In a conversation with Jesse Singal, Yascha Mounk said,
I feel like you and I are part of a small—and rapidly diminishing—band of people who were very concerned about some of the identitarian excesses on the left but are also very outspoken about our concerns about the way in which the Trump administration is attacking the institutions of American democracy and imposing its own culture war on the United States.
Singal says,
I think you and I are fundamentally institutionalists. We don’t want to burn it all down—because, however flawed institutions are, whatever rises from the ashes will be worse.
Institutionalists, like Mounk and Singal, are in an uncomfortable position. They honor the traditional liberal ideals of the institutions of higher education, journalism, and the Democratic Party. They see that radical activists have warped these institutions, but they hope for reform.
In contrast with the institutionalists are the Brokenists, who find the flaws in the institutions intolerable. Brokenists, like Christopher Rufo and other figures aligned with President Trump, think that drastic measures are needed in order to free those institutions from radical control.
The conversation between Mounk and Singal really gives the flavor of the Institutionalists’ difficulties. As Mounk says,
we’re in a weird spot, and I feel a bit torn.
And Singal remarks,
A group of folks still, in 2025, seem convinced that the center left is the root of all problems.
Indeed. There have been a lot of stories about polls showing record-low support for the Democratic Party. I think most people assume that the folks that the Democrats are losing are the normies. But I would not be surprised that if you look under the hood it is the far left where Democrats are having difficulty retaining support. The party cannot tack toward the center, because doing so will cause further losses among the activists.
Note: Noah Smith disagrees. He makes the “nowhere else to go” argument. But he concludes on a pessimistic note for center-leftists.
If Democrats want to win elections, they will need a different ideology — something more akin to the liberalism of Barack Obama and Bill Clinton than to the progressivism of Zohran Mamdani. But they’re in a tough bind — caught between the rage of a leftist base that already despises the party leadership, and the fear and contempt of average Americans who don’t want the views of a progressive activist minority to dominate their lives. I don’t know how Democrats can resolve that dilemma, but they need to do it, and quickly, before Trumpism becomes even more entrenched.
Social justice ideology is rigid and uncompromising. Lorenzo Warby argues that its most pathological characteristics actually explain its ability to control institutions.
This capture of institutions has involved the spread of new cultural schemas (social framings) and scripts (patterns of action) concentrated in social networks and milieus with disproportionate power over and within institutions. It has used, as we shall see, the mechanisms and patterns—status, norms, imitation—that make us Homo sapiens so much the cultural species.
Warby points out that social justice radicals flourish in non-profit sectors. This means that they are accountable neither to customers nor to reality.
There has been selection for ideas that create sharp distinctions between the righteous—who accept the various markers of virtue, of being a good person—and the “deplorable” unrighteous—typically construed as morally malevolent—who dissent.
The center-left finds itself on the wrong side of this distinction. As Singal puts it,
There’s this view among the Bluesky blob that folks like Matt Yglesias, you and I are all secretly reactionary or fascist.
And just about everything nowadays is coded as a right-wing dog whistle: free speech, abundance, having babies, cleavage, …
Mounk has this provocative observation:
the basic ideological infrastructure, the basic assumptions about how the world works, actually remain roughly the same as they were before.
The activists still organize their thinking around oppressor and oppressed classes, settler-colonial theory, hatred of capitalism, and so on. I agree that this is the main challenge facing moderates like Mounk. If the activists do not change their minds, and they do not get purged from the universities and the mainstream media, then how can the center-left matter?
Singal expresses optimism.
The activist groups who have done a little bit of soft extortion over the years. I forget where this came from—I think it was an Ezra Klein column—but it’s like: It would be a shame if you disagreed with our group and we had to come out and call you racist. I think mainstream Democratic types in D.C. are just not going to abide by that anymore. I think those accusations have lost their bite.
I think those accusations have lost their bite with Trumpists. I doubt that they have lost their bite in the Washington Post newsroom or on the Harvard campus.
Their conversation moves on to the institutional problems in some parts of science. This includes partisanship of the editors of top medical journals. It includes the replication crisis. It includes the gender-treatment industry. Singal says,
It just seems incredibly difficult to know what to do when our society is so polarized that you can’t trust medical authorities anymore, because they have become in certain ways activist organizations. That leads to a backlash which wants to deny the plausibility and the real medical needs of a number of teenagers that really are deeply gender dysphoric and are in deep distress. So I guess this is just the America we’re stuck with now.
I am much more of a Brokenist than Mounk or Singal. You won’t catch me saying that all you need to do to fix universities is sprinkle in a few more conservatives. To be fair, they never say that. Like many others these days, they identify problems without offering clear solutions. Instead, they seem to me to wish that social justice activists would confess their sins and sin no more. But I may be uncharitable. You should check out the interview yourself.
So if I am going to complain about the absence of solutions, what would I propose?
I think that higher education ought to be smaller, more intellectually elite but less entitled*, and less heavily funded by the government. I think that the non-profit sector should be much smaller, with much lower salaries, so that most people’s organizational experience is in the profit-seeking sector, where accountability comes from ordinary consumers rather than rich donors and politicians. I think that in the realm of public discussion, including legacy media and social media, we need mechanisms that reward Scout Mindset rather than Soldier Mindset (nod to Julia Galef’s book). If existing universities, media powerhouses, and the Democratic Party stand in the way of this sort of future, then better that they should wither away than we should waste effort attempting to reform them.
*Let me elaborate on that phrase. Suppose that we think in terms of percentiles of SAT scores. Then let us come up with alternatives to college (such as micro-credentials) for everyone below the 95th percentile. College is reserved for the 95th percentile and above, with the most elite colleges having an even higher cutoff. And good grades have to be earned, not given.
But do not give college graduates any entitlement relative to non-graduates. To attain status in law, journalism, management, or other professions, they have to earn it. People who have not taken the college path may turn out to be at least as qualified, and selection systems must allow for this. Above all, college graduates are not entitled to be in charge of social norms or political institutions.
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It is just hilarious to see Yglesias, Klein, and Smith described as centrist anything. That disconnect right there is the core of the problem.
It was a good pod, the lack of solutions proposed stems from the fact that Mounk and Singal are full beneficiaries and participants of what they critique. They want a different priesthood, but essentially the same church.
Lawrence Krauss has a new book out with a bunch of co-writers, “The war on science”, and associated conversations on his Origin podcast. I encourage everybody to listen to Krauss and his co-writers on the pod.
It is hard to conceive higher education can be reformed, it must wither in the sun, and other systems must take off the ground.