How much tolerance should universities have for fascist faculty?

Rick Perlstein discusses what in his view is the striking shortage of significant contemporary art that engages with the crisis of Trumpism (I don’t keep up enough with recent cultural trends to have an opinion on whether he’s right about that). It’s as always with Perlstein’s writing a thought-provoking essay, and I want to highlight one part of it:

The Handmaid’s Tale might be the kind of thing I’m looking for; I couldn’t get into the series and haven’t read the novel. But I’ve always found it telling that Mary McCarthy panned it with extreme prejudice in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, characterizing the notion that the Christian right had in mind turning women into passive vessels for childbirth the ravings of a literary hysteric. I find just that kind of domestication and denial of right-wing threats, Infernal Triangle readers know by now, endemic among America’s establishment elite. Maybe because Margaret Atwood was more politically radical, and a Canadian, that hers was the sounder imagination, when it came to that. . . .

Why is there no great recent fiction about the American right? I have my theories. One is not unrelated to my suspicion that Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code may end up as the death of liberal democracy. Too much of liberal America doesn’t understand, or are bound within institutional confines that don’t allow them to understand, that conservatism is their adversary. Something that must be defeated if the most basic values that sustain a healthy society (whose flourishing too many liberals take for granted, or presume The Grown-Ups have under control) are to survive. For a way too big chunk of Blue America, the answer will always be more affirmations to “going high” when “they go low,” or that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the United States of America.” And from a position like that, the kind of stories that really get inside the ugliness and fright we’re now dealing with may simply sound too “divisive” and “mean,” or hysterical—just like Mary McCarthy said about The Handmaid’s Tale.

Perlstein’s point about the potentially suicidal liberal defense of something close to unlimited tolerance for intellectual and political diversity in places like universities brought to mind these recent observations from Andrew Gelman about Adrian Vermeule (and his sometime co-author Cass Sunstein, but that’s a horse of a different color).

Here Gelman is replying to an email defending Vermeule, by somebody who says that despite his obnoxious politics he’s a talented scholar and a “nice guy.”

Regarding the disjunction between Vermeule’s scholarly competence and nice-guyness, on one hand, and his extreme political views: I can offer a statistical or population perspective. Think of a Venn diagram where the two circles are “reasonable person” and “extreme political views and actions.” (I’m adding “actions” here to recognize that the issue is not just that Vermeule thinks that a fascist takeover would be cool, but that he’s willing to sell out his intellectual integrity for it, in the sense of endorsing ridiculous claims.)

From an ethical point of view, there’s an argument in favor of selling out one’s intellectual integrity for political goals. One can make this argument for Vermeule or also for, say, Ted Cruz. The argument is that the larger goal (a fascist government in the U.S., or more power for Ted Cruz) is important enough that it’s worth making such a sacrifice.  . .

Actually, I’m guessing that Vermeule was just spending too much time online in a political bubble, and he didn’t really think that endorsing these stupid voter-fraud claims meant anything. To put it another way, you and I think that endorsing unsubstantiated claims of voting fraud is bad for two reasons: (1) intellectually it’s dishonest to claim evidence for X when you have no evidence for X, (2) this sort of thing is dangerous in the short term by supplying support to traitors, and (3) it’s dangerous in the long term by degrading the democratic process. But, for Vermeule, #2 and #3 might well be a plus not a minus, and, as for #1, I think it’s not uncommon for people to make a division between their professional and non-professional statements, and to have a higher standard for the former than the latter. Vermeule might well think, “Hey, that’s just twitter, it’s not real.”

I suspect Gelman is right about the mentality at work here, in which Vermeule thinks that uttering brazen lies about election fraud on social media is OK for a HARVARD LAW PROFESSOR, while it wouldn’t be OK to do this in, say, the pages of the Harvard Law Review. On the other hand, maybe Vermeule is flat-out crazy by now, and has come to actually believe his own lies (“We must be careful about what we pretend to be . . .”). On yet a third hand, Vermeule very clearly doesn’t actually care at all whether the election was stolen or not, because he’s quite open about the fact that, as a fascist (Catholic integralist subspecies), he doesn’t have any use for democracy, except as a purely instrumental mechanism for seizing power, to be discarded as soon as it doesn’t work, by for example failing to deliver enough votes for politicians friendly to fascists of the Catholic integralist variety:

Take this tweet from Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard and the country’s most formidable integralist intellectual. In his view, Americans are hopelessly in hock to liberal philosophical ideals; the New Right’s attempt to overthrow liberal cultural hegemony at the ballot box is essentially hopeless.

It’s funny to see GOP types debating which candidates or issues would have made a difference, when the simplest hypothesis is that there is a critical mass of voters who will support left-liberalism on essentially theological grounds, regardless of the conditions it produces.

Vermeule is very explicitly a seditious fascist, which ought to raise the question of what exactly universities are supposed to do about such people, when they’re tenured professors. especially when their subjects of academic expertise are inextricably intertwined with practical questions such as, “Should liberal democracy be abolished in America in favor of fascism? (Catholic integralist variety).”

I’ve made what I believe is the extremely modest suggestion that, at a minimum, Vermeule’s non-fascist colleagues should not go out of their way to promote his academic work. This is from February of last year:

The liberal legal blog Balkinization, run by Jack Balkin of the Yale Law School, is holding a symposium on Adrian Vermeule’s new book.

Vermeule is a radical reactionary theocrat of the Catholic integralist variety, who is working to transform the US government into a radical reactionary theocracy of the Catholic integralist variety, because Vermeule, unlike apparently a lot of liberal legal bloggers, considers politics to be an exercise in practical power as opposed to say some sort of amusing intellectual game. . .

What interests me about all this is that in July of the Year of Our Lord 2022 a lot of liberal elites are still behaving as if a call to resist the rise of fascism in the United States is some sort of hysterical over-reaction by people who don’t understand that a tenured Harvard Law Professor who has been to The Best Schools and publishes articles in The Atlantic etc. must be treated as a serious and most of all respectable intellectual, whose ideas therefore deserve a respectful and prominent hearing. Failing to do so would apparently violate some sort of basic neutrality principle of academic life . . . OK I just can’t do this any longer.

What is wrong with these people? Look I get that firing Vermeule from his sinecure because he’s at best a fascist fellow traveler would be a tricky thing to do for all sorts of reasons. But you don’t have to give him and his ideas a megaphone!

In the end I don’t think Jack Balkin et. al. take the idea that this country is rapidly going fascist at all seriously, which means that on some level they don’t take ideas seriously, which on another level means they don’t take their jobs seriously.

At least Adrian Vermeule doesn’t make that particular mistake.

But what about more strenuous measures than choosing not to treat our fascist friend with fantastic amounts of deference and respect, while promoting his ideas to as wide an audience as possible? This isn’t a rhetorical question: it’s a tough issue. For my part, I like academic freedom, but I like the idea of not destroying a political order that makes academic freedom minimally possible even more.