A society in a dreamlike state of slow dissolution, as America is now, is inevitably going to pass through a series of inversions and perversions of its old status quo, on the way to a new one. Yesterday’s foe, Russia, is now our government’s friend. The concept of the “deep state” has gone from a chimera of the New Left to a pretext employed by the new “populist” right. Americans who wanted to know the truth of where things stood in the trade war between the US and China had to turn, not to their government, but to China, which exposed Donald Trump’s assertions that the two sides were engaged in productive negotiations at a high level as a lie. Never mind that Trump’s phoney claims caused the stock market to soar and made a bundle for his rich pals.
And then there is the stand-off between Harvard and the Trump administration. Under the guise of combating what it claims is unchecked anti-Semitism at the fabled university, the administration has frozen more than $2.2bn in federal grants and contracts to Harvard. The funds stay locked up unless Harvard submits to audits of its faculty for plagiarism and oversight of its hiring practices, among other ultimatums similarly unrelated to anti-Semitism. Trump is threatening to revoke the university’s hallowed tax-exempt status as well.
In response, and unlike Columbia, which folded before the administration’s demands, Harvard’s president, Alan Garber, sent a letter to the White House refusing to acquiesce. Now Harvard is suing the Trump administration. Trump has put similar pressure on a number of universities. But Harvard being Harvard, its confrontation with Trump is getting nearly all the attention.
Harvard being Harvard, that is the rub. Few are not horrified by Trump’s assault. “First they fascinate the fools, then they muzzle the intelligent,” was how Bertrand Russell described fascism’s tactics; in his attempt to bring Harvard to heel, the president is pursuing both ends. If Trump succeeds in his war on the universities, the country will be several steps closer to a soft autocracy.
At the same time, even those appalled by the American right vs Harvard may well have a small voice deep inside them whispering to the former: “Go lunatics!” Conservative elites are making war on liberal elites from the outside. But Harvard, on account of its legacy admissions, thraldom to power, wealth and celebrity, and a thick impasto of social codes and connections, has long frustrated true meritocracy from the inside.
Harvard remains a glittering sanctuary of intellectual pursuits and achievements. But the criteria for belonging to it and similar schools are, largely, subtly calculated and constructed along social lines. The Jewish novelist Saul Bellow used an anti-Semitic, anti-Harvard slur in the 1950s to refer in private to a prominent Jewish literary scholar who had been hired by Harvard when Jews were barely allowed into the place. What the young Bellow meant by his infra dig tribal jab was that humbly born, socially raw outsiders like him and his peers could, maybe, one day find themselves in those institutions, but never of them.
That turned out to be wrong with regards to Jewish intellectuals, who have found a haven at places like Harvard – and especially at Columbia. But Harvard has always embodied a state-of-the-art conformity. While Ralph Ellison, the black author of America’s greatest novel, Invisible Man, taught briefly at Harvard, his vulnerable, open-hearted hero would not have made it through its gates. Rooting for Harvard against Trump is like rooting for Goliath against Godzilla. It feels as superfluous as it does right. Trump will find it easier to keep rounding up foreign students on American streets than tangling with the world’s richest and most elite-accommodating university.
In another Wonderland turn, rational, well-intentioned people, including many Jews, now find themselves railing against the Trump administration’s efforts to fight campus anti-Semitism. Partly this is because American universities in general, and elite schools in particular, have long been home to large, thriving Jewish communities. Partly it is because the instances of campus anti-Semitism, though despicable, were some campuses’ crisis, not a national one, despite Benjamin Netanyahu’s irresponsible lies at the time that “anti-Semitic mobs” had taken over US universities. And it is partly because, enraged by even the long-overdue premises of Black Lives Matter, the right has cynically contrived its very own mirror-response: White, Jewish Lives Matter.
The dazing result is to put Jews, yet again, in a perilous historical situation. Nazis blamed Jews for civilisational decline. The American right is using the mirage of a general hostility to Jews to justify an attack on American civilisation. Jews are now a pretext on the way to being a scapegoat. Steve Witkoff, Stephen Miller, the bouncy Howard Lutnick, the Kushners – the seeming Jewish presence accompanying Trump’s war on America is plain for all anti-Semites to see and conspire about. Meanwhile the Jews who were destroyed in Europe as a pretext for tyranny are now being used by an American would-be tyrant as the pretext for enabling another destruction.
It is absurd to state that anti-Semitic incidents in America are on the rise because of a few pro-Palestinian campus protests. They are on the rise because Trump’s fraudulent campaign against anti-Semitism is suppressing opposition to Netanyahu’s shocking erasure of Gaza. In dreamlike, upside-down, inside-out America, Jews are terrifyingly at the centre of an accelerating historical nightmare.
[See also: One hundred days of autocracy]
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This article appears in the 30 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The War on Whitehall