“Trump is doing exactly what the voters want him to do”—American Scholar and Author Mark Bauerlein

 Mark Bauerlein is Contributing Editor at First Things and Professor Emeritus of English at Emory University. He is the author of five books, including The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, and The Dumbest Generation Grows Up: From Stupefied Youth to Dangerous Adults.

Bauerlein strongly opposes so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in colleges. In this interview he discusses U.S. President Donald Trump’s battle against woke ideology.

Donald Trump started his second term in office by slashing government funding for woke projects, including funding for universities that implement so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. How have DEI programs and woke ideology damaged U.S. universities in the past few decades?

What is the damage? The damage is identity politics. You are grading people on their group identity. This is a return to forms of tribalism. It’s contrary to fairness. It’s contrary to judging people on their individual merits. The ‘E’ is equity—that’s social engineering. We’ve heard that before. It never works out well. The inclusion part, the ‘I’ is Orwellian language in that it actually functions to exclude people. For instance, when universities had job openings, all of them asked for diversity statements. “We want an astronomer. We want you to have a diversity statement for us, to tell us where you stand on things. How are you going to improve diversity? And that includes the inclusion side of things. What does that mean? You’d better not say anything implying that you might be any form of religious person of a conservative type because that’s going to run afoul of LGBTQ ideology.” So if you signal anything about traditional sex roles, you’re excluded. You’re not included. It means the opposite of what it says. So this is just the social, intellectual, and moral damage that DEI does.

And the funny thing is, it’s absolutely contrary to academic freedom. The Left is now screaming about academic freedom, that Trump is hindering academic freedom. Where have they been for the last 50 years in higher education? Academic freedom has been curtailed step by step.

As a former university professor, did you yourself experience the impact of woke ideology?

I used to be a very liberal guy, a liberal democrat. I had tensions with my fellow humanities professors at Emory and around the country, because I still believed in a kind of a Great Books tradition, a Western Civilization tradition, which I thought was a liberal tradition. I mean any tradition that includes Voltaire and Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill, you can’t really call a reactionary right-wing tradition. So I actually believed in maintaining the greatness of the masterpieces and the great thinkers. That didn’t go with multiculturalism, but on all other issues, I agreed with liberal democrats. I changed when I was in my early 40s, and then I went to work in George W. Bush’s administration, and seeing the Left’s reaction to 9/11 made me ask: “Why can’t you people be patriotic for at least one week?” That sort of pushed me over to the Right.

When I became an open conservative, working in a Republican administration, the left-wing people didn’t bother with me anymore. And then when I came out in favour of Donald Trump in 2015, that sort of put me completely off the radar. So in a way, the Left feels that they’re not going to bother with conservatives because they can’t intimidate them. On the other hand, liberals, sort of the moderate types, are being threatened.

But some conservative professors, such as Joshua Katz, have been forced out of their jobs because of their views.

Certainly, yes, there are cases of conservative professors who have been persecuted and conservative speakers being hounded. I think that those cases have damaged universities. They have certainly harmed some individuals. Joshua Katz’s case actually brought a tremendous amount of bad publicity to Princeton, and I know of some donors who said, “I’m done with Princeton,” so I don’t think we’re going to see those cases happen very much anymore. I don’t think we’re going to see much more of conservative speakers on a campus being harassed and hounded.

Frankly, you’ve got to meet force with force. Don’t let them get away with it. You’ve got to fight back against the thugs. I think that we had a degree of tolerance, but maybe the October 7 attack against Israel, and the Palestinian actions on campus have changed that. I would say that there is very little sympathy now for the protests and the cancellation attacks.

Let’s put it this way: Trump won. The entire elite, and the academic elite, has spent years trying to discredit Trump, ‘the racist,’ and he won. They can’t believe it. It just blows their mind that Trump is still around, but he won, and he’s doing exactly what the voters want him to do. That’s a democracy, that’s a representative republic at work. He’s doing what people who voted for him want him to do. The elites and the judges who are blocking Trump, they’re helping Trump become even more popular. And the Democratic Party’s approval rating is way down. I know a lot of lifelong Democrats who actually despise the Democratic Party at the present time.

So what you’re saying is that political correctness, and the promotion of DEI, LGBTQ, and woke ideologies by the previous Democratic administrations helped Donald Trump get reelected?

Liberals used to say, “Oh yeah, I know the DEI thing. We don’t really like that, but it’s just a minor, little thing.” What Trump exposed was that it was running throughout the military, academia, the schools, organisations, charities, media. This is maybe one of the most important historical impacts of Donald Trump. He brought things out into the open. He forced people to declare themselves.

Will Trump’s efforts to rid federally funded programs of woke ideology be successful? There is already a backlash by liberal circles, such as Harvard university, whose funding has also been slashed.

I would not overread the reports of backlash. Those are given through the media, and many of those people in the media have direct ties to Harvard, which, by the way, is not a popular organisation in the United States. The Harvard faculty has shown themselves so clueless and out of touch with the rest of America, they are so condescending toward anyone who dares to criticise them.

I do think Trump has popular opinion on his side, and he doesn’t care what The New York Times says about it. But the DEI industrial complex is very powerful, and they’re doing tactics like going underground. “We’re not the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion anymore. We’re the Office of Outreach and Belonging, let’s just change our language. … And once we get those horrible people out of the White House, we can go back to what we were doing all the while.”’ I don’t think this approach is going to work, because DEI is deeply unpopular in America, it has a 70-80% negative rating. It’s an elite formation that doesn’t have popular support.

Let’s switch to another topic. One of the main areas of your research has been on how the digital revolution and social media is impacting the lives of young people. Two of your books deal with the matter, and you have called the millennials the dumbest generation. How has the digital age impacted their lives?

With social media, mostly what the digital age has done is sink young people into a 24/7 youth culture environment of peer pressure, and they’re constantly in touch with one another, watching videos of one another, looking at pictures, and this is an intellectual disaster. We are licensing them to relate to adolescence without any restraint. In the old days, when I was young, I didn’t want to listen to my parents at the dinner table talking about Richard Nixon and how much they hate him, or the Vietnam War, whatever the issues of the day were. I didn’t want to watch TV at night because there were only two or three networks, and it was all adult stuff. When I went home, my social life ended. I would read kids’ books, sports biographies, science fiction, adventure. But I was reading long-form items. I wasn’t scrolling through videos all the time.

This is what the demons in Silicon Valley have done to the young. They have intensified their adolescence beyond anything ever seen before. They prevented them from growing up, from acquiring the equipment to handle the ordinary disappointments of adulthood. With Facebook, YouTube, and everything else, you can fashion your own reality. One of the things that reading will do, watching intelligent movies, reading the newspaper, and listening to intelligent radio conversations, is that it will make it clear to you that the world is not your oyster, Romeo and Juliet doesn’t end well. In fact, most love stories don’t end well.

This is why they are the dumbest generation. A couple of years ago I wrote a follow-up called The Dumbest Generation Grows Up. The young people I originally wrote about are now in their thirties. They were claimed to be the most informed, most intelligent, thoughtful, tolerant generation ever. But how are they doing? Rates of depression, anxiety, medication, suicidal thoughts, narcissism, pessimism are all up. They’re not getting married, they’re not having kids at the rates as before. They’re completely self-involved.

Are they still dumb?

Yes, they’re dumb. You can see that in levels of education. Reading scores and writing scores just keep going down. You get all these stories coming out of elite colleges that kids just haven’t read very much. English teachers have been saying for years that they can’t assign a novel that is more than 200 pages. Now they can’t assign any novels at all. Forget novels. They have no capacity to sit in a chair without interruption and read for an hour. They’ve been conditioned against it, and let’s be clear: it was all deliberate. They designed these websites in Silicon Valley to get kids addicted to stimulation, to an accelerated consumption of images and sounds. They designed a lot of these tools by consulting psychologists who are experts in addiction, attention, and focus.

This is an intellectual disaster that is happening. One reason why you hear young people, millennials calling, for instance, someone transphobic, is because it is an easy, simplistic, superficial judgement of another. It is a judgement made by someone who has a very narrow conception of human motive, who doesn’t have any room for ambiguity, ambivalence, or irony. That’s someone who hasn’t done a lot of reading. Someone who hasn’t thought about human beings in a deeper way. The quick labelling of someone is an anti-intellectual sign. It’s a dumb move.