Campus Chaos Is the Deep State’s Fault

Protesters’ apocalyptic behavior is a reaction to higher ed’s subsumption into the establishment.

As the most dramatic campus protests since those against a national draft more than 50 years ago wind down, lucid, prescient voices have pinpointed their specific causes in ways that can shift policy for the better. These plausible policy shifts range from a more careful hand with immigration at home to a change in America’s approach to Israel abroad to sustained government pressure on institutionally-backed “wokeness.” But, along with specific causes, there’s a possible deeper reason for these protests that deserves consideration, one with a less controllable effect: higher education’s proximity to government power, and that proximity’s effect on students. 

For 80 years, elite universities and their emulators have forged connections with the Washington administrative agencies and their corporate, academic, nonprofit, and media outgrowths that form our “deep state.” These connections have increasingly stripped elite higher education of its knowledge-producing purpose, and set it toward minting a “power elite” divided between careerist technocrats and dissenting ideologues. In the process, over more than fifty years, they have created a new style of politics practiced by the ideologues with the implicit backing of the technocrats. 

This style goes beyond what is commonly described as woke progressivism and, though it has militant Marxist elements, it goes beyond even those. Its approach to the world is apocalyptic, and it is obsessed with purity, power, and victimization, which means that its closest model is fascism. Tracing how it developed and moved into politics since the 1960s leads straight to the black box that is elite universities’ relationship to the deep state. 

Read more at The American Conservative.