This is a lightly edited transcript of the October 23 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
PERRY BACON: This is Right Now, the New Republic show on politics and policy. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m joined today by Ryan Enos. He’s a professor of Government at Harvard University, and he’s been doing a lot of writing and thinking about the democracy crisis we’re in. So I want to talk to him about that today. So, Ryan, welcome.
RYAN ENOS: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.
BACON: I want to start with something that I assume you’ve not done a lot of research and study about, but the East Wing being demolished in the last few days. This is one of those things that—it’s easy. It’s an easy story to remember. It’s very visual, obviously. When we think about these democracy stories, where we’re going, how radical Trump is, is the East Wing something that we should think about or something that’s sort of a frivolous thing? Or where do you—talk about the East Wing thing a little bit.
ENOS: Yeah, it’s not frivolous. I mean, it’s a fair thing to ask because, of course, in comparison to the grand scheme of what Trump’s done, it’s maybe not important. You know, the White House will go on with or without the East Wing. And he’s killing people without authorization in the Caribbean. He’s locking people up and sending them to foreign countries without trial. I mean, those are all obviously more important.
But it’s not unrelated because what he’s doing—and I think this is the most important part of it, of course, is that he is bypassing the law. He’s bypassing independent commissions that have been set up to regulate this sort of thing. He’s doing what I think is more concerning, which is he is using private money to reshape a public building. And if you think about that, if you think of the limits of that, like, could the president spend money to build his own casino in Yellowstone National Park?
I mean, could he—could he receive private donations to finance his own police force? And all of those things, of course, sound crazy, but this is essentially what he’s doing. He’s taking something that Congress spends money on for good reason because it shouldn’t be under the private control of the president, and he’s spending his own money. And that is a grave violation of the Constitutional order.
And I think the other thing, which is a little more—a little less directly illegal, I mean, it isn’t directly illegal. But it’s something that I think is worth thinking about; it’s also just indicative of Trump’s vision of America, which is, he wants to build this gaudy 90,000—is that how big it is?—square-foot ballroom on the White House. And it’s something that is—it’s out of character. And I think this is important for the White House.
It wasn’t—the White House wasn’t a palace. Like, this was something that was designed by—George Washington approved the designs, and it was a mansion. It was a house. It was not a palace of a European king, but that’s the way Trump sees America, or he sees his role in America. And it’s a reminder of just how little, actually, Trump has respect for the good parts of the American tradition, the one that makes it a Republic and not some kind of a—not some kind of a kingdom in the way he sees it.
BACON: Let me probe both those comments you mentioned. So the first one is more, this is an example of him going around laws, regulations. Like, in theory, there’s a bunch of people who should have approved this before the East Wing was—so that’s the core. That’s part of it. And part of it you’re saying is, the second thing you said is more symbolic in a certain way. Like, that is more like the—he’s treating the White House in a way other presidents have not treated the White House.
ENOS: Yeah, yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I said the first one, like many things that Trump does, should be a an impeachable offense, or at least one that people are looking into. You know, the president cannot spend money, public or private, in any way he wants. He should be—this is the one thing that the Founders gave the Congress more clearly than anything, right? Because it was something that they were concerned about, because it was exactly what George III was doing.
It’s, he was spending money and taxing money without the approval of the legislature, in some cases, without the approval of the British Parliament. And so they said, if you want to have a government that is responsive to the people, you must have the legislature, the ones that can appropriate and tax money. And parenthetically, Donald Trump is going around both those things, because he’s imposing taxes on the American people through tariffs in a way that would shock the designers of our Constitution.
And he is now spending money, public or private. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing. He’s essentially changing the structure of things that are in the public sphere, like the White House, in a way, without the approval of Congress, or of the other bodies, like the historical commissions that Congress has set up as the ones that should regulate this. And the other part of it, as I mentioned, it’s just, I think when we take a step back, it’s important to realize that—and I feel pretty strongly about this—there has never been an American president that has less respect for the American system or the American tradition of democracy than Donald Trump. And America—I’m not naïve. I know America hasn’t been a perfect country for all of its history. But there are parts of the American tradition that are admirable, and that is about a tradition of a democracy. That’s taken us a long time to get to, and we’ve fought really hard to get there.
And in a democracy, you don’t do things like have an unelected king who can build a palace to make himself feel grand. And that’s what Donald Trump is doing. He looks at that little White House, and he says, it’s not grand enough for him, right? It’s not something—he wants to be a—you know, he wants to be some sort of Middle Eastern oil baron, where he can build himself a palace and impress other rulers and things like that.
And that’s so out of character for the American tradition, and a thing that is important for reminding ourselves that we’re a democracy. And he just fundamentally does not understand that.
BACON: Speaking of that, that’s what I was going to ask next about; there have been political scientists like you have talked about the idea that we’re maybe moving toward competitive authoritarianism or we’re already there. I think it’s generally agreed. I know Brendan Nyhan has this group of scholars who he solicits. It’s called the Bright Line Watch, and they’re political scholars who say democracy is in some decline in America.
When you’re asked, where are we in terms of our democracy, how do you answer that question? Maybe you don’t talk about the competitive authoritarianism versus general decline. Where do you see our democracy right now?
ENOS: Yeah it’s interesting that you ask because I taught about this in my undergraduate class last week. This is a class on political psychology, and we were talking about the psychology of authoritarianism. But in order to frame that, we have to think about why are we talking about this. What is this moment we’re in? And I think it’s important, of course, as a scholar, not to be alarmist about these things. So I try to be very careful about this. And I thought really hard about how to describe this to my students.
And the way I would describe it, of course, is that there’s no magic line that you cross, no bright line. That is the term that sometimes we use for this—Bright Line Watch and such. But there’s no bright line that you cross and you say, all of a sudden, we’re no longer in a democracy. This is the thing that we crossed. And so it is important to understand that we’re in decline, and there’s no doubt about that.
But if I had to put a label on it—and some people would disagree because there’s no bright line—but I think we are no longer in a full democracy, and we’re living in a system of competitive authoritarianism. And it’s understand—it’s important to understand what that means, and I’ll say two things about this. So one is: Often the reason we don’t recognize this is because when we think of authoritarianism, we think of something that’s fully nondemocratic, where all of the Democratic—all of the things that make something a democracy, in terms of elections, civil rights, in terms of things like that, have gone out the window.
And we think of a situation like North Korea, or China, or something like that. That is not the way most democracies go away. They enter this system called competitive authoritarianism, where you have things that are the trappings of democracy, like elections and like some functioning judiciary, and things like that. But as the way they say it, the playing field, the ability for the opposition parties, which is a fundamental part of democracy, the playing field has been tilted against them so they no longer can compete in those elections in a way that actually allows them to challenge the incumbent.
And when that happens, the incumbent ruling party, in this case, Donald Trump, is no longer responsive to the voters in a way that makes things a true democracy. So he can violate their civil rights. He can abuse the power. He can abuse the Constitution, all these things we’re seeing Donald Trump do. And one indication that we are no longer living in a full democracy is, Donald Trump seems perfectly at ease doing these things that normally he would worry about either landing in prison, or he would worry at least ending his political future and the political future of his party.
Another thing to think about, in terms of this—and this is something my colleagues Steven Levitsky and Dan Ziblatt have written about—they’ve talked about one measure of whether you’re living in a full democracy is whether you have to fear being punished by the government for what you say or for your political actions. And there’s no doubt that’s where we are.
I mean, we’ve seen—and this happened very early in the Trump administration— we saw students getting picked up off the street for things that they wrote in newspapers. We worry now it’s gone much further than that. We see people—
BACON: [Former FBI Director James] Comey and [New York Attorney General] Letitia James.
ENOS: Yeah, exactly. We see Trump’s political opponents being prosecuted. And that is very clearly a sign that you’re no longer living in a full democracy. Now, we’re holding on. Right? There are a lot of ways to go before we lose our democracy entirely. And if I had to bet, I’d bet that Comey and James will be found—the courts will side with them, ultimately. But that also doesn’t mean that, because we still have some trappings of an independent judiciary, but that doesn’t mean that the damage isn’t being done.
You know, you can think about it. They’re not the only ones. Of course, [Senator] Adam Schiff is—Trump talks about prosecuting him and other Democrats. And when that’s the case—he talks about this with [Governor JB] Pritzker in Illinois, putting him in jail—what happens is politicians ask themselves, is this worth it? Do I want to run against Republicans if there’s a chance I’m going to be put in prison or prosecuted? And that’s when that playing field starts to be tilted in a way that no longer makes it a fair or a fully functioning democracy.
BACON: Talk about—what’s the problem that I’m trying to get at here? But I mean, we had massive protests, so that’s one thing to think about over the weekend. People are mobilized. The Democrats in Congress are opposing a lot of these things, I would say. Is the problem the Republican Party in Congress and in the courts is not reinforcing these traditional barriers?
ENOS: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of problems. And the answer to that, there’s always a question of how deep we want to go on these things. I mean, we could talk about deeper structural problems with our democracy that got Donald Trump there in the first place, right? But I think if we have to point more approximately, I think that there are perhaps three things I would point to.
One is the—I’ll get to the Republicans in a minute, so I’m not trying to give them a pass—but one is that Democrats have been somewhat feckless in their opposition to these things. And by this I mean our most senior Democrats in Congress and in other places—not all of them, but a lot of them—they haven’t treated themselves as an opposition party.
They’ve said, we’re going to try to negotiate our way out of these things. We’re going to treat Trump like a normal politician, one who can be reasoned with when he’s very clearly not. In some ways, you can’t blame them. These are people that have been in Washington for a long time, and that’s what they’re used to. But of course, they’ve failed us in recognizing the moment in which we’re at, where they have to treat themselves as a party that is trying to defend democracy and not trying to just be an opposition party to a regularly functioning politician.
So I think Democrats have failed to meet the moment. More importantly, as you mentioned, there, of course, the Republican Party—and there’s lots of reasons for this that we could talk about, but the Republican Party has abdicated any role they have in defending democracy, as well, and essentially become subservient to Donald Trump. So if you look at the Republican Party now, even compared to 2012, which wasn’t that long ago, and even the beginning of the first Trump term, they’re an entirely different party ideologically.
You know, it’s been flipped on its head in some ways. It’s not clear if Donald Trump has an ideology, but it’s essentially been subsumed. The party’s been subsumed by Donald Trump’s electoral ambition, and now his ambition to govern the country as an authoritarian. And what that means is that they have not stood up to him in any way whatsoever.
Now, as I said, there could be deeper reasons for this that we could discuss, for example, the fact that we have a system set up where primary elections are dominated by a small group of people, and that means that when you have somebody that dominates the party like Donald Trump, ultimately, the future of those politicians is beholden to that one leader that dominates those things. Now, in a perfect world, what I’d like to see them do is choose honor over their electoral future; choose their democracy and their fellow citizens, and say, It’s more important for me to stand up for democracy than to spend another two years in the House of Representatives.
But that’s not the world we live in. And so they have chosen to stick with their offices, rather than stand up to Donald Trump. And if they would push back, if they would stand up and say, no, it wouldn’t take many of them at this point. But we’re losing people. We’re losing people in the Democratic—or, in the Republican Party that are willing to say no. Most of them are out of the office now, right? So we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.
And the third thing I would mention is [that] the courts really put us in a tough spot. Who knows what the reasons for this is? We’re in a sad position because we’re always trying to psychoanalyze our politicians. And that’s one way you know your democracy has gone wrong, is when you’re spending your time psychoanalyzing your leaders.
And we’re going to be talking about [Supreme Court Chief Justice] John Roberts for decades, as we put our democracy back together. It’s not clear if it’s because he really believes in the unitary executive, or he’s just scared of Donald Trump, or if he just doesn’t know what he’s doing—but he very clearly not only first empowered Donald Trump by deciding that a president was immune to prosecution. (And then, parenthetically, now that president can turn around and sue people, which seems like a completely unstable equilibrium.)
But they’ve also now essentially rubber-stamped everything that has come through the Trump administration in a way that would have been really hard to believe. I think it’s really hard to convince anybody, and we have pretty direct evidence for this, that they wouldn’t have done the same thing with a Democratic administration, or even with previous Republicans. Yet here we are.
And so there are very few constraints on Trump at this point. It’s hard to point to what they are. It’s not his own party. It’s not the courts. And Democrats are proving pretty ineffective in what they’re doing.
BACON: So my guess is [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and [House Minority Leader Hakeem] Jeffries with truth serum would say their view is, the best way to stop authoritarianism is to win the midterms. So everything they’ve done has been around trying to say “health care” as much as possible, talk about poll—you look at polls, be very careful, be very cautious. Democracy didn’t help Kamala Harris win. So I think part of what we’re getting at here is the incentives for a political party in a midterm versus the opposition party defending against an authoritarian are probably different.
Their electoral strategy may be correct, but you and I might be worried that November 2026 is almost too late.
ENOS: Yeah, that’s right. And look. I don’t envy those guys because there’s a tension here. Don’t get me wrong. And they’re right that we should be looking to the midterms. And they at least think they have a formula for how to win those midterms. Now, that’s not obvious. You know, it’s not obvious. I think this is a standard trope. We go back to the American people; they care about these bread and butter issues, and they want—it’s going to be about health care and things like that.
And of course, there are reasons to believe that’s true. So when I say it’s not obvious, I just really mean that. It’s not obvious what will win things. But one thing I would say about that is there is, of course, a lot of evidence that Americans actually want to vote for democracy. Now, I know that sounds strange coming on the heels of Donald Trump winning in 2024. And we can discuss that.
But there’s—we can see. I can cite lots of pieces of evidence for this. You know, one is that Donald Trump is just wildly unpopular. And we have to remember that. And part of that is because of the damage he’s done to American democracy. And people respond to that. The colloquial example I give is just even how popular Harvard has become recently, right? And Harvard is a place that nobody likes for a lot of different reasons, right? I mean, who wants to get behind Harvard?
And when it turned up—when it stood up and said no to Donald Trump—and we have some polling evidence on this; it’s, all of a sudden, one of most popular institutions in the United States. And it’s not because everybody suddenly decided they liked elitist education. It’s because Harvard was all of a sudden recognized as a place that was making a stand for democracy.
So politicians and institutions can be rewarded for that. There’s no doubt about that. And so the question of what Democrats should be doing—and this was your question of looking forward to 2026 or fighting now—in some ways, first of all, I think that those are compatible, if we think that politicians and institutions are rewarded for democracy. But it’s also the case that we need to be looking forward to make sure we have free and fair elections in 2026, right?
So that’s the nightmare scenario, is if we lose free and fair elections. And I think that’s the situation we’re in, where unfortunately, we are—that is an open question, right? It’s about how free and fair those elections are going to be, because Trump has shown that there is no boundary that he won’t cross. We’ve been talking about this for eight years, and he’s done things now that would have been unimaginable, even in his first term.
I mean, we started off by talking about these, but they’re some of the grossest violations of civil liberties any of us have seen in our lifetime, sending people overseas without trial; occupying American cities. These are all things that would have been unimaginable in previous decades in American history. And so would he disrupt elections? I mean, I don’t have anything to believe is stopping him now, other than pushback.
And so this is my point about having to say we have to stand up to this authoritarian creep now in order for us to have those elections. So if Democrats just keep saying, This is normal politics, and we’re not going to focus on saying, hey, what Donald Trump is doing is unconstitutional, what he’s doing is actually turning us into an authoritarian country, and doing what politicians need to do, which is lead public opinion on those issues, then there will continue to be no line which Donald Trump won’t cross.
And eventually, that may get to these elections that we’re putting our hope for democracy on.
BACON: If they allow people to vote, but the gerrymandering is done in every state the way—is that a free and fair election?
ENOS: Well, that’s a good question. I mean, constitutionally, unfortunately, yes, because this is a flaw in our system. States have the ability to draw these lines. And going back to the Supreme Court, recently, within the last decade, they decided that political gerrymandering was something that the court had no role in policing. And so now courts can—or the legislatures can—gerrymander as much as they want.
And of course, the prediction is that by gutting the Voting Rights Act, they will essentially allow them to racially gerrymander. And some of those seats that are not guaranteed to Democrats, but some of those seats are guaranteed to African American voters in the South that are voting Democrat, are some of the only reasons that Democrats have seats in some of these Southern states, like Alabama, and Louisiana, and places like that. And those would either be greatly reduced, or possibly reduced to zero in some of those states.
And so the deeper question, what you’re asking, is that a free or fair election, a constitutional election? But the United States operated under that same Constitution, not as a full democracy, for a long time. We know that, right? We had elections where for a long time, half the population couldn’t vote because of gender, even more than half the population, sorry. And another large portion of the population couldn’t vote because of race.
And there were lots of reasons it wasn’t operating as full democracy. And if we’re moving back into that situation where voters’ representation is essentially nonexistent because they have no chance of winning an election, then it’s hard to call that a full democracy. And there’s so many things that are going on in parallel here where we have this authoritarian takeover from the executive, but we have this sort of creeping situation of gerrymandering that undermines our democracy from an electoral side.
And it’s hard to fight all these fronts at once, all these battles at once. And one thing I’d say is, unfortunately, one way to think about this is that these are two things that may be at cross-purposes. Because I understand, and I think ultimately I’m in favor of Democrats that want to start gerrymandering too, to make up for the Republican gerrymandering. Like, this is what’s going on. California is going to start redrawing its lines, probably.
But in the long run, that is damaging for our democracy, as well, right? Because we’d be undermining votes in California in the same way we would in Texas. And if we get through this authoritarian moment with Donald Trump, then that is something that I think in the long term, we really need to look at, because you can’t have parties locking themselves into power in a way that they’re not responsive to voters.
BACON: Let me finish on another topic, which is related to all this, which is higher education. You’ve been very eloquent in calling for Harvard to not comply, and to not fold, and to not do whatever Trump asks. And I appreciate that work. So I guess a couple things in the news this week—I want to start there. One is that you’ve had eight or nine colleges, maybe a bunch of colleges, that have rejected this sort of quote-unquote compact with Trump, where basically, you’d jump the line for federal funding if you agreed to all their policies. So that was good.
On the other hand, you had UVA basically comply with a bunch of Trump requests. So higher ed feels like it’s resisting more than it did in January because it was doing nothing then. But how would you feel about higher ed as a sector right now?
ENOS: Well, I’m of many different minds on this, so I’ll try to give you a somewhat coherent answer. So the UVA thing is very disheartening, right? And some people have pointed to this, and this is new news. I don’t know how many people have actually looked at this thing. I always put “agreement” in quotation marks because what it is is an extortionary demand and an extortionary payment because this is essentially what Trump is doing to these universities.
So often people haven’t looked at the details of that, but the people that have said, Oh, it doesn’t sound so bad, right? And some people are saying, Oh, some people in Virginia even think this is positive. And I think that shows you how far down this path towards authoritarianism we’ve gone, where we’re essentially congratulating ourselves on holding onto some of our rights, and we’re saying—we’re accepting the fact that we’re negotiating over our rights.
And in a democracy, you do not negotiate over your rights. You don’t negotiate the authoritarian away. That’s not a democracy when we’re doing that. And they did that on the heels of having their president run out by the Trump administration. So they’ve already given up their independence. And now they’re doing that. So that’s a very bad thing.
On the other hand, I think what we’re seeing—and this is what you mentioned—is that a lot of universities have rejected this compact, and they did so somewhat collectively. And something that people like me have been calling for for months is that higher education has to unite as a sector. They have to get together and push back as a sector. And I think one reason that this is important is that a lot of people out there, for a lot of different reasons, don’t care about higher education.
But it’s a clear target of authoritarians. And there’s one piece of evidence that we know Donald Trump is operating as authoritarian is he’s trying to shut down higher education. This is what happened in Hungary. It’s what happened in Turkey. It’s what happened in Nazi Germany, is people have gone after universities. Yet universities in the United States, especially, because we have such a vibrant field of higher education, have a true identity that allows for collective action potential.
I mean, we’re all friends. We all know each other. These university presidents know each other. And they can get together, and they’re not competitive against each other in exactly the same way like businesses who are always trying to look for a leg up. They have some higher principle that unites them, at least in theory. And they can get together and actually be that collective bulwark of civil society that can push back on people like Trump.
And there’s a lot of things that make me worried about that because they haven’t done that super effectively at all times. But one thing we’ve seen, at places like Harvard, for example, is that the scholars in higher education who, normally, we want to spend our time in our books and our computers, are really finding their voice about these things. And it took us a little while to find our feet. But they’ve been really successful, and they’ve really pushed back in a way that is making our leaders accountable.
So these lawsuits, for example, that Harvard won against Trump, one thing that people don’t often recognize about those is those were actually started by Harvard professors. It wasn’t a Harvard administration that sued Trump.
BACON: Oh interesting, OK.
ENOS: Yeah, it was Harvard professors, and then the university itself actually joined. And so this example where if you would have asked me three years ago if a bunch of Harvard professors would get together and say they were going to sue, have enough joint collective action to sue the United States, I would have said there is no way that’s going to happen. But they found their voice. You know, Harvard had an AAUP chapter that, all of a sudden (this is the American Association of University Professors, almost like a labor union for professors) has tried—the reason it was put together at Harvard was to try to protect professors, protect things like the value of higher education, our free speech as professors, our academic freedom. And it’s played a real important role in resistance. And so it’s not just Harvard. There’s places across the country where in some ways, the people that really have a stake in this, who are the faculty and the students, are coming together in a way that I think is providing some counterweights to what’s going on with the Trump administration.
And so I think if we can continue our voice, that that’s going to be a powerful pushback in a way that, frankly, things like corporate America are not really capable of.
BACON: The final thing I want to talk about is, one of my former colleagues at the [Washington] Post wrote this piece about this idea that if you did a survey of faculty in most universities, you’d find the overwhelming majority of faculty voted for Harris instead of Trump. And so this has led this claim that universities need to increase, quote-unquote, viewpoint diversity.
So talk about that idea. I guess I’m uncomfortable with the idea that we’re hinting universities should kind of ask people what their politics are, and then hire them accordingly, and at 50-50. On the other hand, I used to complain when universities or other institutions had 2 percent Black people. So I think there is something. There’s a tricky thing here. It’s like, diversity is good; viewpoint diversity is probably good.
I don’t necessarily want to have us counting who voted for who. So how do we have diversity, quote-unquote, without going into bad methods of that?
ENOS: OK, so Perry, I could talk about this at length. You’ll have to cut me off if I get going, because this is something I’ve thought a lot about. Let me say the first, most important thing, which is that the federal government has zero business in trying to regulate the ideology of university faculty. That is full stop.
BACON: I guess their view is, we give lots of money to universities, so we get to talk about how they implement their—
ENOS: Yeah, sure. But what that is is the government using coercion to put an ideological test on a private entity, or even a public entity. And both of those things have been—a plain reading of the Constitution tells you that’s against the Constitution. But the courts have ruled on this very clearly. And it’s an affront to democracy to say that we’re going to go in and measure the ideology of the people that work somewhere, and then control how much money they have.
And just to put another point on this, which I think is important to talk about, is one reason you know this is authoritarian in some way is that universities actually are very small recipients of federal dollars in the grand scheme of things. So if you want to talk about places that receive a lot of federal dollars, we should look at, for example, our defense industry. All of the biggest recipients of federal dollars are: Boeing, increasingly Elon Musk’s various corporations, places like that.
And nobody’s doing an ideological test in Boeing. Right? You know, if you went and looked at the corporate board of Boeing, what do you think their voting patterns are? And so this is targeted at a certain group. And that’s an affront to democracy. We just can’t do that. That’s full stop. Now, there’s another question, which is a separate question that I think is a very good one, which is, how should universities be if we want to operate to be the best that we can be; if we want to fulfill our mission to educate and to research.
And I actually personally think that having something that approaches closer to ideological balance is really important for that. And if you looked at—often now when I talk about universities, I’m somebody that comes on to talk about how they should be resisting the Trump administration—but if you went back a few years and you looked for things that people quoted me on, it was often about this issue. I would say that universities would be doing a service to ourselves and to our students, and actually improve the public view, if we could find ways to become more ideologically balanced.
And so I really think that’s important. Now, there’s a question of how do we get there. And that’s more complicated because—
BACON: Because that would be, like, it’d be hard for a Black woman in America currently to get hired if the search is for a Republican, because there are very few. That’s kind of where I get nervous.
ENOS: Yeah, exactly. This is the problem, right? It becomes self-reinforcing. So let’s say you’re a smart young person and you’re interested in some kind of pursuit in the sciences, or the social sciences, or even humanities. And you look around, and you say, well, but I’m a conservative. Do I want to go into that? And you can understand why they wouldn’t, right? And so I wouldn’t, if I was going to be an extreme minority and even potentially have my ideas looked down on and mocked.
And that does happen at universities. We have to be honest about that, that we often disparage conservative ideas, right? And so those things can—that’s a true state of the world, and it makes it hard to overcome this problem. As I said, you absolutely cannot overcome that with some kind of government interference. That’s like full stop. That’s the end of the world.
But universities need to take a serious look at this. There’s a really bad taste in our mouth right now to talk about—people throw around this phrase “affirmative action for conservatives.” And at the same time, we’re stripping away race-based affirmative action. That just sounds absurd. And I can understand why people don’t want to go down that path because the idea that those are two things we’d be doing at the same time sound almost like an affront to both ideas, in many ways.
So I think the way we need to think about this as a university is to take a step back from the current moment we’re in where we’re being pressured by an authoritarian and say, what is the way that we would approach this if we had—we’re going to approach it as an intellectual problem, something that’s a long-term problem that we have to solve for the good of our universities and, in many ways, for the good of the place of universities in our society.
And ultimately, we might say that we want to do things where we can think about creating ways to get more conservatives on faculty, to have more conservative voices among our students, and all those things. That would make us stronger in the end. But it’s not an easy problem to solve in the same way that—I don’t like this parallel, but it’s one that people have talked about, and you mentioned it when you first started—about how things like bringing in racial and gender equality at universities.
I want to be clear, this isn’t the same thing. I don’t think of politics as a protected class. But we wanted more racial diversity, and more gender diversity at universities because it made us stronger. Universities were worse off in the 1960s when they were all white men than when they became more diverse—and I think we’d be stronger if we were more politically diverse too. And that was a hard problem to solve then, and we figured it out. And this is a hard problem to solve now. But I think we can figure it out in a way that would make us stronger in the long run.
BACON: But I guess JD Vance would say, We’ve given you time to solve this problem. You’re not solving it, so now we’re going to solve it for you by … This is not a new issue, that academia is considered too left. I guess it wasn’t a new problem in 1960 that academia was very white.
ENOS: No, that’s right. Yeah, I mean, it’s a hard problem. And but you’re not going to solve it by an authoritarian attack. That’s for sure. And one thing that we have to say really clearly here is, unfortunately, the idea of ideological diversity has also been conflated with this idea of things like free speech, for example. And so often, you read this compact on higher education that Donald Trump put forth. And it talked about how they—in the same paragraph, it talked about controlling the ideology of faculty and then said free speech is very important.
And so we have to be very clear that Donald Trump and JD Vance, and people in that circle, they don’t care about free speech, actually, and they don’t care about ideological diversity either. What they want is [for] universities to be more in their image. And we can see this in the way that faculty have been pressured to be punished, have lost their jobs because of things they say. We’ve seen this in a lot of red states now.
And those two issues, ultimately, have to be separated. And if we let people that don’t actually care about ideological diversity and don’t actually care about free speech, but are just using those as fronts in order to shape universities in their image, then we’re going down a very dangerous road. And so those of us that actually care about ideological diversity from the perspective of saying that will make us stronger pedagogically, it will make us stronger researchers, it’ll make us people that hear from more diverse ideas, which always make us smarter, we have to solve it from that perspective of truly caring about it, not from some sort of political mission.
BACON: Let me ask, because we use the term “lasting ideological diversity” and conservatives. We’ve sort of conflated these things. But I went to a Black church when I was a kid. It was working class. People were not super politically engaged. We all probably voted for—most people voted for the Democratic candidate, but [there] was actually a fair amount of disagreement about how should schools work, the police, et cetera.
Versus, when I worked at The Washington Post, in the opinion section, we had a range of from Hillary Clinton to Jeb Bush. I don’t know that that was ... We had more partisan diversity. I don’t know that we had more—I guess I’m nervous about the idea that there are two ideologies in America [and] we need to balance those out, as opposed to there being a broad … a lot of Black institutions have plenty of people who think differently.
They might just not have a party—. When we say, I hope we mean, actually, a mix of socialists, libertarians, not just R and D, which I think is very … we have two parties. We shouldn’t reduce everyone’s thinking to that, in my view at least. I just want to talk about that a little bit.
ENOS: Yeah, well, look. I one hundred percent agree with you. And I think this is part of the problem when we try to approach these issues not from a perspective of what are we actually trying to accomplish intellectually, but from the perspective of how are we going to gain political points, or in Trump’s perspective, how are we actually going to try to shut down criticism in the way authoritarians do, and try to shape American institutions in his image? I mean, what he’s trying to do.
And when we respond to that, rather than thinking about it from the perspective of what are we trying to accomplish and what are our goals, then we end up reducing it to these sort of reductionist paradigms like, oh, we just need to balance conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And if you think about institutions in America, institutions aren’t set up that way. Right? You know, the NRA doesn’t have Democrats running around as board.
You know, the ACLU, unfortunately, I think would be better if they did. But in this day and age, they don’t have a ton of Republicans. But it’s not clear, from an intellectual perspective, that institutions should be set up with partisan balance. But what you’re asking, and I think is the way universities should be, which is, should we have something that allows for an exchange of different ideas across different viewpoints?
Now, one important thing to mention is that universities actually—and this is part of the problem because this has become politicized; there’s this caricature of universities, where we’re all somewhere in between socialist and Marxist or something like that. And that’s our ideological—of course, that’s not true. You’re meeting faculty members—
BACON: This school is not full of Marxists, obviously, you know. Yeah.
ENOS: Your median faculty member is kind of a center-left person. And a lot of those, 20 years ago, probably would have been Republicans. Because a lot of them are rich folks that have a lot invested in the system. And it’s just the Republican Party has moved away from them. So now they find themselves as Democrats. And that’s true. There’s some radicals running around here, but that’s diversity, right? Radicals are part of the diversity too.
And so there is that kind of exchange of ideas, and you’re absolutely right. One thing we should be measuring, when we think about this problem, is what is actual ideological diversity? Let’s just not measure everybody and ask who they voted for because there’s a lot of people that disagree, and in one way, because it’s reducing things to a binary.
BACON: Binary, right.
ENOS: Yeah, they all voted for Harris. But there’s a lot of diversity in there, right? And in some ways, you can see this. This all goes on in the backdrop, for example, of what happened in the last couple of years on campuses around the country with the protests and the conflicts over the war in Gaza. People treated this as a bad thing, where we had all these protests on campus, and people talked about this tension on universities.
But to me, in many ways, that was the success of diversity in universities. Look what happened. I mean, we had people wildly—yeah, it was a very touchy subject. And we have people—and many institutions aren’t like this, and this is why they didn’t experience this—we had people with wildly different worldviews. We had people from different parts of the world. We have Jewish Israelis. We have Arab Palestinians. We have people from other parts of those countries. We have people from different religious backgrounds.
We have people who are deeply conservative when it comes to these issues in the Middle East. We have people that are very liberal when it comes to these issues in the Middle East, and we’re all existing in the same community, right? And we’re trying to sort these out. And every once in a while, people get kind of angry and yell at each other, but that’s really rare. And the rest of the time, they’re just making their voices heard. Some of them are protesting one direction, some are protesting another direction.
Sometimes they’re coming in the classroom and having respectful debates about these things, and that’s actually happening almost nowhere else in America. And that’s actually a really amazing thing. And you can choose, you can point to all kinds of other issues that people come here and have diverse viewpoints on and argue about, and that’s actually an amazing success.
BACON: Because that’s not a D and R issue. I hadn’t thought of it that way. The issue is not D and R. It’s more complicated.
ENOS: Yeah, and so one way to frame this whole conversation we’re having—and this is often lost, so I’m glad you’ve given me an opportunity to talk about it—is we talk about these universities being these very single-minded and closed-minded places. And that’s a complete mischaracterization. I would argue that we are some of the most open-minded, wildly diverse-thinking places in the entire country, if not the world.
People come here and they argue about stuff and they have different viewpoints. They come from amazingly diverse backgrounds. I think it’s a problem, and we started the conversation this way to say, that we’re voting 95 percent for one party. And I wish we voted more broadly. But to reduce that to saying that we are an ideologically constrained place, or something like that, or a place that has no disagreement, or has groupthink or something, I think is just absurd.
BACON: Because I guess if you have five parties, like other countries—I guess on the Harvard campus, the most right-wing candidate would probably not get many votes on the Harvard campus. That is a problem [for] that person, but the other four parties might get some.
ENOS: Oh, yeah, they would. And look. If the Republican Party moved back to the center in the United States, of course they would get more votes at places like Harvard. I mean, we can’t expect people to follow the party as it moves one direction, and one way to put this, is one of the things we value in the United States—and actually, I think this is something that, ultimately, hopefully, can get us through this moment—is we have a lot of value in things like civic education and understand the principles of democracy in places, things like that.
And we teach things like that at Harvard; our professors understand that and things like that. And as the Republican Party has moved away from that, especially in the last year, and completely abandoned that, then you can understand why people aren’t willing to put their name behind that. But it doesn’t mean there’s not conservatives on campus. It doesn’t mean there’s not people that, given another situation, would vote for conservative policies, and that’s OK.
We have conservatives and liberals in the world. I’m not a conservative, but there are people that are out there, and they have legitimate ideas. And we can compete in elections to see who wins. But we have to have a party that believes in democracy first, and one of them has moved away from it.
BACON: Brian, this was a great conversation. I really enjoyed it. I feel like I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully, the audience has too. Thank you for joining me. I appreciate it.
ENOS: Yeah, thank you. It was great.
BACON: Good to see you.
