Scott Lucas is a writer in Oakland, California, and a contributor at San Francisco magazine.

SAN FRANCISCO—If political scientists are supposed to help us understand trends in American politics and society, the blindsiding 2016 presidential election was a reminder that their work often can only go so far. So when thousands of the country’s leading political scientists descended on San Francisco over Labor Day weekend for the annual conference of the American Political Science Association, there was some soul-searching to do.

Donald Trump was not the theme of the conference, which took place during a record-breaking heat wave that saw temperatures soar to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. As usual, there were job-seeking graduate students frantically preparing for interviews, academic publishers vying for manuscripts, and researchers from around the world debating Bayesian statistics and Foucauldian historiography over coffees and beers.


But the U.S. president was impossible to escape. In hundreds of different presentations, many though not all explicitly about Trump, political scientists debated the causes and effects of the 2016 election, offering a window into how the Ivory Tower is reckoning with America’s new political reality. Were white identity politics at the root of Trump’s win, or was economic dislocation? Was Trump simply the culmination of trends building for decades, or had he dramatically reshaped the political playing field? And why hadn’t more scholars of American politics seen Trump’s victory coming?

“I don’t think I’ve hardly ever met a Trump voter,” Shep Melnick of Boston College admitted in a panel presentation. “Most of us in academia have not.”

Academia has a left-leaning reputation, of course, and some of the scholars assembled in San Francisco used the conference as opportunity to deliberate about “the resistance.” One meeting was held under the title “Disavowing Violence: Imperial Entitlements, From Burke to Trump (Fuck That Guy)”; another was “White Genocide is Gonna Get Your Mama!”; yet another was “The First 222 Days (But Who's Counting?).” Silent protesters held signs and dressed as Guantánamo Bay detainees at a talk by University of California, Berkeley, law professor John Yoo, the former Justice Department official known for writing the “torture memos” in the George W. Bush administration. For some in attendance, Trump was straightforwardly a fascist, and at least one academic refused to say that violence against him was out of the question.

But most political scientists do not view themselves as activists, and were far more measured in their analysis. Instead, they spent the conference presenting data and theories that sought to discern what signal had been sent by Trump’s voters—a topic they worry has crowded out all others. “We’re kind of tired of it,” joked Nancy Hirschmann of the University of Pennsylvania.

Some, like Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles, suggested that a newly roused sense of white identity lay at the heart of Trump’s appeal to his voters. “This idea of white identity was activated by Trump’s campaign—not created by it,” she said. Others suggested that Trump voters were motivated principally by economic anxiety. Pippa Norris of Harvard University and the University of Sydney and Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan presented new data suggesting that Trump voters were more likely to be motivated by “materialistic” concerns than those who pulled the lever for Hillary Clinton.

Some scholars focused on the growing sense of geographical—not just cultural—separation between Republicans and Democrats. In a series of in-depth interviews with rural Republicans in Wisconsin, Katherine Cramer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said she had found a sense of “distributive injustice” that ran through their concerns: Rural voters thought political resources flowed disproportionately to those in cities—and vice versa.

If political scientists were divided about what caused the Trump election, they were more unified in their evaluations of his presidency so far. Matthew Spalding of Hillsdale College in Michigan called the Trump presidency “a unique moment of great opportunity.” But his view was far from the consensus, even for conservatives like Jack Pitney of Claremont McKenna College, who lambasted Trump and congressional Republicans for their failure to deliver changes to the Affordable Care Act. “Everybody who has ever read a book on the subject could tell you that health care reform was complicated,” Pitney said. “But of course Trump didn’t know that, because he’s never read a book.”

If anyone at the conference could have explained the Trump phenomenon, it perhaps was White House aide Michael Anton, who defended the administration in a talk Saturday morning.

For years, Anton, who attended graduate school at Claremont and worked as a speechwriter before becoming spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council, has attended APSA meetings to deliver papers about historical thinkers like Machiavelli or Xenophon. But this year, he found himself in the unaccustomed position of discussing real-time events from an insider’s point of view—and on the winning side.

On a panel about the future of conservatism, Anton argued the Trump administration is reinventing conservatism for changing times by shifting to a full-throated defense of protectionist economics and an “America First” foreign policy. “The Reagan ’80 platform was the Nicene Creed,” he said, but added, “Circumstances can change radically, and what statesmanship needs to do can change.”

Anton also acknowledged his outsider status in the room. His pseudonymous support of Trump’s candidacy during the primaries, in a widely read essay published by the Claremont Review of Books, opened fractures with his fellow conservatives that have yet to fully heal. “I could write a memoir called Ex-Friends. I wish it hadn’t come to this. I’m sorry,” Anton said, declining to take swipes at the assembled conservatives for missing the Trump wave.

At the same time, he defended the more conventional Afghanistan policy that Trump recently revealed, which would allow military commanders to increase U.S. troop levels in the country by several thousand people. “With a relatively small force and a new strategy that is not repeating the mistakes of the Iraq War, we are doing good and will continue to be doing good,” Anton said.

Many political scientists in San Francisco disagreed with that assessment—including the president of APSA, David Lake, a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego. In his keynote address before a crowded audience at the end of a long day, Lake argued that the recent global populist wave had been building for many years before Trump and would likely continue. The interests of the United States and Europe have been drifting apart since the end of the Cold War, and economically dispossessed voters in the United States have fewer reasons to support American-led globalization, Lake said. All of this adds up to a crisis of legitimacy that has left the United States “not well placed to meet the challenges of a 21st century,” he declared.

Despite all the assembled brain power, there was little consensus on what the future holds—but there was an unfamiliar new feeling in the conference halls: humility. As Paul Pierson of U.C. Berkeley joked in his presentation, “No Americanist political scientist should be in the business of prognostication at this point.”