It's how the right won this week that matters.
The conservative campaign strategy behind the resignation of Harvard President Gay
The theme of 2024 will be “revanchism.”
It’s barely a week into the new year and the revanchist right has already struck a blow for the forces of reaction. The downfall of Claudine Gay is a story of donor revolt in the corporate academy, where the prioritization of administrative prowess over academic integrity in a bloated professionalized bureaucracy has muddled the mission of higher education. This, in turn, has rendered American universities vulnerable to assault from an increasingly sophisticated conservative movement.
The scope of this movement was on display this week. Gay’s resignation marked a major victory in a disciplined and coordinated campaign that was waged in full view of the public.
This is a new strategy for the right. Many of their powerbrokers (like Leonard Leo, co-chair of the Federalist Society) prefer to operate in the shadows, pulling the countermajoritarian levers of the republic by bribing Supreme Court justices and staffing the federal judiciary with Ayn Rand ideologues. In many ways, this aversion to the spotlight reflects the relative weakness of the conservative movement. Unable to win over the American public to its shockingly unpopular program of forced birth oligarchy with Nazi characteristics, the right is strongest in institutions least accountable to the people: the courts, the cops, the Senate, the corporate board room. The most visible moments of right-wing protest activity in the last decade (think Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” rally and January 6th) have been abject failures, both in their instrumental objectives and in the larger battle to win the sympathies of the public.
The campaign to dislodge Claudine Gay was something different. It was a clear play for public opinion — to rehabilitate the right as the sensible faction in American politics while vilifying a key symbol of liberalism as corrupt, hypocritical, and out-of-touch.
The right’s new methods, moreover, come straight from the toolbox of left-wing movements, which have long pursued a strategy of elevating symbolic fights in the national media in order to make the public pick a side.
Read the victory lap that Christopher Rufo, one of the architects of Gay’s ouster, takes in the Wall Street Journal. He quotes Antonio Gramsci, possibly the most influential Marxist since Karl, to declare war on America’s cultural institutions. His weapons? The power of public opinion and the effective “squeezing” of leverage.
Any student of social movements will know the tools to which Rufo refers. They are the fundamentals of all good campaign strategy: the spectrum of allies and the pillars of power. I’m writing this to show how Rufo won by using these campaign tools — and so designed an effective strategy that appealed to the public and isolated Gay from would-be ideological allies.
Reading the Political Weather: the Spectrum of Support
Rufo has proven a keen campaigner in the past. He manufactured the wave of “critical race theory” moral panics that Glenn Youngkin rode to the Virginia governorship in 2021, at a moment of Republican retreat after the party’s 2020 losses. While CRT has lost much of its momentum — witness how the flaccid Ron DeSantis has struggled to win over Republican primary supporters with a strict “anti-woke” message — Rufo and his conspirators have latched onto a new three letter boogey-man.
The right has now placed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs into the center of the culture wars. This is an effective strategy for right-wingers. It’s not hard to see why when you look at how the American public views diversity efforts in higher education.
In May 2023, Pew Research released a report on workplace attitudes towards DEI. Most Americans approve of diversity efforts at their jobs. Far fewer of them, however, ranked diversity as an “extremely” or “very” important priority. This suggests a soft, but not necessarily stable, approval for corporate programs to diversify the workforce.
It’s a different picture when it comes to attempts to increase diversity within higher education. Two weeks before the 2023 Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, Pew analyzed the public’s support for race-conscious admissions. The report concluded that the snapshot was mixed: “Half of U.S. adults disapprove of selective colleges considering race and ethnicity in admissions decisions, while a third approve.” When the ruling to end affirmative action was handed down, a slim majority of Americans even agreed that the Court made the right decision. (The partisan lean respondents is important to note: a clear majority of Republicans (75%) and Independents (58%) approved of the decision, while only a small fraction of Democrats (26%) did.) The public’s response to the decision was muted, with a few minor protests concentrated on elite campuses. When asked about the ruling, students themselves offered ambivalent feelings and conflicting accounts.
It’s helpful to contrast the end of affirmative action — which, I always have to remind myself, mostly affected a tiny fraction of students competing for spots at elite colleges — with the end of the constitutional right to abortion. If the public met the former with a shrug, then it greeted the latter with a fist. A heavy majority of the public disagreed with Dobbs, and expressed this disapproval vociferously, both in the streets and at the ballot box. (The Democrat Party’s relative over-performance in the 2022 midterms has been attributed to this “Dobbs effect.”)
Another poll suggests one possible reason for these divergent responses. Americans’ confidence in higher education has cratered in the past decade across all demographics surveyed. A full 62% of Americans had “some” to “very little” confidence in higher education in 2023, compared to 36% with a “great deal” or “quite a lot.” Soaring tuition costs, partisan polarization against college, and several high profile academic scandals seem to have taken their toll on the institution.
Let’s bring this back to the campaigning tool known as the “spectrum of support” (sometimes called the “spectrum of allies.”) This is a tool meant to help organizers determine what the public thinks of their issue at a give time. Public opinion is not static, and can swing based on news events, the messages of your opponents, generational shifts — and good campaigns. The aim of a strong campaign is to move each slice of the spectrum to the left: activating your allies, shifting the uncertain public to your side, neutralizing those who disagree with you, and isolating your opposition.
Judging from the polling data I outlined above — and without getting into debates about the merits of the polls or the benefits and drawbacks of specific DEI programs themselves — a symbol of campus diversity proved a ripe target for the right. A high profile dogfight in the media about DEI at elite institutions of higher education stood a good chance of rallying conservatives around a cause supported by the majority of the public, and without a strong liberal opposition to play defense.
When conservatives saw their moment, they pounced.
The Newsworthy Moment and the Pillars of Power
Claudine Gay walked into a trap when she stepped into the Congressional hearing. Was Elise Stefanik’s line of questioning cynical, unfair, and intellectually bankrupt? No doubt. Was Gay’s equivocation in response to the question “Do you and your institutions condemn antisemitism and calls for the genocide of Jews?” an egregious error? Absolutely.
Forcing this error was, of course, part of the strategy. Rufo credits Stefanik by name in his Wall Street Journal essay, commending the Congresswoman’s leadership for pressuring the Harvard president into a ghastly mistake for all of America to see.
The Congressional hearing took place on December 5th. On December 10th, Rufo tweeted that he had “sat on the Claudine Gay plagiarism materials for the past week, waiting for the precise moment of maximum impact.” Rufo knew his target had copied sentences of other scholars’ work verbatim, but held his fire until Gay was already embattled.
The plagiarism that Gay committed is minor, revolving around sloppy editing rather than purloined ideas or falsified data. I think in absence of the first misstep, it’s likely she could have kept her post after issuing corrections and an apology. Instead, the mainstream media ran nonstop coverage of Harvard’s embattled leader, coverage that the plagiarism allegations only fueled. She then lost the support of key figures in the elite media, including the New York Times’ John McWhorter — figures that, on paper, might have buoyed her chances at surviving the scandal. On the right, Gay became a symbol of the hypocritical elite shielded by Big Diversity. Among liberals, she marked a tragic figure with few good options. Finding herself short on allies, she resigned.
There’s another part to this story. Rufo names three “points of leverage” against the powerful. He and Stefanik took care of the political and reputational, dragging Gay into the spotlight and highlighting her mistakes to a national audience. But the financial lever was also at work, as billionaire twitter essayist Bill Ackman relates. Ackman and other mega-donors reportedly withheld or withdrew a billion dollars to pressure the Harvard Corporation to oust Gay. It’s worth noting that this mysterious entity backed Gay in spite of the turmoil caused by Gay’s Congressional testimony as well as the donor flight. It wasn’t until the plagiarism scandal grew — striking at the heart of Harvard’s scholarly mission — that Gay read the writing on the wall.
Reputational, financial, and political. The campaign to remove President Gay from her post used another key tool to identify where to concentrate the attack. The “pillars of power” framework is helpful in showing where figures in power derive their authority. The truth about presidents of elite universities is that they serve mostly as fundraisers. They must also represent the values of the institution, which includes public scholarship, and act as a leadership during times of crisis, navigating the cross-pressures of conflicting interests. Rufo, Ackman, and Stefanik successfully weakened these pillars of power enough to topple the president of Harvard.
I write this to explore how the right is going on the offensive so we can better combat their campaigns in the future. If the right continues their success in elevating issues that redound to their benefit, the liberal-left coalition will lose ground. If we can understand the strategy, we can avoid playing on the terms set by our opponents.
Burn After Reading
My friend Anthony Brian Smith passed away this week. He was mischievous, brilliant, hilarious — just like his poem “Daffodil.” I love you, Tony.
AA’s for drunks who never will
admit they haven’t had their fill.
Death is top shelf. Life is swill.
The fish would trade away a gill
to walk upon the soil as man
and run till he no longer can
and then fall flat. You’ll never be
a redwood towering over trees
who spits on birds and just for fun
casts its pall on everyone.