Some Harvard students surveyed their professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences about their political leanings last year. This represents what they found out:
It's apparently just as the right wing fears; there are vanishingly few self-proclaimed conservatives on the faculty.
Now Harvard may be exceptional, in the sense that people who have landed a job there may feel freer than the average academic brainiac to be forthright about their political opinions. But it does seem to be true that academics by and large lean progressive, or at least in the direction of the Democratic Party. And they sure aren't Republicans. Why such an extreme disproportion?
Paul Krugman has a worthwhile observation on how that imbalance has developed among his own tribe: economists of high repute.
The field I know best, economics, contains (or used to contain) quite a few Republicans with solid academic reputations. Like just about every academic discipline, the field leans Democratic, but much less so than other social sciences and even the hard sciences. But the G.O.P. has consistently preferred to get its advice from politically reliable cranks.
The contrast with the Biden team, by the way, is extraordinary. At this point it’s almost hard to find a genuine expert on tax policy, labor markets, etc. — an expert with an independent reputation who expects to return to a nonpolitical career in a couple of years — who hasn’t joined the administration.
And because the Republican Party has repelled people who actually know how the world works, it has filled up with grifter politicians who only know how to fall in line for the sake of winning or holding on to power. And this has made them patsies for an anti-factual authoritarian leader.
... the predominance of craven careerists is what made the Republican Party so vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.
Surely a great majority of Republicans in Congress know that the election wasn’t stolen. Very few really believe that the storming of the Capitol was a false-flag antifa operation or simply a crowd of harmless tourists. But decades as a monolithic, top-down enterprise have filled the G.O.P. with people who will follow the party line wherever it goes.
So if Trump or a Trump-like figure declares that we have always been at war with East Asia, well, his party will say that we’ve always been at war with East Asia. If he says he won a presidential election in a landslide, never mind the facts, they’ll say he won the election in a landslide.
The point is that neither megalomania at the top nor rage at the bottom explains why American democracy is hanging by a thread. Cowardice, not craziness, is the reason government by the people may soon perish from the earth.
If democracy is going to survive in this country, it's going to take not only policy smarts, but also what so many Republican leaders so transparently lack: commitment to truth, discipline, hard work, and, probably from too many among us, sacrifice for the good of the community. Democracy depends on widespread civic virtues.
It's great having a Krugman on our side; heck, it's good having most professors.
But democracy has to be the vision and goal of millions of ordinary aroused citizens or we won't keep it.
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