Academic Gabfest

The program does helpfully summarize APSA’s anti-harassment policy, elaborating its commitment to providing a safe and welcoming environment for “all participants, regardless of actual or perceived gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, socioeconomic status, age, or religion.” But mostly it lists the hundreds of panel discussions, lectures, and papers that are the meat and potatoes of APSA’s annual gatherings. There are some worthy subjects that fell under the rubric, such as “Study of Medieval Political Thought: The Quest for Legitimacy in the Middle Ages.” There is the requisite academese: “Varie-ties of Interpretive Research: From Trump to Transylvania.” There is also an undercurrent of anger: “Disavowing Violence: Imperial Entitlements, From Burke to Trump (F— That Guy).”

Fortunately, there is at least one panel that takes the quest for legitimacy seriously. In a tiny room in a far corner of the Hilton Union Square is a discussion on “The Uncertain Legitimacy of Foreign Policy Experts.” The panel is notable because it contains two academic stars, or at least stars by the standards of academic political science: Daniel Drezner of Tufts University (a columnist for the Washington Post) and Tom Nichols, a Naval War College professor who recently landed at number 13 on Politico’s list of “50 ideas blowing up American politics (and the people behind them).”

Not coincidentally, both wrote books in the last year that address the distrust between Americans and intellectuals: Drezner’s The Ideas Industry and Nichols’s The Death of Expertise. Aside from being popular writers, they are unusual among academics for leaning at least somewhat to the right. Nichols is a Greek Orthodox Christian and Republican, albeit an avowed Never Trumper. Drezner formally left the GOP in protest over Trump in July.

Neither hesitates to assign blame to liberal academics for bringing de-legitimization upon themselves. “Robert Jervis, who’s considered a peerless international relations scholar, wrote that it makes a difference to our research that most of us are liberals, and I think that’s incontrovertible,” Drezner tells the panel. “I think it leaves political science vulnerable to a standard conservative critique, not to say that our scholarship is necessarily warped in any way. But if a political scientist that’s at variance with, let’s say, what conservatives want to believe .  .  . all they have to say is, ‘That is an elitist, out-touch-academic who is way to the left of the political spectrum and has no understanding what the needs of the real people are.’ And you know what? There’s going to be a grain of truth to that, even if the scholarship is rock solid.”

Still, Drezner holds out hope for a way to recapture public reverence for intellectual leadership. “Trump might make political science great again,” he says. “Because, as it turns out, he is articulating ideas that are so stupid, they are so preternaturally dumb, that whether you go from the liberals or conservatives, you are actually going to have consensus that ‘Gee, this idiot is wrong.’ ” Of course, there is no consensus yet among voters on whether calling Trump’s agenda dumb represents an authoritative opinion

or condescension. For his part, Nichols notes that it’s not a coincidence that the relevance of the academy has declined hand in hand with lowering academic standards. Nichols is a Russia expert, trained among the last generation of Cold War Sovietologists who regarded their expertise as a vital national security asset, one to be held to high objective standards.

Now, Nichols observes, “tenure standards and publication standards have changed .  .  . [and] part of the reason this has happened is because a lot of universities have found their political science departments so unreformable that they’ve created and hived off political policy schools.” With the lack of rigor, one can be a well-credentialed political scientist without any real expertise. He describes meeting a Latin American expert who’d never been to the region, calling it an example of the increasingly common “Jesuit sex education” one receives from foreign policy experts. And he laments that there’s no longer a “normative core” in political science. “We had some things we agreed about,” he says. “War was bad, democracy was good.”

A big part of the problem is that academics simply don’t know how to talk to ordinary people, much less persuade them. “Academic political science is not preparing people to speak to the public,” he says. “There is still fundamental hostility to popularizers,” adding that among academics, “ ‘You write well’ is an insult. ‘Your writing is very accessible’ is said with almost a dripping tone of contempt.”

These, of course, are thoughtful reflections on the reasons for the ebbing legitimacy of political science. But to be blunt, while thoughtfulness may sell books to a general audience, it’s not clear there’s an academic market for it. Leftist radicalism is a different story. Just after the foreign policy experts discussion there is another panel at the Hilton—“White Genocide Is Gonna Get Your Mama!”—and it is far better attended.

The title is ironic, but not in a way that is reassuring. One of the speakers, associate professor George “Geo” Ciccariello-Maher, was censured by his employer, Drexel University, after tweeting last December, “All I want for Christmas is white genocide.” He followed that up with “To clarify: when the whites were massacred during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” Ciccariello-Maher says the tweets were meant to draw attention to the belief among racists that there is some organized institutional plan to kill whites en masse. (Ciccariello-Maher has also tweeted that someone who gave up his first class seat to a uniformed soldier made him want to “vomit.”)

According to Ciccariello-Maher and his fellow panelists, this notion of impending “white genocide” is a widespread cultural meme. For instance, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla criticized the Black Lives Matter movement for using counterproductive “Mau Mau tactics” in a New Yorker interview last month—an allusion, Lilla specified, to a famous Tom Wolfe essay, “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” whose subject was intimidation, not killing. Nonetheless, panelist Nikhil Pal Singh characterizes Lilla’s observation this way: “Here is a serious liberal intellectual essentially saying activist groups are out there who want to kill white people.”

Princeton’s Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor weighs in with all manner of splenetic thoughts on white genocide, including that the GOP is, “in my opinion, a thoroughly racist party that .  .  . has completely racist policies” and that Trump (to whom no one would give a passing grade for racial sensitivity) “has unequivocally expressed sympathy, admiration, and solidarity for white supremacy in the United States.”

After their initial presentations, the panelists then take a moment to help plan a protest against another APSA speaker, George W. Bush administration official John Yoo for his role in writing memos offering legal justification for waterboarding terrorists. This will bear fruit the next day during Yoo’s panel, which is about the need to limit executive authority. A group of APSA attendees stand silently in front of the dais holding signs, and two people later charge into the ballroom yelling. Now a law professor at Berkeley, Yoo has no doubt grown accustomed to being protested and is unfazed.

The panel on white genocide has a logical, if disturbing, rhetorical end. The first question from the audience is from a grad student named Nathan from UC-Davis who wonders, “What do we do with the way that liberals have fetishized this purist notion of free speech and nonviolence?” He then suggests, “There are more confrontational ways to deal with white supremacy and violent fascists.”

Afterwards, I see Tom Nichols in the crowded lobby of the Hilton. He is chagrined, but unsurprised, by what had just transpired at the white genocide panel. More surprising, he says, is that APSA gave him a platform to critique political science from the right. “Twenty-five years ago, you wouldn’t have seen a panel like that, since scholars doing that kind of public engagement were risking career suicide. So that’s progress.”

Mark Hemingway is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.