Erick Erickson on the Right Rot

A number of posts have discussed the conservative movement.  In the past decade, it has taken a bad turn.

Conservative Erick Erickson bravely takes on the rot on his own side of the spectrum:

A group of white guys have subtly inserted themselves into conservative institutions and church organizations. They all embrace racial grievances. To varying degrees, they embrace white nationalism, antisemitism, and even Nazi sympathies. They are getting added to conservative institutional boards, attempting to purge churches, and are desperate to indoctrinate young conservatives into fascist ideology. They even surround the Vice President of the United States. Some of them believe the United States is at a tipping point, and they want to push it over the edge and rebuild it in their image. You might think it does not affect you, but, in time, you will see their efforts in your church pews, in your kids’ brains, and in your politicians’ mouths. It begins with shampoo.

Charles Haywood made his fortune selling shampoo. He sold his Indianapolis hair care company in 2020, and he has spent the years since writing out, at length and under his own name, what he would like to do with your country. Rod Dreher, who is no man of the left, read Haywood’s online ramblings and described Haywood as pouring out vile from “deep in his Midwestern Führerbunker”.

In a document he calls the Foundationalist Manifesto, Haywood explained that his preferred government “will not be democratic.” The state “will have unlimited means,” because “properly viewed, the state is not constrained externally.” Women “will not be permitted to choose career over family.” Men “will not be permitted to choose not to have a family.” The state will seize the assets of “any citizen who views himself as a global citizen.”

That is not my characterization of his politics. Those are his words, from the manifesto that earned him a friendly sit-down with Tucker Carlson in September 2022.

Elsewhere he has speculated about serving as a “warlord” at the head of an “armed patronage network,” a model he says he drew from the groups of white settler farmers formed in southern African countries and colonies while black Africans were fighting for majority rule. Reviewing a biography of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, he wrote that his already favorable impression of the Spanish dictator had become positively glowing. He is not alone in that fixation. MAGA gadfly Jack Posobiec wrote a book called Unhumans, which Vice President JD Vance blurbed and which claims Franco and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet are models for handling the American left. Josh Abbotoy, the executive director of American Reformer, has written that America is going to need a Protestant Franco. It is not a coincidence, but an attempt to shift the Overton window toward dictatorship.

A crank with a blog is a crank with a blog. The problem is that Charles Haywood is not on the outside of the conservative movement. He has used his wealth to get inside it and reshape longtime institutions that build the future of the right, pushing those institutions toward his vision of pushing our constitutional republic to its breaking point so they can rebuild it the way they want.

California Political Geography

Many posts have discussed California.

PPIC:

California’s political geography reflects both growing national polarization and enduring regional differences. Using survey data and sophisticated modeling to estimate public opinion across 46 areas of the state, this report shows that while partisan alignment increasingly shapes views on major issues, Californians broadly agree on several policy topics. At the same time, a persistent coastal-inland divide—and the distinct political and economic position of the Bay Area—continues to structure differences in attitudes and lived experiences across the state.

• A strong coastal-inland divide defines California politics. Coastal regions are far more Democratic and liberal, while inland areas anchor Republican support. The modern center of California conservatism is the far north of the state. These broad partisan tendencies shape the geography of a wide range of issues, from immigration to the size of government to climate change and perspectives on the economy. →
• Independents are numerous but typically partisan in practice. Most lean toward a party and vote consistently that way. Democratic-leaning independents are concentrated along the coast, while Republican-leaning independents are more evenly distributed. →
• Most Californians agree on several key issues. Though the exact level of support varies, majorities across the state support abortion access, view immigrants as a benefit, and favor state action on climate change. Opposition is mostly limited to very conservative areas in the far north of the state. A broad geographic range of Californians also want a smaller state government, despite the state’s overall liberalism. →
• The affordability crisis is spreading inland. Residents on the coast are the most likely to say housing is a big problem in their part of the state, but concern about housing has grown the most in the interior over the last few years. Likewise, Bay Area residents have the most negative economic outlook, though those in inland California worry the most about paying their bills, including housing costs. →
• The Bay Area is distinct politically and economically. It is the most liberal and Democratic region, showing the strongest consistent support for progressive policies. Despite high housing prices in the region, Bay Area residents are also less likely to share the affordability concerns of the rest of the state.

Faculty Ideology and Campaign Contributions

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

A release from FIRE:

A new study commissioned by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicates that donations from faculty at top universities have become increasingly one-sided, with the range of opinion becoming concentrated on the left.

“Free speech is not just the right to speak, it is the condition that lets universities test ideas through real disagreement,” FIRE Vice President of Research Angela Erickson said. “Our findings suggest politically active faculty are clustered within a narrow ideological band, which raises serious concerns about whether students and scholars are getting the full benefit of the open inquiry universities promise.”

FIRE provided University of Rochester Professor David Primo with a list of more than 100,000 faculty members at 55 universities that was first compiled for use in the 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report. Primo then analyzed a dataset created by cross-referencing those names with a database of over 850 million state and federal campaign contributions compiled by a Stanford University professor. Faculty members who could be matched with donations were assigned a “CFscore,” a measure used by researchers to estimate a person’s political ideology based on who they donate to.

“Studying faculty campaign contributors provides a unique window into the views of politically active professors,” Primo said. “These data allow us to systematically measure viewpoint diversity at top universities and lay a foundation for strengthening discourse, teaching, and research on college campuses.”

By relying on contribution data rather than voter registration data, Primo was able to measure professors’ ideology instead of just their party affiliation. A Republican professor who gives exclusively to Maine Sen. Susan Collins (CFscore: 0.70) would score differently than a Republican professor giving exclusively to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (CFscore: 1.52), for example.

The average ideology score of faculty donors in the 55-school sample was -1.02. That’s only slightly less left-leaning than some of the most left-wing members of the U.S. Senate, such as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who are tied with CFscores of -1.14. Notably, there was no equivalent critical mass of donations on the Republican side.

Trust in HIgher Education

Elite academia leans heavily to the left.

Report of the Yale Committee  on Trust in Higher Education

 It should come as no surprise that trust in higher education has fallen most among those Americans who identify as Republican or conservative. According to Gallup, the percentage of self-identified Republicans who expressed “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education declined from 56 percent in 2015 to 26 percent in 2025, while confidence among Democrats fell more modestly, from 68 to 61 percent.42 In one national survey, only 19 percent of Republicans expressed “quite a lot” of confidence that the nation’s leading research universities “teach students neutrally and without political bias.”43 

The complaint that colleges and universities lean left is hardly new. William F. Buckley, Jr., made much the same case about Yale in 1951.44 Yet something distinctive has happened in recent decades. In 1989 approximately 40 percent of the nation’s faculty identified as liberal, 40 percent as moderate, and 20 percent as conservative. By 2014, those numbers had shifted to 60 percent liberal, 30 percent moderate, and 10 percent conservative.45 Of course it is not just the faculty that has changed. The political system has changed too. Fifty years ago, the Democratic and Republican parties were less ideologically divided than they are today. As the parties resorted, so did the partisan preferences of many professions, including within higher education. 

42 Jeffrey M. Jones, “U.S. Confidence in Higher Education Now Closely Divided,” Gallup, July 8, 2024; Jones, “U.S. Public Trust in Higher Ed Rises From Recent Low.” 43 Ken Goldstein, “Yale public opinion studies: September 2025 national, state, and local studies,” presentation, November 19, 2025. 44 William F. Buckley, Jr., God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Regnery, 1951). 45 Samuel J. Abrams, “Mind the Professors,” The American Interest, March 10, 2017. 

Leftward Trend in Social Science Research?

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Manzi, J. The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024. Theor Soc 55, 25 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-026-09690-2

This study analyzes approximately 600,000 English-language social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 to estimate the long-run ideological orientation of disciplinary research output. Large language models (LLMs) were applied to each abstract using a fixed 2025 U.S. ideological spectrum, enabling consistent coding across six decades. Five key findings emerged. First, roughly 90 percent of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period. Second, all disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024. Third, policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not. Fourth, disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity Fifth, sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time. Robustness checks using a wide assortment of alternative datasets and analytical methodologies indicated that these findings were unlikely to be artifacts of idiosyncratic assumptions. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the capacity of LLM-based text classification to deliver reliable, large-scale ideological measurement over time, a task previously impractical with human coding alone. Taken together, the analysis provides the first systematic, cross-disciplinary evidence of the long-run political orientation of anglophone social science scholarship, revealing both the persistence and the intensification of its leftward tendencies, particularly in sociocultural domains.

Huge caveat, from the article:In this study, ideology was operationalized as the relative positioning of a given text along a left–right spectrum of U.S. political thought. This includes economic and sociocultural dimensions, each characterized by their association with recognizable ideological actors and institutions. To ensure interpretive consistency over a 65-year period (1960 to 2024), political stance was evaluated against a fixed 2025 reference frame, derived from contemporary U.S. political categories.

This approach involved trade-offs. Using a static ideological scale, anchored to notions such as the 2025 political positions of Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, or the Heritage Foundation, ensured that the LLM’s judgments were grounded in stable, well-defined anchor points. It avoided the problem of ideological drift, in which the meaning of ‘left’ or ‘right’ might evolve over time due to shifting partisan alignments or cultural contexts. However, this came at the cost of temporal anachronism. Texts written in earlier decades may have been judged by standards they would not have recognized.

There is no doubt that the academy leans left, and has done so for a long time.  But the core problem with Manzi's analysis is that the entire US political spectrum has moved to the left, especially on cultural issues.  On abortion, civil rights, marriage, gender equality and a range of other issues, positions that were once radical left (e.g., support for same-sex marriage) are now mainstream.  Judge Glock at National Affairs:

The interaction of politics, policy, and public opinion should change how we look at polarization. In one sense, some conservative Republicans have indeed moved away from what we now consider the center. But the center itself has also changed, and veered emphatically to the left. Both parties, to varying degrees, have followed this shift over time. The changing context helps explain why each party can see the other as "radical" relative to what it considers the center, and why the argument that the right has moved rightward more than the left has moved leftward is unpersuasive.

 

Policy Schools Are Short on Conservative Voices

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Frederick Hess at AEI:

It’d be good for everyone if there were a deeper bench of Republican policy professionals who really knew how government works. That’s why it’s such a big problem that the nation’s public policy schools serve as owned-and-operated subsidiaries of the Democratic Party.

Faculty at leading programs lean lopsidedly to the left; unsurprisingly, they emphasize predictable priorities, such as prison reform, homelessness, or healthcare. The technocratic progressives are joined by colleagues who go further still, recasting policy debates in identity-driven and baldly ideological terms to “expose” systemic racism and the evils of U.S. capitalism.

Right-leaning priorities are routinely marginalized or dismissed as backward-looking, as is the case with immigration enforcement, entitlement reform, educational choice, or tax-cutting. As a result of this bias, a broad swath of aspiring conservative policy professionals has sensibly opted to avoid these programs altogether. The result: Republicans are short on skilled policy professionals, while left-leaning students and scholars operate in a blue bubble in which they too rarely engage with those who think differently.

Gender Differences

 Mike Allen at Axios:

A flood of data reveals a little-discussed, future-defining trend: Men and women are going separate ways.The split is clear in politics, religion, education and the labor market, Axios' Erica Pandey reports.

Why it matters: For the next generation, gender is becoming the biggest predictor of how you think, act and vote.

"There's a much broader story here," says Daniel Cox, director of the Survey Center on American Life. "Even after all the votes are tallied and we've moved on from the 2024 election, we're not going to have resolved any of the cultural and relational tension between young men and young women."

• "You see it in politics: Women are turning left. Men are turning right.
• You see it in religion: For the first time ever recorded in the U.S., young men are more religious than young women.
• You see it in education: There are 2.4 million more women on U.S. college campuses than men, the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM) notes. Those degrees are often resulting in higher-wage jobs for women in big cities.
• You see it in the labor market: Wages and labor force participation have increased since the 1980s for college-educated men and women, and for working-class women. But they have stagnated for working-class men, who are also now significantly less likely to be employed than four decades ago, according to AIBM's analysis.
• You see it in visions for the future: Men are more likely than women to want marriage and kids, according to Pew Research Center.

Polarization and SCOTUS

AT NYT, Adam Liptak Graphics by Alicia Parlapiano:

A look at how individual justices voted in divided cases issued after oral arguments brings trends at the court into sharp relief, according to data compiled and analyzed by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin, both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.

By that measure, the court is extraordinarily polarized. Two of the four most conservative justices to serve since 1937 are on the current court: Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. (The others were Chief Justices William H. Rehnquist and Warren E. Burger.)

In that same time span, two of the five most liberal justices are currently sitting: Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. (The others were Justices Thurgood Marshall, William J. Brennan Jr. and William O. Douglas.)

Overall, in divided cases argued in the last term, Democratic appointees voted for a liberal result 83 percent of the time and Republican ones 33 percent of the time — a 50 percentage point gap.

Overall, in divided cases argued in the last term, Democratic appointees voted for a liberal result 83 percent of the time and Republican ones 33 percent of the time — a 50 percentage point gap.

Left-Leaning Campuses

Many posts have discussed the spiral of silence on campus.  Students and faculty feel social pressure to conform to prevailing ideologies.

 Nate Silver:

The protests are also happening against a background of what are often extremely left-leaning environments on college campuses. The 2023 College Pulse survey asked students at hundreds of undergraduate institutions about their political views on a liberal-conservative scale. At the Ivy and “Ivy Plus” schools that were home to some of the first protests, liberals outnumber conservatives by a ratio of approximately 5:1, including by as high as 11:1 at Brown at 9:1 at Penn:

 

Why Platforms Matter

 Tevi Troy at National Affairs:

From the moment they put their hand on the Bible to the moment their successor does the same, presidents are inundated with difficult decisions. The only way to handle this tidal wave is by resorting to some kind of triage.

When confronted with policy challenges in the George W. Bush White House, aides like myself would first look to see if President Bush had said something about an issue, and then look to the Republican Party platform to see where the convention that nominated the president stood. This process was not dispositive; there were often changed circumstances and areas of nuance. But knowing where the party stood gave us a head start in determining what the answer should be on a thorny policy question.

My mentor Ben Wattenberg, a former Lyndon Johnson speechwriter who became increasingly associated with the right as the Democratic Party drifted left, worked on multiple platforms during his time as a Democratic operative. His fights with the left during those platform-committee battles of the 1960s and '70s helped him understand the full extent of the left's policy proposals, ultimately driving him away from the Democratic Party. AEI senior fellow and Dispatch founder Jonah Goldberg, who also worked for Wattenberg, once recalled the latter's views of platforms on his podcast, The Remnant:

My old boss Ben Wattenberg used to defend party platforms. He would say they don't matter that much but they also tell you what the party wants you to think it thinks about things. And that's instructive, even if it has no binding power, and even if it doesn't move voters, and all that stuff. It gives you an insight into the collective consciousness of an organization or an institution.

As we head into the 2024 election, at a time when party ideologies are muddled and politicians advertise their postures rather than their policies, platforms are more important than ever. We need those insights into the parties' "collective consciousness" to understand where those institutions are, where they are going, and whether we should entrust their representatives with our precious votes.

Thinking (Badly) About Crime

 John McMillan at City Journal:

When crime throws American cities into disarray—as has happened before and in some places is happening now—it is a bad look for the Left.

Start with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, one of the most influential scholarly books of the twenty-first century. Mass incarceration, Alexander writes, “is a stunningly comprehensive and well-disguised system of racial control,” designed perpetually to harm people of color—a “racial caste system.” Yet Alexander’s book should be infamous for its well-documented flaws. She defines “mass incarceration” as broadly as possible to make the problem seem worse than it is—she considers those on probation or parole, or awaiting sentencing, to be “incarcerated.” She doesn’t point out that in the early 1960s, violent crime began rising sharply along with nonviolent drug crimes. She doesn’t acknowledge that nonwhites drove the three-decade crime climb, or that urban African Americans are more likely to be victimized by crime, which is why many blacks supported the punitive crime measures she decries.

If you are reading this and struggling to understand how someone could write a scholarly bestseller about police, courts, and prisons, without also discussing violent crime, I have bad news for you: The New Jim Crow is no outlier. Elizabeth Hinton, a Yale historian and the author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, discusses the expansion of America’s carceral state but mentions criminals only in passing. Between the 1960s and 1980s, she says, fears about crime were overwrought. Changes in the reporting and compiling of crime statistics—along with biased media coverage and political fear mongering—allegedly “skewed perceptions of violent crime.” Heather Ann Thompson’s Blood in the Water, on the Attica prison riot, is a better book—it won the Pulitzer and Bancroft Prizes—but she puts America’s “crime problem” of the 1960s in scare quotes, as if to suggest it wasn’t real. In 2015, the flagship Journal of American History published a vainglorious special issue on “Historians and the Carceral State” that featured only left-wing perspectives.

Of all the subfields in American history, scholarship on the criminal-justice system may be the most politicized. It is dominated by gatekeepers who mostly see things the same way and resist outside interpretations.

Democrats Increasingly Identify as Liberal

Jeffrey M. Jones at Gallup:

After hovering near 50% in recent years, the percentage of Democrats who identify as politically liberal rose four percentage points in 2022 to 54%, a new high for this group. At the same time, the 10% describing themselves as conservative is the lowest to date. Thirty-six percent say their views are moderate, which is typical of the level recorded for Democrats over the past decade.

Longer term, Democrats have been growing more liberal since at least the mid-1990s when Gallup regularly began tracking party groups’ ideological views. The percentage identifying as liberal was 25% in 1994; it rose to 40% by 2010 and 50% by 2017.

As Gallup has reported previously, increased liberal identification among U.S. Democrats has occurred across all demographic categories, but that shift has been particularly pronounced among White Democrats. More than six in 10 White Democrats identified as liberal in 2022, representing a 37-percentage-point increase since 1994. That contrasts with closer to four in 10 Black and Hispanic Democrats identifying as liberal last year, up less than 20 points from 1994.

Red State, Blue State

 From the Rose Institute:

The governors of the nation’s four largest states, California, Texas, Florida, and New York, face voters in 2022. Beyond determining who will occupy governors’ offices, these contests will shape our nation’s direction in the coming years. The four “mega-states” have established rival and increasingly polarized visions of state government–one blue, the other red. California and New York have become national catalysts for progressive policies, while Texas and Florida have become the most powerful advocates of conservative alternatives. Their governors–Gavin Newsom (D-CA), Kathy Hochul (D-NY), Greg Abbott (R-TX), and Ron DeSantis (R-FL)–have come to embody these states’ highly partisan models. This election thus provides voters in the four states an opportunity to judge not only their governors, but also the blue or red agendas they represent. Moreover, the elections may give momentum to at least two of these governors–Newsom and DeSantis–to sell their states’ competing visions to the nation by running for president in 2024.

Using new survey data, this report highlights four main findings.

• The governors of all four states have positioned themselves to win reelection in 2022 by retaining the support of members of their state’s dominant party, rendering opposition by people outside that party largely irrelevant.[1]
• The four governors are on track to win reelection even though a large share of their constituents are dissatisfied with recent economic and social trends.
• Many residents of these states are considering moving elsewhere, most frequently those (such as Republicans in California and New York) who disagree with their state’s dominant political orientation. Many are interested in moving to a place where their neighbors would have political and policy preferences closer to their own.
• After their expected reelections, at least two of these governors–DeSantis and Newsom–are positioned to carry their states’ policy visions into a national competition for the presidency.

Congress and Polarization

Judge Glock, "The Mismeasurement of Polarization," National Affairs, Fall 2021:

It has become a commonplace of political discourse among academics, pundits, and politicians to claim that one or the other party has become more extremist, or that it has taken a radical position on some particular issue. Most often, those making the charge fail to distinguish the baseline against which the other side has supposedly radicalized.

When those on the left say the right has radicalized, they tend to measure it against the perceived will of the people at the current time, or against some new status quo — such as the Affordable Care Act — that was itself considered leftward radicalism just a few years earlier. When those on the right say the left has radicalized, they tend to measure it against some point in the distant past, or against the long-standing status quo.

What both measures of party polarization fail to take into account are long-term shifts in policy and public opinion that have occurred over America's history. When we look to these changes, it becomes clear that the baseline against which partisanship is measured has not remained static; instead, it has shifted to the left. Both parties have followed this shift over time, with Democrats largely leading the way and Republicans following from the rear.

This changing baseline helps explain why both parties can plausibly claim that the other side has radicalized. For the left — whose adherents measure polarization from the baseline of current policy and opinion, which has itself moved left — Republicans may appear extremist, even if their positions have remained fixed over time. For the right — whose adherents measure polarization against policies and opinions of the distant past, which fell more to the right than they do today — Democrats have radicalized, in the sense that they have followed the shift of policy and opinion to the left of where it once was.

On the whole, American politics has moved, and continues to move, along with policies and the preferences of the American electorate. This may be cold comfort for conservatives, who have witnessed both drift decidedly to the left over the past century and a half. But it can help assuage the alarmism over one-sided polarization that has long plagued our political discourse.

The Poole-Rosenthal scores provide a distorted view of ideological change over time.  

Frances E. Lee, " Patronage, Logrolls, and “Polarization”: Congressional Parties of the Gilded Age, 1876–1896," Studies in American Political Development 30, Issue 2 (2016).  The abstract:

According to the quantitative indicators scholars use to measure political polarization, the Gilded Age stands out for some of the most party-polarized Congresses of all time. By contrast, historians of the era depict the two major parties as presenting few programmatic alternatives to one another. I argue that a large share of the party-line votes in the Congress of this period are poorly suited to the standard conceptualization as “polarization,” meaning wide divergence on an ideological continuum structuring alternative views on national policy. Specifically, the era's continuous battles over the distribution of particularized benefits, patronage, and control of political office make little sense conceived as stemming from individual members' preferences on an underlying ideological dimension. They are better understood as fights between two long coalitions competing for power and distributive gains. In short, the Gilded Age illustrates that political parties are fully capable of waging ferocious warfare over spoils and office, even despite a relative lack of sharp party differences over national policy.

Democrats and Idelogy

Lydia Saad at Gallup:

Whereas Republicans nationwide are highly unified in their ideological outlook, with most (75%) identifying as conservative, Democrats are more fragmented. According to Gallup data collected thus far in 2021, the largest subgroup of Democrats are those who describe their political views as liberal, at 51%. The other half are mostly self-described moderates (37%), along with a small group of conservatives (12%).

...

The percentage of Democrats identifying as politically liberal increased fairly steadily from 30% in 2001 to 50% in 2017. It has remained there since then, including today's 51%. As their numbers have expanded, liberals have edged out both moderates and conservatives. But moderates have been holding steady near 38% since 2013, while conservatives have become even more scarce.

...

The liberal wing of the party has had considerable momentum during this century. But despite its gains, it now represents half of all Democrats, with the other half still identifying as moderate or conservative. And while the party is now solidly liberal on social issues, it remains politically fragmented on economic issues.

Although having such a diverse political makeup has its challenges, that diversity could be helping the Democratic Party maintain its edge over Republicans in party affiliation. Even as the two parties are closely split when it comes to firm party identifiers, Democrats have held the significant edge in leaned party for most of the past two decades, including by 48% versus 42% so far this year.

Subversion of Academic Freedom

Samuel Goldman at The Week:

Attitudes toward higher education are sharply partisan, though. A Pew study in August found 76 percent of Democrats but only 34 percent of Republicans believe colleges have a positive social impact. And that difference is reflected in two recent controversies about academic freedom, one at Yale Law School (YLS) and one at the University of Georgia. Disparate in some respects, both incidents involve subversion of the university's core principle of academic freedom in pursuit of knowledge.

In the first case, at Yale, administrators have come under fire for pressuring a student to apologize for hosting a "traphouse" party featuring "Popeye's chicken" and "basic-b--ch-American-themed snacks (like apple pie, etc.)." Recordings show an associate dean and the YLS diversity director threatened professional consequences for the student, whose ostensibly "triggering" activities also included participation in the Federalist Society, an influential right-leaning legal scholarship organization. "You're a law student," they warned, "and there's a bar you have to take."

The Yale story was much-discussed among prominent commentators. The Georgia case has attracted much less attention outside academic circles. On Wednesday, the regents of the University of Georgia system voted to revise its employment policies, making it easier to fire tenured faculty.

On the Left

Justin Ye at The Harvard Crimson:

Of the Class of 2025 who supported a candidate, regardless of whether they were eligible to vote, 87 percent supported Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election — 3.1 percent fewer than Class of 2024 students who indicated they planned to vote for Biden last year.

Those supporting Donald Trump in the election dropped from 7.1 to 6.3 between the two class years. Of those who supported a candidate, 6.7 percent of the Class of 2025 supported Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins.

Freshmen not affiliated with any political party rose by 3.3 percent, from 22.6 percent in the Class of 2024 to 25.9 percent in the Class of 2025. The proportion of Democratic freshmen decreased from 57.4 percent last year to 55 percent this year, while the proportion of Republican freshmen decreased from 5.2 percent to 5 percent. Independents make up 11.8 percent of the Class of 2025 and libertarians 1.3 percent.

The proportion of freshmen in the Class of 2025 identifying as liberal remained unchanged from last year — 72.4 percent. Those identifying as “very liberal” rose from 31.7 percent of the class to 35.2 percent between the Class of 2024 and 2025.

Survey of 78% of incoming class of 2025 at Harvard via @thecrimson reveals, as usual, many fascinating details. The lack of political diversity remains striking, and has increased in past 5 years. https://t.co/R2QTAgFUO9 pic.twitter.com/zYfiMqsQAc

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) September 28, 2021

 Agnostics (23.9%) and atheists (17.4%) outnumber Protestants (14.5%).

Is left-wing authoritarianism real?  Sally Satel at AEI:

An ambitious new study on the subject by the Emory University researcher Thomas H. Costello and five colleagues should settle the question. It proposes a rigorous new measure of antidemocratic attitudes on the left. And, by drawing on a survey of 7,258 adults, Costello’s team firmly establishes that such attitudes exist on both sides of the American electorate. (One co-author on the paper, I should note, was Costello’s adviser, the late Scott Lilienfeld—with whom I wrote a 2013 book and numerous articles.) Intriguingly, the researchers found some common traits between left-wing and right-wing authoritarians, including a “preference for social uniformity, prejudice towards different others, willingness to wield group authority to coerce behavior, cognitive rigidity, aggression and punitiveness towards perceived enemies, outsized concern for hierarchy, and moral absolutism.”

A FIRE survey of college students:

• More than 80% of students report censoring their viewpoints at their colleges at least some of the time, with 21% saying they censor themselves often.
• More than 50% of students identify racial inequality as a difficult topic to discuss on their campus.
• Two thirds of students (66%) say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus, and almost one in four (23%) say it is acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech.

 

Ideology: Liberals and Conservatives Outnumber Populists and Libertarians

 

Populists - voters who are culturally conservative, economically liberal, make up 14% of the electorate. In contrast, Libertarians - voters who are economically conservative, culturally liberal - make up 6% of the electorate. pic.twitter.com/sYyNCAEnEt

— Echelon Insights (@EchelonInsights) July 7, 2021

Youth: More Engaged, More Liberal

 From the Harvard Youth Poll:

Less than one year after Barack Obama’s election, 24% of young Americans considered themselves to be politically active (fall 2009 poll). Twelve years later, we find the share of politically active Americans increased by half — and now 36% are politically active. The most politically active among this cohort are young Blacks (41% politically active).

Over the last five years, on a host of issues ranging from health care, to climate, immigration, poverty, and affirmative action--young Americans are increasingly more likely to favor government intervention. For example, we found:

• A 19-point increase in agreement with the statement “Qualified minorities should be given special preferences in hiring and education” (now 33%).
• An 18-point increase in agreement with the statement “Government should do more to curb climate change, even at the expense of economic growth” (now 55%).
• A 16-point increase since 2016 in agreement with “The government should spend more to reduce poverty” (now 61%).
• A 16-point increase in “Basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it” (now 64%).
• An 8-point increase in agreement with “Recent immigration into this country has done more good than harm (now 37%).

Ideology and Perception of Taxes

Frank Newport at Gallup:

Our analysis, as we have seen, shows modest support for the hypothesis that views of one's income tax burden directly reflect what one pays in taxes. When we turn to ideology, however, we find significantly more powerful relationships -- including a 26-percentage-point difference between conservatives' and liberals' perceptions that their income tax is too high (58% of conservatives say it is, compared with 32% of liberals) in Gallup's most recent data, from 2021. Similar ideological differences are evident in views of the fairness of one's taxes. (And Gallup's recent review found almost identical differences between Republicans and Democrats.)

Thus, many Americans answer this question about their taxes based on their underlying ideological views of the concept of taxes in general and/or their views of the taxes others pay. This is not surprising, given that much research shows that Americans' ideology -- along a conservative-to-liberal spectrum -- appears to be a fundamental factor in determining their views on much that goes on around them across a variety of social, cultural, economic and personal dimensions. (Why some people end up being conservative and some liberal is itself the subject of much research, including some provocative suggestions that ideological differences reflect underlying genetic differences1.)