This graphic represents a crisis.

For it to be a crisis does not depend on you having any conservative sympathies. For it to be a crisis does not even depend on you having an old fashioned sense that college must be an arena of the battle of ideas, the kind of quaint notion that I grew up with and which was never seen in my academic household as at all contrary to socialist beliefs. No, for this to be a crisis requires only that you recognize that Republicans are one of two major political parties in American life, and that the structural realities of our system, and the cyclical nature of elections, ensures that there will be practical consequences of such a dire decline in popularity. Further, it helps if you recognize that in the present era, Republicans dominate American governance, with control of the House, Senate, Presidency, and crucially for our purposes, a significant majority of the country’s statehouses and governor’s mansions. They also have built a machine for state-level political elections that ensures that they will likely control many state legislatures for years to come.

I am increasingly convinced that a mass defunding of public higher education is coming to an unprecedented degree and at an unprecedented scale. People enjoy telling me that this has already occurred, as if I am not sufficiently informed about higher education to know that state support of our public universities has declined precipitously. But things can always get worse, much worse. And given the endless controversies on college campuses of conservative speakers getting shut out and conservative students feeling silenced, and given how little the average academic seems to care about appealing to the conservative half of this country, the PR work is being done for the enemies of public education by those within the institutions themselves. And the GOP has already shown a great knack for using claims of bias against academia, particularly given the American yen for austerity.

Meanwhile, in my very large network of professional academics, almost no one recognizes any threat at all. Many, I can say with great confidence, would reply to the poll above with glee. They would tell you that they don’t want the support of Republicans. There’s little attempt to grapple with the simple, pragmatic realities of political power and how it threatens vulnerable institutions whose funding is in doubt. That’s because there is no professional or social incentive in the academy to think strategically or to understand that there is a world beyond campus. Instead, all of the incentives point towards constantly affirming one’s position in the moral aristocracy that the academy has imagined itself as. The less one spends on concerns about how the university and its subsidiary departments function in our broader society, the greater one’s performed fealty to the presumed righteousness of the communal values. I cannot imagine a professional culture less equipped to deal with a crisis than that of academics in the humanities and social sciences and the current threats of today. The Iron Law of Institutions defines the modern university, and what moves someone up the professional ranks within a given field is precisely the type of studied indifference to any concerns that originate outside of the campus walls.

Universities make up a powerful lobbying bloc, and they have proven to be durable institutions. I don’t think you’ll see many flagship institutions shuttered soon. But an acceleration of the already-terminal deprofessionalization of the university teaching corps? Shuttering departments like Women’s Studies or similar? Passing harsh restrictions on campus groups and how they can organize? That’s coming, and despite showy nihilism from people who will insist that I am naive to imagine there was any alternative, our own behavior will make it easier for reactionary power, every step of the way. I assure you: there is many things that they can do to us that will make life for all of us much worse, and your self-impressed indifference will not shelter you.

In 2010 I wrote of Michael Berube’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, “the philosophy of non-coercion and intellectual pluralism that Berube describes and defends so well isn’t just an intellectual curiosity, but an actual ethos that he and other professors live by, and which defends conservative students.” I grew up believing that most professors lived by that ethos. I don’t, anymore. It really has changed. For years we fought tooth and nail to oppose the David Horowitz’s of the world, insisting that their narratives of anti-conservative bias on campus were without proof. Now, when I try to sound the alarm bells to others within the academy that mainstream conservatism is being pushed out of our institutions, I get astonished reactions – you actually think conservatives should feel welcomed on campus? From arguments of denial to arguments of justification, overnight, with no one seeming to grapple with just how profound the consequences must be. We are handing ammunition to some very dangerous people.

David Brooks has a column out today. That means that social media is going through one of its most tired types of in-group performance, where everyone makes the same jokes and the same tired “analysis” of whatever his latest dumb argument is, over and over again. None of the jokes are funny, none of the analysis useful, but this ritual fulfills the very function that Brooks is talking about in his column: making fun of David Brooks is one of the ways that bourgie liberals signal to other bourgie liberals that they are The Right Kind of Person. Brooks, of course, is incapable of really understanding his own observations, given his addiction to just-so stories about character and gumption and national grit. He does not see, and can’t see, the economic structures that dictate so much of American life, nor is he constitutionally capable of understanding the depths of traditional injustices and inequality. If he did, he wouldn’t have the column.

But his critics can’t see something that, for all of his myopia, he always has: that our political divide is increasingly bound up in a set of class associations and signals that have little to do with conspicuous consumption and everything to do with a style of self-performance that few people ever talk about but everyone understands. It is the ability to give such a performance convincingly that, in part, people buy with their tuition dollars.

That this condition makes egalitarian politics a part of elite class formation has gone little discussed in my political home, the radical left. I have been excited to see a recent groundswell of young left-aligned people, and many of them are bright and committed. But almost none of them seem aware of the fact that their ironic Twitter accounts and cultural references and received opinions on all manner of political issues are as sure a sign of their class identity as a pair of wingtips and a blazer once was. And until and unless they understand how powerfully alienated the great mass of this country is from their social culture, we cannot hope to build a mass left-wing movement and with it do good things like defend public education. I agree: it’s the economy, stupid, and we must appeal to them by making the case that things like universal free college are good. But if recent political history tells us anything it’s that no economic policy, no matter how sensible, can win if its proponents refuse to grapple with the politics of resentment. The left, broadly, has not done a good job of that. The professoriate? My god.

I am unapologetically a part of several different elites myself. I would like to think I am at least aware of it, and at least capable of giving the devil his due by saying that David Brooks is not wrong about who sees class, how they see it, and why it matters.

I owe my life to our university system and I am a product of public schools. Public education is the core concern of my professional and intellectual life. Our public universities are under massive pressure and at immense risk. Their enemies are a powerful, well-funded, and relentless political movement that has one and only one remaining impulse, which is to destroy its perceived enemies. Those who should be defenders of public universities have created a culture that is not just indifferent to attempts to effectively defend our values in open debate but who now mock the concept of public debate as a conservative shibboleth. I can see no short-term evolution in the culture of the academic left that will enable us to become effective champions of our own institutions, the monsters are coming, and I am afraid.