Why Conservatives Should Want To Fund The Acadamy

for ideological reasons

Why rightoids hate science

As part of Donald Trump’s flood of the zone, he has cut funding to the National Institute of Health. This comes to the regret of many, but to the shock of no-one. At least among those that pay attention to anything at al. For years now, the Academy has been vilified as a hotbed for left-wing activism and a bulwark of liberal power. This is primarily because the Academy is a hotbed for left-wing activism and a bulwark of liberal power. Predictably, this has led to a ever waning trust in anything the Academy produces, and support for anything that works against them.

It no less surprising then that the other great liberal bulwark—the “mainstream” media—would come out against the administration’s actions. In previous eras, this would have been effective. But the “mainstream” media is no longer the main stream. It is only one of two equal streams, which only finds audience among the converted. The unconverted are not about to show mercy in their war on the Academy. Right wing America has chosen to go all in against universities. But they are making a crucial strategic mistake.

The foolishness of defunding Academia

Just like the solution to bad speech is usually more speech, the solution to bad science is more science

This entire post you are reading is just an elaboration on the sentence above, which I encountered in from a video I happened to be watching. But the elaboration is necessary. A casual observer may skip over the substantive insight contained within. Even the author himself may not have realized it himself.

The rightoid strategy towards the Acadamy right now seems to be to just starve them on resources. Unfortunately for them, that will never work. They might stop what they perceive to be a “gravy train”, but the Acadamy largely does not run on gravy. It runs on passion. Its soldiers could scrape five times the gray in the private sector. But they do not. The Acadamy is highly selected for people that seek not gravy but impact. Almost every field is dominated by liberals. Because it is liberals that seek that impact most. Economics is an outlier, precisely because it is a draw for libertarians that want impact.

If you starve the Academy of money, this selection effect will only get stronger. Faculty will only become more ideological not less. And it won’t stop the publication of woke studies. Universities have other funding sources. Best case scenario, you reduce the number of studies they produce. But it is the univocality of the Academy’s work—not its quantity—that gives it strength. Defunding Academia will make that worse.

It’s the same kind of mistake that defunding the police. The reason American police is so much more trigger happy than European police is that they have a much lower police-officer-to-murder-ratio than the Europeans do¹. These fellas just have to confront much more violence on a regular basis. Defunding the police will (obviously) decrease the number of police. But on the margin firing a police officer also causes 0.06-0.1 murders per year. Killing you on both sides of the ledger. Defunding the police will thus make the average policeman confront more violence. Which will make them more violent, and will create a stronger selection effect where only the most violence-tolerant people will apply and stay in the police force. All of this will have the side-effect of making cities less save for everyone else. This too has a parallel to the Defund the Academy movement. Because any war against academia will inevitably sweep in a lot of actually useful research.

A way out

But there is a better way. Tactical thinker on the far left and right alike realize that to fight the academic consensus, you have to create a viable alternative. It’s the march through the institutions, not the march against them. And this has been pulled of successfully. In my previous post I praised the achievements originalism. They developed themselves from a fringe movement that even some Republicans borked, to a force that controls the federal judiciary to such an extend that they will decide the development of jurisprudence for a next generation. This is despite being astronomically outnumbered among the legal profession.

Of course, none of that could happen if originalists did not have friends in high places. And a conservative approach to other academic subjects also won’t succeed without help from those high places. But conservatives have friends in those places. But right now those friends aren’t doing much for them. Republicans could be securing funding for research and idea creation that Academia is too liberal to fund themselves. As time goes on, alternative strains of thoughts will develop. The products of those movements can advice you in constructing alternative visions for society².

Of course liberals have friends in high places as well. Which is what makes me comfortable giving this advice when I’m not conservative myself. The most successful march through the institutions plausibly imaginable will at best create a rival intellectual movement to the liberal mode of thought of a certain field. Hopefully this will create the hard times that would make the liberal ideas more rigorous. Regardless, more ideological diversity will increase the search window for ideas.

Or at least in theory…

The rightoid problem.

Up to now I have been speaking as of conservative and rightoid are synonyms. Unfortunately they are not. The Republicans are not a conservative party anymore, they are the MAGA party. A significant portion of Trump voters don’t even call themselves conservatives any more. Styling themselves “centrists” instead. The President has displaced the intellectual core of his party. This has profound consequences.

Some of those consequences are strategically advantageous. The GOP has now gone on the offensive and conquered a position of cultural hegemony. I suspect that conservative intellectuals were an important factor in why this hasn’t happened earlier. Almost all of them attended Ivy League colleges, where they got a mistaken image of where the Overton window is. This prevented them from seeing the moves that they could make.

But the rightoid coup also creates great problems. It has made the party a lot dumber, leading to worse policy priorities. But more strategically relevant is the fact that the party doesn’t think long term. Both tendencies combine in the administration’s decision to mandate a classical building style for public buildings by Executive Order. Previous generations didn’t think to concern themselves with architecture policy. But if they had they would have realized that this EO is a utterly ineffective way to do it. This EO will be repealed in four to eight years when a Democrat enters the white house, like it was last time. In that time very few buildings will actually be completed. If he had a longer term horizon, he would push to sign his architectural preferences into law. And if he had an actual long time horizon, he would fund Intbau.

1. Some quick googling suggests 50 police officers per murder per year. Compared to Germany’s 1000(!).

2. Inb4 “conservative think tanks”. Sorry but they are too high in time preference for your purposes. Your median think tank is writing about what policies to implement now, rather than developing more fundamentally new ways of thinking that can inform you decades down the line.