As news started to spread of Yale’s leadership negotiating a deal with the Trump administration, the university’s faculty, students and alumni sprang into action to oppose any settlement. What the president and lawyers intend remains unclear. In the case of Harvard, it appears that Trumpists – and Trump himself, for that matter – might have been leaking about concessions being imminent partly to put pressure on the university. What is clear is that the Trump administration has embarked on a wide-ranging investigation of Yale, accusing it of discriminating against white and Asian students. But in any case, the battle over Yale’s response reveals a troubling pattern. Many of us had thought that the US possessed a robust civil society that could act as a counterweight to an overbearing government and resist authoritarian encroachments. What few reckoned with: its institutions themselves can be run in a fairly authoritarian fashion – universities being a prime example, with deleterious consequences for democracy as a whole.
The argument for the freedom-preserving role of civil society has been known at least since a French aristocrat travelled the US in the early 19th century in order to uncover why American mass democracy, unlike democracy in his native country, appeared stable and peaceful. Alexis de Tocqueville ended up singing the praises of how Americans are always associating with each other to discover and, if necessary, defend common interests. That wisdom still resonates in lived experience today, starting with birdwatchers and the PTA.
True, some think that American civil society is not what it used to be: The expression “bowling alone” by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam – in contrast with bowling as a member of a large group – has become proverbial; even more important is his observation that while plenty of people might still be bonding with the like-minded, there is less and less “bridging” among very different kinds of groups. Citizens are also more likely to be dues-paying members of organizations that advocate on specific social and political issues – as opposed to mobilizing people themselves and experiencing collective action. Putnam, in turn though, was charged with idealizing a mid-20th-century America that in fact never built that many bridges to minorities, for instance.
This whole discussion always overlooked two things. Civil society is not by definition pro-democratic. As another political scientist, Sheri Berman, argued in the 1990s – when a liberal enthusiasm about the blessings of civil society was probably at an all-time high – the Weimar Republic, still the paradigmatic case of catastrophic democratic failure, had a vibrant civil society; it just so happened that its members were committed anti-democrats. By the same token, an account of tightly knit organizations in the US today will have to take note of hate groups such as the Proud Boys and the Patriot Front.
More important still: even if those inside an organization are strongly in favor of democracy – in fact even prepared to fight for democracy – the structure of the organization itself, as the law professor Genevieve Lakier has pointed out, might be fairly authoritarian. Those with a more managerial mindset might not risk treasure and time in all-out battles with an aspiring authoritarian government. As the jurists Daniel J Hemel and David Pozen have noted in a piece with the poignant title In Search of University Democracy, US tertiary education differs from universities in Europe in that institutions of higher learning often give ultimate authority either to politicians or powerful businesspeople and other worthies serving as trustees. Genuinely shared governance by a variety of stakeholders is rare; students in particular hardly ever have any real say.
To be sure, one can justify a model that tasks presidents with ensuring the long-term flourishing of an institution of higher learning; after all, students – and plenty of faculty, for that matter – tend to come and go. No doubt that has been the rationale – or often just the rationalization – of plenty of civil society and business leaders during Trump 2.0. One only needs to think of the many law firms that caved or, for that matter, Fifa, which toned down its anti-racism messaging in the US. Even if individuals objected to concessions, they ended up having no influence and could at best resign out of protest.
This wave of anticipatory obedience is all the more egregious because – just as in the debates at Yale – non-leaders might sometimes just know better. By now it is clear that the Trump administration may well not honor its own deals; and some deals are simply rotten to begin with, because they give the justice department continuous control over an institution. Even if a university thinks it got off lightly, the effects on potential applicants and faculty as well as alumni might be profoundly negative. It is telling that even Yale law school – not necessarily known as a hotbed of progressive resistance – is apparently opposed to any settlement (especially as universities fighting back against the Trumpists have eventually been vindicated by courts).
A certain disillusionment with civil society should not lead to defeatism; if anything, the pattern has been that, where elite actors have failed, so-called ordinary people have stepped up and made a difference (Minneapolis being the obvious example). Also, not every institution inside a democratic country has to conform to our standard notion of representative democracy, regular elections in particular. But as we think through what Reconstruction in a post-Trump US – which must also be an anti-Trump US – requires, one question should be high on the agenda: do so many institutions in civil society need to be as authoritarian as they currently are?
-
Jan-Werner Müller is a Guardian US columnist and a professor of politics at Princeton University
