The Academic Trumpists: Radicals Against Liberal Diversity

There has been an outpouring of research on populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and extreme right movements in Europe. Much less studied, however, is the growing political conservatism in the American academy and how it relates to populist sentiment. The Academic Trumpists addresses a gap in the research literature by looking at the impact of Trumpism on conservative faculty. It compares 109 professors who publicly supported Trump to 89 conservative professors who opposed Trump. All 198 functioned as public intellectuals who advocated publicly their views.

Drawing on recent research in the sociology of intellectuals and Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical field perspective, this book offers a fielding political identities and practices framework to show how these two groups of professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) differ in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, their political rationales, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, and their stances on key controversies surrounding the Trump presidency (Covid-19, the two impeachments, the November 2020 election lost, and the January 6 mob assault on the US Capitol). The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative critics resist this move. This polarization of views between these two groups of conservative professors is enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that connect their positions in the academic field to affiliations with conservative think tanks that reinforce their respective political identities and radical right-wing anti-establishment thinking in America more generally.

This book will appeal to readers interested in the politics of higher education, the sociology of intellectuals, political sociology, and research on conservative and right-wing populism politics in America today.

David L. Swartz, retired from teaching, is now visiting researcher at Boston University. He is author of Symbolic Power, Politics, and Intellectuals: The Political Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (2013), co-winner of the 2014 American Sociological Association History of Sociology Section Best Book Award. He is also author of the widely cited Culture and Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu (1997). He is one of the founders of the political sociology standing group of the European Consortium for Political Research. His research interests include social theory, education, culture, stratification, and political sociology.

With Nicholas Rodelo who is an independent researcher and data analyst. He has been studying right-wing academics and think tanks with David Swartz since 2019, when he was an undergraduate in Economics at Boston University. He lives in the United States.