In the decade since the 2008 global financial crisis, while all other forms of consumer debt have shrunk, student loan debt has tripled. Currently around 44.2 million Americans owe a total of more than $1.5tn, and 30% of these are struggling to make monthly payments. Meanwhile, college teachers are increasingly likely to live from contract to low-paid contract. None of this comes up in The Coddling of the American Mind, a book about why young people feel anxious and college is making it worse.

Instead, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt focus on students demanding “protection” from arguments they find challenging and the professors and administrators who cave in to them. The first section elaborates what the authors call the “Great Untruths” that supposedly dominate college campuses: What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Weaker; Always Trust Your Feelings; Life Is a Battle Between Good People and Evil People. Their targets are “safetyism”, the language of microaggressions, identity politics and intersectionality. Generation “iGen”, the one that comes after millennials, is, according to the authors, suffering a mental health crisis because of smartphone addiction and the paranoid parenting style of the upper middle class.

Their title echoes The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom’s 1987 bestselling attack on the “relativism” that he said threatened the achievements of western civilisation. As if paying homage to Bloom’s love of classics, the new book opens with a pilgrimage to Misoponos, a Greek oracle who serves Koalemos, preaching the three great untruths. This excursion turns out to be a bit of mischief (misoponos means “lazy”, and Koalemos is an obscure god of stupidity). “We didn’t really travel to Greece to discover these three terrible ideas,” the authors reveal. “We didn’t have to.” They did not write this book because of an oracle; they wrote it, perhaps, because an article that they published in the Atlantic went viral.

The book is less interesting for its arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style

The bait and switch might seem like a strange way to begin fighting dogma on behalf of facts. But the “tenured radical” is a long-standing enemy in the culture war industry. Lukianoff and Haidt update the themes of neoconservatives such as Roger Kimball and Dinesh D’Souza, whose 1991 Illiberal Education also first appeared as an Atlantic cover story. But if they are clearly hoping to tap into the forces that made Bloom and his successors bestsellers, this is a repetition with a difference. Rather than Plato they want data. Rather than a canon, they want to preserve mental health. They say health will save democracy.

The methods they teach come from cognitive behavioural therapy, which Lukianoff credits with having saved his life when he suffered from depression. He and Haidt argue that student demands for social justice are expressions of “cognitive distortions” that CBT can correct, and that the problems that young people and their parents worry about are not as grave as they think; they are simply, as Steven Pinker writes, “problems of progress”. Despite the title, which suggests cultural or civilisational diagnosis, the checklists and worksheets distributed throughout this book make clear that its genre is self-help.

The tips it contains may benefit upper middle class parents. They may benefit students from minority or working class backgrounds who arrive on elite campuses to find that, despite good intentions, those campuses have not fully prepared for them. But the framing leaves no room to consider how historical and social change might legitimately change institutions or individuals, or that individuals might want to change their world. (This framing also explains how they can write hundreds of pages about what’s wrong with contemporary higher education and not mention debt or adjuncts.) The authors cite the “folk wisdom” “Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child”. They call this attitude “pragmatic”. The prospect that a group of children might get together to build a new road themselves is not one they can countenance.

The Coddling of the American Mind is less interesting for its anecdotes or arguments, which are familiar, than as an epitome of a contemporary liberal style. That style wants above all to be reasonable. Lukianoff and Haidt include adverb after adverb to telegraph how well they have thought things through. Following the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a white supremacist drove a car into a crowd of people, killing Heather Heyer, “levels of fear and anger were understandably elevated”. “Members of some identity groups surely face more frequent insults to their dignity than do straight white males.”

Far-right marchers clash with counter-protesters at the ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Photograph: Michael N/Pacific/BarcroftImages

Elaborate syntactic balancing acts even out at meaninglessness. In a passage likening recent “witch-hunts” on American campuses to atrocities perpetrated during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Lukianoff and Haidt write: “As historical events, the two movements are radically different, most notably in that the Red Guards were responding to the call of a totalitarian dictator, who encouraged them to use violence, while the American college students have been self-organised and almost entirely nonviolent.” Those are big differences! “Yet, there are similarities, too. For instance, both were movements initiated by idealistic young college students.”

The point of the style is to signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly. The fact that Lukianoff and Haidt claim authority to police tone becomes clear the first time they discuss the role “overreaction from the right” has played in recent campus wars – at least halfway through the book. They quote death threats that Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor received in 2017, including “lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum” put in her head. “One might conclude,” Lukianoff and Haidt write, paraphrasing an imagined conservative, that if she and two other professors who received such threats “had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble”. Should black female scholars really believe that the lynch mob would leave them alone if they just spoke in a more “reasonable” way? No; Lukianoff and Haidt state clearly that some on the right are determined to attack professors perceived as left-wing and that universities often fail to defend them. The authors certainly do not endorse threats of violence. And yet, even as they allow that another professor, the classicist Sarah Bond, came under fire despite speaking in a “scholarly way” and offering “a thoughtful and academic presentation”, they reiterate the contrast articulated by the conservatives they are supposedly criticising. On the next page, when they summarise how the typical “polarisation cycle” proceeds, they say that it is instigated when “a left-wing professor, often black or female, says or writes something provocative or inflammatory”.

The style that does befit an expert, apparently, is the style of TED talks, thinktanks and fellow Atlantic writers and psychologists. The citations in this book draw a circle around a closed world. In offering a definition of “identity politics”, a term coined by the black socialist lesbians of the Combahee River Collective (and the subject of a recent book edited by Taylor), Lukianoff and Haidt quote “Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the Brookings Institution”. They tell their readers to read Pinker, whose fulsome blurb appears on their book jacket.

The book ends with a list of recommendations for fixing young people and universities. “We think that things will improve, and may do so quite suddenly at some point in the next few years,” they conclude, suddenly cheery. Why? “As far as we can tell from private conversations, many and perhaps most university presidents reject the culture of safetyism,” even if “they find it politically difficult to say so publicly”. Based on conversations with high school and college students, the authors believe that most of them “despise call-out culture”.

“Private conversations” that they cannot describe seem like thin evidence from a social scientist and a lawyer whose motto is “Carpe datum!” A few chapters earlier, they bewail the ethos of “customer service” that has led universities to coddle students, but here they are confident that “if a small group of universities is able to develop a different sort of academic culture … market forces will take care of the rest”.

Who will fix the crisis? The people who are already in charge. How? Simply by being open about what they already secretly believe. The rhetorical appeal, here, shares a structure with the appeal that carried the enemy in chief of political correctness to the White House: “That’s just common sense.”

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

Lukianoff and Haidt go out of their way to reassure us: “Neither of us has ever voted for a Republican for Congress or the presidency.” Like Mark Lilla, Pinker and Francis Fukuyama, who have all condemned identity politics in recent books, they are careful to distinguish themselves from the unwashed masses – those who also hate identity politics and supposedly brought us Donald Trump. In fact, the data shows that it was precisely the better-off people in poor places, perhaps not so unlike these famous professors in the struggling academy, who elected Trump; but never mind. I believe that these pundits, like the white suburban Dad in the horror film Get Out, would have voted for Barack Obama a third time.

Still, they may protest too much. In the midst of what Fukuyama, citing his colleague Larry Diamond, calls a “democratic recession”, the consensus that has ruled liberal institutions for the past two decades is cracking up. The media has made much of the leftward surge lifting Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But as this new left-liberalism gains strength, a growing number of white men who hold power in historically liberal institutions seem to be breaking right.

Bad is how these men feel when someone suggests they have had it relatively easy

As more and more Americans, especially young Americans, express enthusiasm for democratic socialism, a new right-liberalism answers. Its emerging canon first defined itself in reaction to new social movements highlighting the structural or systemic elements of identity-based oppression. By deriding those movements as “clicktivism” or mere “hashtags”, right-liberal pundits also, implicitly, expressed frustration at how web platforms were breaking up their monopoly on discourse. In January 2015, weeks after a wave of massive Black Lives Matter protests, Jonathan Chait decried Twitter as the launch pad of a “new pc movement”. In the conclusion of The Once and Future Liberal, Lilla singled out Black Lives Matter for special condemnation, calling it “a textbook example of how not to build solidarity”. Andrew Sullivan has criticised “the excesses of #MeToo”. Just last week, Harper’s and the New York Review of Books published long personal essays in which men accused of serial sexual harassment and assault defended themselves and described their sense of persecution by online “mobs”.

Lukianoff and Haidt share some benefactors and allies with the well-established right that funded Bloom and D’Souza. (Lukianoff works at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit group that receives funding from the Scaife and Olin families.) But, reading The Coddling of the American Mind, I was more struck by their points of proximity to the newer Trumpist right.

Like Trump, the authors romanticise a past before “identity” but get fuzzy and impatient when history itself comes up. “Most of these schools once excluded women and people of colour,” they reflect. “But does that mean that women and people of colour should think of themselves as ‘colonised populations’ today?” You could approach this question by looking at data on racialised inequality in the US, access to universities, or gendered violence. They don’t. They leave it as a rhetorical question for “common sense” to answer.

Their narrow perception of history severely limits the explanations Lukianoff and Haidt can offer for the real problems they identify. Can you understand the “paranoia” middle-class parents have about college admissions without considering how many of their children are now downwardly mobile? How are college teachers supposed to confidently court controversy when so many of them have zero security in jobs that barely pay above poverty wages?

Just as they appear to lack a clear explanation of why the “terrible ideas” that are “harming students” have taken hold, they don’t seem to have a theory of how good ideas cause change. At one point, they note that Pauli Murray, one of their exemplars of “common humanity identity politics”, recently had a college at Yale named after her, as if this proved that in an unregulated market, the right ideas do win in the end. But Yale did not just happen to remember this law school graduate, half a century later; Yale named Pauli Murray College following countless student protests around Black Lives Matter – and after a cafeteria worker named Corey Menafee, who got sick of looking at pictures of happy slaves in Yale’s Calhoun College, put his broom through a stained glass window, and his union came to his defence.

For all their self-conscious reasonableness, and their promises that CBT can master negative emotion, Lukianoff and Haidt often seem slightly hurt. They argue that intersectionality theory divides people into good and bad. But the scholars they quote do not use this moral language; those scholars talk about privilege and power. Bad is how these men feel when someone suggests they have had it relatively easy – and that others have had to lose the game that was made for men like them to win. Their problem with “microaggressions” is this framework emphasises impact over intentions, a perspective that they dismiss as clearly ludicrous. Can’t these women and minorities see we mean well? This is the incredulity of people who have never feared being stereotyped. It can turn to indignation, fast.

If there is a new right-liberal dispensation, the two-step from shame to rage about shame may be what brings it closest to the Trumpists. Hints of elective affinities between elite liberalism and the “alt-right” have been evident for a while now. The famous essay that Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos wrote in 2016, “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right”, cites Haidt approvingly. At one point Lukianoff and Haidt rehearse a narrative about Herbert Marcuse that has been a staple of white nationalist conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” for decades. Nassim Taleb, whose book Antifragile Haidt and Lukianoff credit with one of their core beliefs and cite repeatedly as inspiration, is a fixture of the far right “manosphere” that gathers on Reddit/pol and returnofkings.com.

The commonality raises questions about the proximity of their enthusiasm for CBT to the vogue for “Stoic” self-help in the Red Pill community, founded on the principle that it is men, rather than women, who are oppressed by society. So, too, does it raise questions about the discipline of psychology – how cognitive and data-driven turns in that field formed Haidt and his colleagues Pinker and Jordan Peterson. Lilla admits to envying the effectiveness of the “right-wing media complex”. It is hard to imagine that Haidt does not feel some such stirrings about Peterson, who is, after all, selling more copies of self-help books marketed as civilisational critique. Lukianoff and Haidt quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago as an epigraph and key inspiration; Peterson, who frequently lectures on the book, wrote the introduction to the 50th-anniversary edition Penguin will publish in November.

A spokesperson for ‘good’ identity politics … Martin Luther King delivers his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in 1963. Photograph: AN2

Predictably, Lukianoff and Haidt cite Martin Luther King as a spokesperson for “good” identity politics – the kind that focuses on common humanity rather than differences. But there was a reason the speech they quote was called “I Have a Dream” and addressed to people marching for jobs. Keeping faith with the ideal that all humans are created equal means working to create conditions under which we might, in fact, thrive equally. In the absence of this commitment to making the dream come true, insisting that everyone must act as if we are already in the promised land can feel a lot like trolling. Why are you making such a big deal about identity, Lukianoff and Haidt ask again and again, of people whose identities, fixed to their bodies by centuries of law and bureaucracy and custom, make them vastly more likely to be poor or raped, or killed by the police, or deep in debt. Seize the data! But not all kinds of data.

In his book, The Reactionary Mind, the political theorist Corey Robin paraphrases Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: since Edmund Burke, effective reactionaries have been the ones who recognise that in order to stay the same, things will have to change. By contrast, the new right liberals say that things must stay the same in order to progress. America is already great.

The core irony of The Coddling of the American Mind is that, by opposing identity politics, its authors try to consolidate an identity that does not have to see itself as such. Enjoying the luxury of living free from discrimination and domination, they therefore insist that the crises moving young people to action are all in their heads. Imagine thinking that racism and sexism were just bad ideas that a good debate could conquer! (As if a person did not need a minimum level of material security to participate in the kind of disinterested debate David Remnick and Steve Bannon might have enjoyed at the New Yorker festival.)

As the right liberals insist that students are suffering from pathological “distortions”, a sense of unreality prevails. In their safe space of TED talks and thinktanks and think pieces, the genteel crusaders against “political correctness” create their own speech codes. As their constituency shrinks, their cant of progress starts to sound hysterical. The minds they coddle just may be their own.

• The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt (Penguin, £20). To order a copy for £17.20 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.