How Texas A&M Sacrificed a Children’s Lit Professor to the MAGA Cult

If it’s not clear enough by now, the MAGA right is only doing to left-leaning academia what they perceived left-leaning academia was doing to people like them, with students taking cues as they always have. There are only two operative principles behind the surveillance and attacks on higher education, neither of which have anything to do with free speech, academic freedom, or viewpoint diversity: retribution and dominance.

It’s tempting to resort to liberal pluralist principles to explain this—as a kind of hypocrisy with respect to the right’s past positions on viewpoint diversity, or as an attack on academic freedom—but the truth is we’re no longer living and working within that framework. The problem is that the American college and university system—like the American Constitution—is a fundamentally liberal pluralist system butting up against the aggressively monist system the Trump administration is quickly institutionalizing.

“Monism” is in this sense the simple opposite of pluralism, the idea that there’s only one way to think and believe. For example, in a recent Jubilee debate with journalist Medhi Hasan, a young man named Connor, who identified himself as a fascist and Trump supporter, forthrightly articulated that his support for freedom of speech was only a means to an end—to obtain power—after which point he would take it away from everyone else. A liberal pluralist—someone who believes in the rights-based accommodation and coexistence of multiple viewpoints and cultures—would be tempted to call this hypocrisy. How could you be in favor of free speech for yourself, as an instrument to gain power, but against it for others? But hypocrisy doesn’t matter here, because the operative principle is dominance, not liberal pluralism: The only correct way is to force everyone to believe as the monist does.