“The centre of American politics is hollowed out,” according to Kevin M. Schultz, professor and current chair of the department of history at the University of Illinois Chicago.

That won’t be a surprise to anyone, given the re-election of the right-wing populist Donald Trump. But Schultz resists the conclusion that Trump’s voters have rejected centrist policies across the board.

“Most Americans [still] believe in abortion during the first trimester, the sanctity of and preserving social security,” he told 51�Թ�. “There’s this big popular middle at the centre of the bell curve, but if you look at our political debates, it’s either end of the bell curve which seems to dominate the microphone.”

One of the main explanations is the way that the spectre of the “white liberal” – often typified by the college professor – has proved a highly effective tool to frighten American voters. And this tradition, which Trump’s ongoing assault on universities both draws on and takes to new heights, is the subject of Schultz’s provocatively titled new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History, published this week by University of Chicago Press.

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Schultz’s previous books include HIST, a popular college-level textbook of American history, now in its sixth edition; Tri-Faith America: How Catholics and Jews Held Postwar America to its Protestant Promise; and Buckley and Mailer: The Difficult Friendship That Shaped the Sixties. The last of these explores the close but fractious relationship between the left-wing novelist Norman Mailer and the conservative political commentator – whom Schultz now describes as “a patron saint of the modern right”.

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Buckley is also a crucial figure in Why Everyone Hates White Liberals, which explores “one of the most important and understudied scapegoats in American history”. Ever since Buckley – who founded the conservative National Review in 1955 – and particularly since the 1980s, Schultz demonstrates, “white liberals” have been demonised from all sides for a wide variety of alleged failings.

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From the Left, they have been dismissed as patronising, out-of-touch elitists – “limousine liberals”. From the right, they have been blamed for the excesses of the 1960s. They are seen as, alternatively, insufficiently radical or as too radical; as secret white supremacists or as over-concerned with the rights of minorities. Some of these contradictory stereotypes have proved crucial in uniting – in opposition to liberals – the populist, libertarian and traditionalist branches of conservatism, which would otherwise be at loggerheads.

Universities have long been a central target of anti-liberal rhetoric. All the way back to the 1950s, Schultz said, “a lot of the us-versus-them critique of liberals has centred on cultural power”. Polemicists turned their fire on “the movie icons of Hollywood, who are bringing their values into movie theatres across the country”, but also on “the liberal professors who are indoctrinating your children”. It has proved very politically convenient for conservatives to focus anti-elitist ire “on an amorphous group of people in the cultural and academic realms” rather than on corporate and financial elites.

On one level, Donald Trump has just drawn on certain strands of this long-standing anti-liberal playbook to appeal to a broad spectrum of Republican voters.

Campus resource: Faculty must stand together to confront the American illiberal peril

When addressing the religious right, Schultz noted, “he talks about ‘the secular liberal elite’, which wants to take away their religious freedoms and their right to practise their faith”. For middle-class voters – including Blacks and Latinos, who supported him in greater numbers in 2024 than in 2016 – “he has played into the notion that liberals are harbingers of government regulation and red tape, which will get in the way of your ability to succeed”. For a different though overlapping constituency, Trump portrays liberals as “the thought police, proponents of political correctness. They are no fun and they are policing your behaviour, taking away your ability to make a joke at someone else’s expense.”

Yet Trump has also gone much further than his predecessors in making “anti-liberalism” one of the cornerstones of his electoral platform, Schultz believes: “He’s really owned it in his personal style. He has elevated the rhetoric” used by earlier presidents such as Ronald Reagan, “not just to point out that the opposition is liberal but to make them the enemy”.

Hence the T-shirts Schulz saw in stores while on vacation in Florida reading: “I am oiling my gun with liberal tears”. His book also quotes a woman called Bev, who lives in “Trump country” in Missouri and replied to a query on Quora with the observation that the people she knows “don’t give a shit what [Trump] does. He’s just something to rally around and hate liberals, that’s it, period...It’s fuck liberals, that’s pretty much it.”

While earlier critiques of the academy were largely aimed at firing up the conservative base rather than shaping policy, Schultz argues that in Trump’s hands they have “become much more than just a rhetorical attack”.

Back in 1951, Buckley published his first book, The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”, which “argued that professors were teaching children to oppose the two Cs, Christianity and capitalism, indoctrinating the youth in moral relativism and religious tolerance on the one hand and socialism or social democracy on the other”. Yet Buckley’s polemic, Schultz went on, merely issued “a plea to donors to stop giving to Yale if they didn’t agree with what teachers were teaching”.

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And though Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan also attacked liberal professors, “they did not necessarily cut the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] or NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities] budgets,” added Schultz. Rather, they “mandated that those moneys be spent in all 50 states”, which had a modest effect in “directing funds away from liberal strongholds such as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles”.

None of this came even close to what Trump is doing, Schultz said, in “removing some of the support the federal government gives universities for the research they conduct – ironically, including the kind of stuff he embraced during to accelerate the development of a vaccine against Covid. He’s attacking those institutions [such as the National Institutes of Health] with the blunt force of the federal government.”

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It is hardly in dispute that American college professors, on average, lean further to the left than the general population. Yet Schultz has no time for the claim that “professors are brainwashing their students into thinking in certain ways. A common complaint I hear in my department is that we can’t even get students to read the syllabus, much less convince them that Keynesianism is the best way to run an economy!”

He acknowledges that most of his fellow historians are “eager to point out the flaws in American democracy and eager to point out the wins of the civil rights movement, together with the losses from the violence fomented against it”. Yet there is also “a fairly strong commitment – not universal and not blind – to the American ideal of the future of democracy, the balance between equality and freedom, the push towards free speech,” he added.

“A lot of teachers believe in the American dream and the promise of America and want to expand rather than curtail them. When they teach the shortcomings of the American dream, it is not to demonise America but to show how the country has fallen short of its ideals. That gets cut out from the critique of what the liberal professorate wants.”

Take the case of which attracted much criticism from the right for making slavery central to the story of the foundation of the US. Schultz admitted that the rival which issued its report two days before the end of Trump’s first term, was “largely dismissed by historians as a hack job that decimated their attempts at crafting an authentic past (always an impossible task, but our endeavour nonetheless) in order to promote a partisan agenda”.

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Yet even historians who were broadly sympathetic “didn’t swallow the entirety of the 1619 Project either”. They “pointed out many shortcomings” and “roundly criticised it for offering too narrow an understanding of what the United States was...The presumption of today’s Right that the Left and those they call ‘liberals’ simply want to indoctrinate children into believing everything the 1619 Project pronounces is flatly not true, at least not in higher education.”

So what do recent developments feel like on the ground in universities such as Schultz’s?

“The attack on professors is not necessarily new,” he responded (speaking before the Trump administration’s on Harvard University, cutting off its federal funding and threatening to end its charitable status and bar it from recruiting international students). “But the way Trump is pushing forward his attacks is much more blunt and direct and ‘creative’ – in a destructive kind of way. That has left a lot of academic leaders incredibly nervous about how far his attacks might extend.”

Since Schultz’s university is part of the public University of Illinois system, “we depend to an extent on federal grant money and especially state dollars. We are very concerned about the loss of federal dollars but also about the way Trump is doing this, announcing something on Friday which will go into effect on Monday, which means your university suddenly loses $47 million over a weekend. A lot of the concern stems from uncertainty rather than manifested action. I have welcomed the courts’ mandates that some of these radical immediate changes be put on pause while they get studied and examined.”

Schultz would like to see university administrators “doing a better job of getting the word out about all the good that universities do for our society”. This is a case they are skilled at making “in state legislatures all the time when they ask for state appropriations”, but they needed to find better ways to “make the case more broadly”.

As for academics, Schultz urges them to recognise the central claim of White Liberals – namely, “the limitations on using the word ‘liberal’ as a rallying cry for the Left or the centre-Left”.

Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy were proud to call themselves “liberals”. But once the right succeeded in making the word close to toxic, their successors were much more wary – even when proposing “liberal” policies that were and are broadly popular with the electorate.

This had led, Schultz reflected, to “a significant problem for the left in marketing its core ideas”. Kamala Harris, he writes, made the case for “supporting the commonweal” by telling the story of her late mother chastising her for “thinking she could do everything on her own and assuming that her actions didn’t have knock-on effects. ‘You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ Harris would impersonate her mother as saying.”

But coconut memes proved a poor substitute for a strong and inspiring label to encapsulate Harris’ political philosophy. The task for academics, then, is to work with left-leaning politicians to find an alternative; Schultz’s book “ends by exploring a few of the possibilities”, he noted – while also stressing that it would be counter-productive for academics to actively team up with Democratic politicians to oppose Trump's agenda.

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The other thing academics can do is to follow Schultz’s example and keep writing books that engage with what is happening to American politics and society. The first Trump administration, for instance, led to a deluge of often anguished books by academics analysing and critiquing the phenomenon.

But does Schultz believe that academics will still be willing to put their heads above the parapet during this more vengeful second term?

He has noticed a certain amount of anxiety, he conceded: “Some members of my department are extremely wary and will use non-internal email addresses if they want to write something that might be contentious. They are worried about being ‘outed’ and attacked.”

Indeed, prominent Yale professors and Trump critics Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley have recently announced their with Stanley explaining that his decision was “entirely because of the political climate in the United States”. Just last week, , Gerald F. and Marjorie G. Fitzgerald professor of economic history at Northwestern University, made a , noting “This no longer feels like the right place to raise a family and pursue a research career”.

As of now, none of Schultz’s faculty have expressed a desire to leave the US. “But I have seen some academics trying to migrate from red [Republican] states to blue [Democrat] states because they feel there will be more protections and opportunities [there] to publish more freely, and they will feel safer from the public,” he said.

For the moment, Schultz remains cautiously optimistic that academics are going to “continue to write op-eds and books about political polarisation and how Trump has amplified it to his benefit. There are just not enough personal attacks on academics that would warrant any kind of slowdown in such protest literature,” he believes.

���� could happen: we could see professors being arrested or imprisoned for some of the things they are saying. But I don’t foresee that happening. Even Trump’s supporters would see going against the courts or curtailing the rights of journalists to publish what they want as a breach of trust.”

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