) and the ubiquitous demand made by public funders that university curricula serve the interests of business by producing “job ready” applicants that can be fed into the most dynamic sectors of the economy.

Anyone concerned with academic standards and freedom should be concerned when any extraneous political agenda is imposed upon academics and students, whichever side of the political aisle it claims to serve. Curricula needs to be determined by the state of the art in the field and not preachy administrators hoping to cure the ills of the world through changed reading lists. At the same time– as Rufo’s own arguments admit– the world has changed. The most important change– in the humanities at least– is the emergence of long silenced voices that demand– rightly– to be heard. The state of the art in the field should determine the curricula in all disciplines, but certainly in the humanities the state of the art means including the works of historically colonised people, critical race theorists, and others who have been demonstrably oppressed by the dominant structures of power and wealth. Including those voices does not mean that they should dominate the conversation to the exclusion of older perspectives, but it does mean that they have to be heard.

Rufo’s intervention does not go into details about how he would reform institutions in general or universities in particular, but the general arguments he does make contradict themselves. He calls out the left for its “euphemistic rule,” but then concludes that the new right must “replace contemporary ideological language with new, persuasive language that points towards clear principles.” Two points are in order: first, persuasive language need not be true, and second, clear principles can be ideological. Rufo intends his readers to conclude that his feet are planted in the soil of objective truth, but he himself admits that he is mobilizing power to prosecute a political– ideologically partisan– agenda.

Rufo’s penchant for making bald faced contradictions perhaps explains why works for a think tank and not an academic institution. If he worked as an academic, he would have to defend his arguments from critics who would expose his contradictions. As a private researcher, he is free to deal in platitudes about the superiority of passion to reason and re-setting the public agenda on the basis of “clear principles.” (He also does not have to fend off charges of plagiarism, which is good for him, because he flat out plagiarises Hume’s argument, from Essay on Human Nature, that reason is the slave of the passions. Maybe Claudine Gay should expose him).

In any case, the problem with Rufo’s criticisms of the “euphemistic left” is that he wants his readers to think that his “clear principles’ are objectively true, while at the same time arguing that all principles are political and that public life is really a Nietzschean battle to impose one’s own preferred ‘truths’ on everyone else. He writes that “no institution can be neutral– and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will immediately be captured by a faction more committed to imposing ideology.” If true, it follows that this argument applies to Rufo as well, and that, consequently, his real agenda is not to protect objective truth from the infamies of the ‘far left,’ but just to impose his ideology on everyone else.

But institutions can be neutral, in the partisan political sense, and yet passionately commit themselves to fulfilling their purpose. To speak again only of the universities, the belief that they must serve a cliched left or right wing agenda is simply false. Faculty and students have political positions, which they must be free to defend (not impose) in the context of academic argument, but the university itself, if it is to function as a space for open, free, intellectual inquiry, criticism, and debate, cannot serve any political master. There have been egregious cases of faculty being hounded out of their positions, not had their contracts renewed, or fired, for running afoul of EDI platitudes. I have criticized these violations of academic freedom and integrity and will continue to do so. But the solution is not a “new right” take over of the universities (as has happened at New College in Florida), but a recommitment of all members of the university institution to the discipline and courage of argument. The purpose of the university is not to spread any particular group’s “truth” but to expose every truth-claim to the test of open examination and criticism. The truth will out, but not because one group is more committed to its partisan principles than another. The truth is what survives contestation and criticism. If Rufo is serious about returning institutions to their purposes, he needs to stand on the side of critical engagement and not on the side of forcibly silencing opponents who annoy him.

The decisions of the Colorado Supreme Court and the Secretary of State of Maine to bar Trump (pending appeals to US Supreme Court) from the Republican primary ballot in those states gives practical urgency to abstract debates about the relationship between constitutional principles, the rule of law, and democratic self-determination. On the surface– whatever one thinks of Trump– having judges and a secretary of state (from an opposing party) take pre-emptive steps to remove a candidate from ballots and thus prevent voters from exercising their right to vote for a candidate of their choice seems rather like the ‘election interference’ of which Trump has been accused.

On the other hand, elections are governed by rules and– again, whatever one thinks of those rules and whatever one thinks about how democratic ‘actually existing democracy’ is– there is an argument that Trump has disqualified himself by his actions on January 6th, 2021. The Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine Secretary of State appealed to the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution’s ban on “insurrectionists” running for office as justification for their decision to remove Trump from the ballot. At issue, legally, constitutionally, is whether or not Trump’s actions on January 6th amounted to insurrection. At present, no court has found him criminally guilty of such a charge, which predictably raises suspicions– and not unjustified, within the rules of the American electoral system– that Democratic justices and officials are trying to disrupt the Trump campaign because- as incredible as it might seem– he has a legitimate chance to beat Biden in the general election.

The US Supreme Court will decide the constitutional issues one way or the other, by either refusing to hear the case (and thus letting the decisions stand) or hearing arguments and rendering judgement. Here too partisanship is almost certain to come into play. The 6-3- conservative-liberal split and the fact that three of those 6 were appointed during Trump’s term as President increases the probability that the court would render a verdict favorable to Trump. However, the real issue that these decisions raise is political and goes to the heart of the value that underlies democracy.

The Secretary of State of Maine argued that since “democracy is sacred” she had no choice but to bar Trump from the ballot, for Trump, apparently, is the antithesis of everything democratic. But is he? What makes democracy sacred? And what does “sacred” mean? Setting aside the overtly religious connotations, sacred means, I would argue, something like “not for sale at any price or exchangeable for any superior good.” So, if democracy is sacred, office cannot be bought at any price but must be the function of the choice of the citizens. Moreover, it cannot be sacrificed to any higher good, including, presumably, constitutional principles.

Let us set aside the obvious role that money plays in US federal and elections and focus on the substantive political problem. That problem is: do constitutional principles exist for the sake of democracy or does democracy exist for the sake of constitutional principles? The question has haunted American democracy from the beginning, when the question of how to regulate (tame, subordinate?) the popular energies unleashed by revolution was debated in the Federalist. The problem that Hamilton, Madison, and other founders of the America state faced was the unbridled nature of democratic energy. Popular power is unfocused but must be channeled this way or that. They worried that democratic power would be captured by majoritarian movements that would wield state power against opposed minority interests (especially the minority interest defined by class power rooted in control over wealth and resources).

The debate has raged since Madison’s critique of popular democratic power between supporters of its subordination to constitutional limits and defenders of its essential vitality. Defenders of democracy argue that by its very nature democracy must leave the question of governing principle open: democratic peoples decide fro themselves who will rule them and by what principles they will be ruled. Sheldon Wolin, criticizing Rawls for the anti-political and undemocratic thrust of his theory of justice, makes the general point clearly: Rawls tries to ‘cut democracy to the specifications of constitutionalism” he argued, and “fit ‘democracy’ into an undemocratic social framework.” Rawls’ makes these moves, Wolin contends, because his starting point, “is not democracy, but … ‘stability.”(“The Liberal/Democratic Divide” Fugitive Democracy, 275.)

For Wolin, one cannot have democracy without struggle and contestation over what is and is not a fit matter for public debate and decision. “The problem of the political is not to clear a space from which society is to be kept out but it is to ground power in commonality while reverencing diversity … Diversity cannot be reverenced by bureaucratic modes of decision-making. Diversity is the nightmare of bureaucracy.” (“Democracy and the Political,” 249) The problem of diversity– a problem of which Trump is a paradigm example– is that the forms it takes cannot be predicted in advance. It is a nightmare for bureaucratic thinking precisely because the forms it throws up cannot be regulated in advance. When a movement arises which seems to break the established pattern the response of bureaucracy– as exemplified here by the Colorado Supreme Court and the Secretary of State of Maine– is to try to suppress it, eradicate it under cover of legal or constitutional principle. The result– if Wolin is correct, and I believe that he is– must be undemocratic.

Wolin did not live long enough to see Trump, but Trump is not, in fact, a novelty in US politics but the latest in a long line of right-wing populist iconoclasts. None of these figures scared Wolin away from his affirmation of democracy over its constitutional strangulation, so I doubt that Trump would have either. What Trump’s opponents forget is that democracy is not first and foremost a substantive moral doctrine but a form of distributing power. In a democracy, different groups and movements struggle for power. One side in this struggle cannot cloak itself in the mantle of “democracy” as justification for banning other players from playing. To do so is obviously to try to stack the deck in one’s favour and thus undercut by one’s practice the very value of democracy to which one appeals as theoretical justification.

To support unbridled democratic contestation between rival parties and movements does not mean supporting Trump or other demagogic forces or rejecting the existence of genuine, shared, fundamental interests anchored in basic natural and social needs. What it does mean is that commitment to democratic politics elevates the principle of self-determination above expertocratic, top-down forms of enacting policies to meet those needs. In short, a commitment to democratic self-determination requires that democrats accept risk. Unless one want to be ruled by an expertocracy (like Iran’s Council of Experts that vets candidates for office, or return to the days of Enlightened despotism, or- as technotopians urge– turn our public affairs over to an AI system that will mechanically churn out win-win solutions to all problems– one must accept the possibility that majorities will coalesce around demagogic figures like Trump. That is precisely the reason why Plato believed that democracy will always undermine itself. but he did not appeal to constitutional constraints– because he knew they would not work– but to a plan of rigid social order which allowed the majority no say at all in choosing their rulers or determining the laws they would have to obey.

Are Plato and contemporary Platonic-technotopian critics of democracy correct? Are the hoi poloi (or even the whole human race) too stupid to run their own affairs? If the answer is yes and the solution to turn our affairs over to quasi-divine Philosopher-Kings or machines, then I suggest that our time on the planet is up. We should decide–democratically!– that the human experiment has run its course and failed.

If we are not ready to vote for voluntary extinction or to turn political life over to a computer system, then we must assume that we are mature enough to determine our collective life in accordance with democratic principles. Trump’s opponents want to use constitutional principles like a computer algorithm to select out Trump in advance of democratic contestation. As I noted above, following Wolin, this cuts into the very heart of democracy: one cannot anticipate in advance what sorts of movements democratic power will create and coalesce around. The only democratic antidote to democratically emergent but substantively undemocratic movements like Trumpism is to defeat them, politically, through the force of better arguments and superior mobilizing power around an agenda more demonstrably in people’s shared interests.

As Wolin argues, ‘The mode of action that is consonant with equality and diversity is deliberation. Deliberation means to think carefully.” We must think carefully because what is at stake is the exercise of human power” (249) But Trump is unreasonable! opponents will respond. But is he? He is actually a skilled rhetorician and politician, but in order to understand the logic of his positions, one must think politically and not in abstractly logico-empirical terms. That is, Trump, like all politicians uses speech to moblize power, not to advance truth-claims. Pointing out his “lies’ will never defeat him, because his supporters are not following him because of the abstract truth-value of his assertions, but because they think that his agenda serves their interests. They are worried about jobs, their communities, their traditions, and so they can be mobilized around an anti-immigrant, isolationist, protectionist agenda. An effective response has to acknowledge the legitimacy of people’s fears in ways that opens their ears to counter-argument.

People cannot deliberate when they are afraid or angry, and many of Trump’s supporters– in 2016, 2020, and still today, are afraid and angry. The problem is the social context which makes 77 million people willing to vote for a Trump. I say ‘a’ Trump and not ‘Trump’ because unless the political fight is won with his supporters another right-wing populist will arise to take Trump’s place. Trump is a symbol of unmet social needs: how to channel those who feel those unmet needs in a democratic rather than demagogic direction is the real problem that Trump’s opponents face. Hoping the constitution will save democracy is both in vain and undemocratic.