Will Trump-lit affect the US election?

When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, many academics were horrified at the triumph of his brand of nativist, post-truth populism and felt that they had to “do something”.

Take Sarah Churchwell, chair of public understanding of the humanities at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. She had been working on a study of the novelist Henry James, she told Times Higher Education in 2018, but that just “felt like burying my head in the sand”. The Virginia-born scholar, therefore, embarked on the extensive research for what became her book Behold, America: A History of “America First” and “the American Dream”. This was explicitly designed as a political intervention and, more particularly, as a “decoder ring” for the “Nazi dog whistles [that] seem to be embedded in Trump’s conversation, his thinking and his tropes”.

Although she accepted that “die-hard Trumpers” were unlikely to read her book, she hoped to win over at least some of the “people who voted for him but wouldn’t describe themselves as racist” – and who might be “shocked” to discover “that ‘America First’ is a bona fide Ku Klux Klan slogan”. She also argued that the notion of “the American Dream” had largely been co-opted by conservatives in a very narrow materialistic sense. Recovering some of its earlier meanings, as she does in her book, could help to forge an inspiring progressive agenda.

Behold, America was widely praised by critics. In The Observer, Robert McCrum described it as “passionate, well-researched and comprehensive” and thought it would “no doubt take an influential place on a teeming shelf of Trump-lit”. Yet most academic “Trump-lit” gets little attention and relatively few readers. The outcome of the US presidential election on 5 November still seems too close to call and may well depend on factors, from celebrity endorsements to the weather, over which academics have no control. But given that Trump remains a genuine contender to return to the White House, it is worth asking whether all the academic books, journal articles and op-eds have actually made any difference to Americans’ perceptions of him – and whether that difference is quite what the authors intended.

Angelia Wilson, professor of politics at the University of Manchester and an expert on American conservatism, has a new book, The Politics of Hate: How the Christian Right Darkened America’s Political Soul, being published early next year. As much as she would like to change the world, however, she is sceptical about the impact of academic “publications angsting about, or trying to illuminate facets of, populism or the rise of the right”, because they are “rarely read outside the academy and/or the highly educated and time-wealthy elites”.

However valuable and illuminating, such work can do little to combat the deep, intractable forces that drive support for Trump: “How do you stop demographic shift away from a white majority and the anxiety that comes with it? How do you conjure up more jobs (beyond service industry jobs) for the working class, who are not educated in high-tech/AI – jobs offering a living wage and job satisfaction? How do you combat the relativity of truth claims and scepticism of facts in a world of boundless free speech pumped endlessly to every individual without curators/filters of truth?”

Despite this dispiriting context, Wilson welcomes “significant evidence of an increase of grassroots activism among young people” in both the US and the UK, as well as leading conservatives “publicly warning of the risks of another Trump presidency”. But can academic research and writing take any of the credit for this?

“Maybe,” reflects Wilson. “But I doubt it…Change relies on people – whether or not they’ve read the academic analysis, whether or not they are among the intellectual elite – getting up and doing something. Any conduit between academic publishing and political action is limited or curated by right-leaning or ‘balanced’ media, and it’s possible the link between the two is correlation rather than causation.”

All this presents something of a challenge to academic authors who write about contemporary politics and want to change as well as interpret the world. How exactly is that supposed to work?

Russell Muirhead, the Robert Clements professor of democracy and politics at Dartmouth College, describes the task of academics as “fashioning a mirror in which we can see ourselves clearly and thus better determine where to go from here”. In the 2019 book he wrote with Nancy Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy, the pair “tried to sound an alarm and paint a picture of reality so people could diagnose our situation accurately”. In their new book, Ungoverning: The Attack on the Administrative State and the Politics of Chaos, “we’re naming a phenomenon, the intentional destruction of the administrative state – what we call ‘ungoverning’ – that is almost completely unknown in the annals of political history”. Their job, as they see it, is to provide clarity. It is then up to others to apply and act on this knowledge.

Lee McIntyre, research fellow in the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, by contrast, seeks to cut through apathy. Although he wrote his latest book, On Disinformation: How to Fight for Truth and Protect Democracy, with this year’s election in mind, his aim was not to “‘win over’ any MAGA supporters or even any leaning independents” but rather to help “an audience who already understands that both truth and democracy are under threat, but have been pummelled into thinking that there is nothing they can do about it”.

McIntyre hopes his work will serve as “a training manual for the truth-defending foot soldiers out there to learn what they can do to protect truth and democracy”. The book’s final chapter “includes 10 things that ordinary citizens can do. It has to be a grassroots effort. The government, media, tech companies and politicians aren’t coming to save us.”

Paul Summerville, adjunct professor at the University of Victoria’s Gustavson School of Business in British Columbia, believes that the 2022 book he wrote with Eric Protzer, Reclaiming Populism: How Economic Fairness Can Win Back Disenchanted Voters, has “shifted the conversation” within the academy and, to some extent, beyond – though it no doubt helps that Protzer is a research fellow at Harvard University’s Growth Lab, to which policymakers often come with questions such as “We have $50 million to spend – what is the most intelligent way to spend it?”.

“Many other books failed to take the populist complaint seriously,” Summerville says, and so amounted to “no more than diatribes against Trump which didn’t understand what was going on”. Protzer and he, by contrast, had clearly demonstrated that “the populist complaint” is “rooted in genuine economic concerns” – notably, low levels of social mobility, “understood as economically unfair” – with other factors, such as immigration, merely acting as “amplifiers”.

The key to addressing populism, Summerville goes on, is to focus on “the binding constraints that prevent people moving ahead”, such as the costs of education and healthcare. It is striking, he says, that Canada has largely “managed to avoid the populist eruption”, which he attributes to the fact that the country “provides people with the mechanisms to get on with their lives when there is economic disruption”.

Politicians who want to “connect with people”, concludes Summerville, need to “frame their policy decisions in terms of economic fairness and social mobility”. The Democrats performed much better in the 2018 midterm elections, which saw them gain control of the House of Representatives, than in the 2020 election, he suggests, because they put more stress in 2018 on healthcare than on issues such as defunding the police and transgender rights. The party’s current presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, seems to have learned some useful lessons from this, which chime with the arguments of Reclaiming Populism. Her choice of running mate, the gun-owning veteran-turned-teacher-turned Minnesota governor Tim Walz (and in avoiding Hillary Clinton’s error of dismissing Trump supporters as “deplorables”), shows that she understands the importance of taking seriously, rather than implicitly dismissing, “the kind of people who have been disenfranchised”, Summerville says.

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Others have far more reservations about what might loosely be called the academic campaign against Trump.

Julia Sonnevend, associate professor of sociology and communication at the New School for Social Research in New York, believes “academics could be helpful” in forging “a compelling vision for the country’s future”, but can do so only if they “better understand the myths, narratives and images the Trump campaign offers to American voters”.

Drawing on the themes of her new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics, Sonnevend suggests: “We have to pay more attention to personalities, to feelings, to visuals, and to understand that the role of policies and institutions – or even facts – is limited in contemporary politics built on the public performance of authenticity.” She also echoes Churchwell’s point that the concept of “the American dream” is “a frame of thought that is still very relevant and meaningful to most Americans”, which might need to be reinterpreted but should not be dismissed out of hand. It is essential to avoid “academic arrogance or the reflex cancelling of alternative viewpoints or beliefs”.

For Eitan Hersh, professor of political science at Tufts University, “a lot of public writing by scholars and pundits was aimed at giving liberal readers comfort that they are right, that Trump is wrong and dangerous, that his supporters are wrong and racist and dangerous, too”. Yet this was just an example of the kind of “political hobbyism” that he criticised in his 2020 book, Politics Is for Power: How to Move beyond Political Hobbyism, Take Action, and Make Real Change. Such writing, Hersh argues, amounts to a pretence to political engagement that allows authors to “blame opponents and institutions rather than themselves for what they don’t like about the state of politics”. Treating politics like a spectator sport can never be a substitute for the hard work of real politics, which involves individuals mobilising and lobbying to achieve concrete change in their towns or cities.

Yascha Mounk, professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, has himself written two books about the dangers of populism and understands why “journalists and academics feel that it should be part of their professional vocation to save democracy when (like now) it is under serious threat”. But is there a danger that, in doing so, they allow their scholarly rigour to slip? He worries about the kind of activism that wants to “frame every research study or newspaper report in whatever terms seem most likely to shore up the ‘right’ side”. This runs the risk of “eroding the commitment to the pursuit of truth – and ultimately the legitimacy of key institutions of society. The upshot is to make the game of authoritarian populists easier, not more difficult.”

Another failing of the “academic campaign against Trump”, according to Matthew Flinders, professor of politics and public policy at the University of Sheffield, is that “a lot of the books were very good at interrogating the existing data and research on democratic decline and the emergence of populism” but were much weaker in setting out concrete proposals for what could be done. One title that fell into this trap was Robert Putnam’s The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, which was “far stronger at dissecting the problem than it was in offering a policy-based agenda for change”.

This, in turn, reflects the fact that “the social sciences have arguably become dominated by an intense negativity bias that leads to an overemphasis on failure, decline, crises…to the detriment of more balanced analyses that seek to understand why and when certain policies might actually be successful”. Flinders, therefore, welcomes “an interesting seam of scholarship emerging on the topic of positive public administration” that attempts to “build an evidence base around what works and how this can be scaled up and scaled out”.

A more outspoken version of this critique comes from Musa al-Gharbi, assistant professor of communications, journalism and sociology at Stony Brook University in New York, who has just published his first monograph, We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. He flags up several reasons to be wary of academic anti-Trump tracts.

There is, he claims, a “whole kind of genre in the social sciences which runs something like this: ‘Which negative trait best explains why someone voted for Trump? Is it because they are more racist or sexist or authoritarian?’ If someone had done a similar article asking ‘Why would somebody vote for Hillary Clinton? Is it that they are communists or atheists or hate America?’ we would immediately say, ‘That’s a biased study design.’ But when you are studying Trump voters, it seems perfectly reasonable and normal.”

Quite apart from issues of scholarly standards, al-Gharbi sees real dangers here, because “people often react quite negatively to partisan/activist science” and other scholarly work. For instance, political scientist Matt Motta found that “the main effect of the March for Science” – the 2017 march by scientists across the US protesting the devaluating of expertise by the Trump administration – “was that it led to reduced trust in science. Unfortunately, they polarised science right before the onset of a major global pandemic, when public trust in expertise was actually quite important,” al-Gharbi says.

He also agrees with Flinders that academics need to focus more on questions such as ‘What actually works? Why does it work? How does it work? What’s good and worth preserving about the existing order?’”, rather than “tearing things down, problematising, drawing distinctions”. Social change is constant and inevitable and so, in his view, relatively uninteresting to study. By contrast, “persistence in the face of this constant flux is not something that just ‘happens’. It’s an accomplishment. But most social scientists are not interested in preserving the existing order. They want to tear it down or revise it. So they don’t really attend to this important and understudied question, which is how to make things last – including and especially good things.” 

It is not unusual, for example, for academic authors to argue that the political right’s embrace of “family values” is a screen for misogyny and homophobia. Yet anything seen as “family-bashing”, al-Gharbi points out, is likely to be “an ineffective frame that alienates more people than it draws…It would definitely be better to celebrate families and push for a more expansive definition. But that would require flexing affirmative capacities that have atrophied in most of us.”

Academics who have written books attacking Trump obviously know that they would deserve little credit for a Harris victory in November – and little blame for a Trump victory. Yet to the small extent that they might hope to shift the dial for voters, it is worth reflecting on whether they have always gone about it as effectively as possible.