Double Aspect

At the Without Diminuishment Substack, a self-described “voice of Canada’s new right”, Geoff Russ has a post denouncing the “abandon[ment]” of cultural and educational institutions “to the anti-civilizational left”. The remedy, according to Mr. Russ, is that “[t]here have to be people from the right as CEOs, board chairs, and directors” in universities, museums, and other such institutions, because “our countries will be in far better shape if people who respect, and even revere” these institutions “are overseeing them”. This is an excellent illustration of how the new right’s obsession with power is pathological even when, as here, its defenders point to a real problem.

The problem, as Mr. Russ describes it, is that “people have infiltrated storied institutions that they despise, capturing them to punish their founders and audiences”. The examples he gives are the now-ousted president of the Oxford Union, removed for joking about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, as well as administrators at some museums in Winnipeg, not removed despite their overt philistinism. I doubt that an intention “to punish founders and audiences” is always an apt description, but I must say that sometimes it is difficult to avoid thinking that something of the sort is at play. I would nominate the curators of the Manchester museum as possible candidates. When I visited earlier this year, I got a distinct impression of sneering embarrassment at their city’s industrial and commercial heritage that they are charged with preserving and explaining, joined with a fear that that unenlightened visitors might fail to share this feeling.

I have another example, too, which would have made perfect fodder for Mr. Russ’s piece, but unfortunately occurred just after its publication. I am talking, of course, about the way the Reagan foundation — another cultural institution charged with preserving and explaining a storied heritage — lied about this heritage in order, as Aaron Blake puts it in a piece for CNN, “to try and muddy the waters” about the veracity of the now-notorious ad sponsored by the Ontario government to showcase Ronald Reagan’s pro-free trade views. As Mr. Blake points out,

[t]o the extent Trump is able to rewrite this portion of history to fuel his trade wars, it comes at the expense of the ideals Reagan spent years advocating. It provides a completely inaccurate picture of the man the foundation is supposed to celebrate.

So one has to agree with Mr. Russ: the infiltration of institutions by people who hate them and what they stand for, people who are suffering from a toxic mixture of embarrassment and contempt at their past and its heritage, is a real problem.

And if anything, things are worse than a focus on the obvious philistines or apparent sellouts would suggest. There are also people who are embarrassed by their institutions and heritage even though they quite obviously do not hate them or wish to destroy them. But they would, in the name of making these institutions welcoming and accessible, strip away the weirdness that is part of their charm, and so diminish them—the allusion to the title of Mr. Russ’s Substack being unintended but perhaps not accidental—without intending to do so. As an example of this, I would point to Julian Prégardien’s comments on the ritual of a classical recital being a barrier to people whom they supposedly make feel unwelcome, in an interview with Jay Nordlinger. Mr. Prégardien does not hate either his music or his audiences! But his love for them is distorted by faddish thinking and might well do them unintended harm.

Yet if Mr. Russ points to a real and serious issue, his proposed solution is illusory. More than that, it is Manichean, facile, and profoundly misconceived. Just like Mr. Prégardien, it will harm and, yes, diminish the institutions it purports to save.

Perhaps the most obvious thing to say about Mr. Russ’s conclusions is that, while it is true that our educational and cultural institutions should be led by people who respect and even revere them, it does not follow that such people must come from the political right—let alone the kind of political right that Mr. Russ represents. Yes, there is a current of philistinism and contempt for learning on the progressive left. But not every person whose politics lean left subscribes to this view. Nor does every libertarian, or every traditional conservative of the sort Mr. Russ evidently doesn’t think much of. (Ben Sasse, the former president of the University of Florida, who had previously served as a Republican Senator but left politics because he would not get on the “Trump train” comes to mind.) Nor, for that matter, does every apolitical person—and if I had to choose (though I don’t think we have to), I would probably prefer culture and learning to be overseen by people who value them for their own sake, and not as political accessories. Conversely, as the Reagan Foundation story proves, the right has its own philistines. Yet the view that the world is divided between a monolithic “left” characterized by the most distasteful elements of what is actually a complicated political current that only agrees on a few things, and a “right” dominated by will-to-power cultural conservatism, is as descriptively wrong as it is morally repugnant.

This black-and-white worldview not only caricatures opponents in order to dismiss them, but blinds one to the glaring flaws of one’s own side. I don’t want to succumb to caricature myself, or to put words in Mr. Russ’s mouth, so to be clear I do not claim to know which politicians of the right he personally supports or approves of. But the record of a variety of governments, old and new alike, is not one of respect and reverence—quite the contrary. The latest news on this particular front is Ron DeSantis demanding that universities in Florida stop hiring foreign scholars, which, to state the obvious, is antithetical to the pursuit of academic excellence and truth, which respect for higher education would demand. In Canada, Doug Ford has both overseen a decline in public funding for universities and prevented them from making up the shortfall by raising tuition fees. (To be clear: there’s a perfectly respectable libertarian argument for the former, though I do not suppose Mr. Russ, for one, has much sympathy for libertarianism; there is no libertarian argument for the latter.) The same was true under the late and unlamented Conservative governments here in the UK. These governments also worked hard to cut off the other financial lifeline universities threw themselves—international students. Others—in fairness this includes governments that are by no means on the right—have done the same.

So of course, has Donald Trump. But the Trump administration is trying to go much beyond this. As, for example, Keith Whittington recently explained in The Dispatch, it is bullying universities in the hope that they will allow the government to police their every decision—from how they decide which students to admit, to what they are allowed to charge these students, to what ideas they are to be exposed to. As Kevin Williamson sums it up,

The American university system is the envy of the world, and we are burning it down because there’s a couple of nonbinary gender studies professors at Bryn Mawr who say crazy stuff from time to time and there is a brain-dead gaggle of Jew-hating weirdos at Columbia.  

And this brings me to what I find the most disturbing—and the most revealing—about Mr. Russ’s post: the focus on power and control. Again, I do not mean to put words and political sympathies in his mouth, but notice the similarity between Mr. Russ’s approach and Mr. Trump’s. It is not either about supporting existing institutions or even creating alternative ones. It is about taking over and imposing change from the top. This lust for possession and power is not the sign of respect and reverence that Mr. Russ rightly says is needed in the leadership of our institutions.

JRR Tolkien—a man whose staunch Catholicism, stubborn rootedness, and even occasional pinings for “unconstitutional monarchy” might have recommended him to the “new right”, but whose clear-eyed rejection of power-worship outweigh all that and make him anathema to them—saw this well. In The Silmarillion, for example, he contrasts the Vala Aulë, whose “delight and pride … is in the deed of making, and in the thing made, and neither in possession nor in his own mastery; wherefore he gives and hoards not, and is free from care, passing ever on to some new work” and the Elvish craft-master Fëanor, who “began to love the Silmarils”—his great masterpiece—”with a greedy love, and grudged the sight of them to all save to his father and his seven sons; he seldom remembered now that the light within them was not his own”. The new right is on the path of Fëanor, without his talent, not of Aulë. In case you haven’t read The Silmarillion: the path of Fëanor is the way to murder and suffering for generations, not to a glorious retvrn.

To be sure, there is nothing wrong with aspiring to lead an institution one respects and reveres, if one thinks one can be a good steward to it and hand it down unblemished, or indeed improved, to those who come after. It’s a bad soldier who wouldn’t be a general and all that. But the rightful aspiration is to earn the right to lead, not to be handed it on the strength of a political mandate. Mr. Russ isn’t saying that men and women of the right should become academics and curators so that they can, in time, be deans, vice-chancellors and directors. He wants to install them at the top, to rule—not to do the grunt work of making the institutions work. What he wants is not leaders but commissars.

One superficially tempting response to this is summed up in the online right’s familiar refrain: do you know what time it is? Things, this implies, have degenerated so far that there is no time to take the slow route. You have to cut corners, to drive dangerously, to get on with it already. Whatever rule-breaking and errors are committed in this process are justified by the greater good being pursued.

But in the case of cultural and educational institutions, quite apart from the inherent and assumed immorality of this approach, I simply do not understand how it is supposed to work. It’s easy enough to decree that universities must devote themselves to the teaching of the Western canon or some such, at least after the new right figures out which scraps of the Western canon are patriotically correct enough to be taught. (If it can trouble itself to do some reading, the new right will find the Western canon every bit as “problematic” as its brothers-in-arms on the woke left do. If people mustn’t hear Ronald Reagan’s words, how could they be allowed to read Adam Smith’s?) Who is going to be teaching it? Today’s “me studies” professors? Salt-of-the-earth conservatives whom Mr. Russ will rescue from their “populist migration to the trades and small business”? Is there a Project 2029 with binders full of philologists who listen to Tucker Carlson?

This will not turn out well. To be clear, I am not saying that there are not, let alone that there cannot be, right-leaning academics, or for that matter university administrators. But it is just a fact that there are not nearly enough readily available right-leaning academics now, for all sorts of reasons, many of them, to be clear, to the utter discredit of the modern university. But no matter what these reasons are and who is to blame for them, ideological capture at the top is not likely to produce the results its proponents hope for. In addition to its other flaws, it is a lazy and unimaginative tactic.

In short, Mr. Russ’s post is representative of so much “new right” thinking. It affects to be concerned with nothing less than saving civilization, but it is mostly preoccupied with taking power. It has no workable proposals for preserving, let alone improving, the institutions it purports to be preoccupied with. As often as not it despises these institutions, and even if it doesn’t, its rule-breaking will damage the institutions rather than maintain them. To the extent it is well-intentioned rather than just power-hungry, it is profoundly misguided.