Trump divide among American conservative professors

Abstract

There has been an outpouring of research on right-wing populist conservatism since the advent of the Trump presidency and right-wing movements in Europe. Yet, little research has been devoted to divisions among conservatives themselves, especially among conservative academics. Although Trump has maintained remarkable unity within the Republican Party for electoral reasons, he has fostered sharp divisions among conservative intellectuals and academicians. This article compares 102 politically conservative professors who are Trumpists and 80 conservative professors who are anti-Trumpists. All 182 function as public intellectuals who advocate their views in print and digital media. Drawing on recent research in the sociology of intellectuals and particularly Pierre Bourdieu’s analytical field perspective, this article proposes a fielding political identities and practices framework to show how these two groups of professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) differ in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, and their stances on key issues surrounding the Trump presidency. The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative academic critics resist this move. This polarization of views between these two groups of conservative professors is enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that connect positions in the academic field to affiliations with think tanks, government agencies, and professional associations in the field of power that reinforce their respective political identities. This research contributes to political sociology, the sociology of intellectuals, and the sociology of conservative politics in American higher education.

In October 2016 there appeared an online list Scholars & Writers for America: Statement of Unity of 177 supporters for the presidential candidate Donald Trump.¹ The Statement of Unity offered five topical reasons for supporting Trump’s candidacy: constitutional governance, corruption in government, economic stimulus, religious liberty, and education. Sixty-nine of the signers were professors who held academic teaching/research positions in colleges and universities. Yet, Trump was hardly a candidate that one would imagine igniting much support in the academy. Indeed, there was very little.² Donald Trump was not elected president in 2018 by strong support from students, faculty, and staff on America's college and university campuses. Nor did they offer electoral support during his failed attempt to be reelected in 2020. Indeed, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden were by far the more popular presidential contenders in 2020 among students and professors. Trump stoked the fires of right-wing populism by stressing American-first nationalism and anti-immigration. He attacked identity politics popular on many American colleges and campuses. He made an about-face on the right to abortion supported by many students and faculty. Had not Trump criticized science and objective knowledge by proposing alternative facts? Was he not critical of American higher education? Yet, a small number of professors did publicly support Trump in both elections. Who were these professors? How could individuals who had spent their lives separating fact from fiction support such a political figure? Why would an academic support an individual and political movement that challenged the very basis of his/her intellectual career and institutional setting? Was not academic Trumpist an oxymoron?

Not all politically conservative academics supported Trump. Indeed, not only liberal professors but also some conservative faculty strongly opposed both Trump’s candidacy and his presidency. Who were these conservative anti-Trumpists?

Although Trump maintained remarkable unity within the Republican Party for electoral reasons, he created sharp divisions among conservative intellectuals and academicians. The Trump era increased the political polarization not only in American society but also within the academy. Yet little research attention has thus far been devoted to the divisiveness of Trumpism within the American professorate.³ This article addresses this gap in the research literature by looking at the impact of Trumpism on conservative faculty. It compares 102 professors who publicly supported Trump to 80 conservative professors who opposed Trump. All 182 functioned as public intellectuals who advocated their views in print and especially in the digital media. Who were these academic Trumpists and their conservative academic critics? Comparisons look at their respective positions (school prestige, intellectual orientation, and scholarly productivity) in the field of American higher education. What were the principal rationales used by the academic Trumpists in support of Trump and the critical objections used by those who opposed him? In addition, the article examines the network affiliations to major think tanks, government agencies, and professional scholarly associations where these professors try to influence the public agenda with their views. Particularly important has been the development of intellectual outlets in conservative think tanks that provide a venue of solidarity for conservative professors beyond the purview of liberal campus politics. Finally, the article looks at what stances these two groups took relative to four of the most important challenges of the Trump era: Covid-19, the two impeachments, the November 2020 election lost, and the January 6 mob assault on the US Capitol. Did these challenges lead any of these professors to change their minds? Why or why not? A concluding discussion reviews the key findings and explores some implications.

A field analytical perspective

This study is situated in the recent line of sociology of intellectuals research developed by a number of scholars (Bourdieu, 1988, 1990a; Brym, 1987; Collins, 1998; Eyal & Buchholz, 2010; Karabel, 1996; Medvetz, 2012) who in their individual ways stress how intellectuals struggle over their identities as intellectuals and pursue their own cultural and symbolic interests as they compete for recognition in cultural arenas relatively autonomous from external political and economic forces. They also network, form schools of thought, and make public knowledge/value claims in a wide range of political engagements. This study advances this line of research to show how positions within the academic field and networks to opportunity structures in the field of power help us understand the political engagements and identities of these conservative professors. In short, we offer a fielding political identities and practices framework. Our fielding framework shows how the stratified hierarchy of academic field positions and networks to opportunity structures of think tanks connect for maintaining political identities and stances in ways that other frameworks do not.⁴

This study draws inspiration from Bourdieu’s (Bourdieu, 1988, 1993a, b) analytical field perspective. While the study does not follow a strict application of all conceptual features of Bourdieu’s thinking, it draws on selected key features that overlap with some and contrast to other approaches in the sociology of intellectuals.⁵ The fielding perspective employed here is undergirded by a critical method that challenges popular received wisdom, highlights conflicts by actors using various power resources to advance their interests, uses relational thinking to break with essentialist views of actors, connects actor views to their underlying power underpinnings, and explores inter-field relations.⁶ The following are the key features of this intellectual field analysis.

First, field analysis is infused with a critical methodology that constructs the object of research against received views and common assumptions. As such, it goes beyond popular surface explanations, such as the idea that conservatives support the status quo against radical change. This study shows that some conservative professors call for an anti-establishment radical change.

Second, a fielding framework looks for oppositions and divisions rather than consensus and commonality alone as one would stress in an institutionalist perspective (Powell & DiMaggio, 1991). In contrast to institutional theory, field analysis does not propose a commonly shared understanding of what it means to be a conservative in the academy.⁷ While conservative professors share views on standard conservative issues, such as limited government, free markets, and individual freedom, they divide sharply on others. This study shows sharp division: the Trumpists advocate anti-establishment populism whereas the anti-Trumpists embrace traditional conservative values. Moreover, the study shows that the two groups of professors diverge in their strategies for success in the academy; the anti-Trumpists invest more in scholarly capital than do the Trumpists. This study identifies the various capitals (power resources) that these professors use to maintain or enhance their positions in their struggle for symbolic power in academic field hierarchies.

Third, a fielding perspective calls for relational thinking rather than imposing a substantialist view on the object of research (Bourdieu, 1990b; Emirbayer, 1997). The study does not propose an essentialist definition of conservatism or Trumpism.⁸ While the study builds on samples of self-identified conservatives, it does not delineate who is a true conservative or who is a true intellectual. One Trumpist self-identifies as a paleo-conservative; another as a libertarian. One critic even contests that a Trumpist can be a true intellectual (Barlow, 2019). Against essentialist views on character or personality types (e.g., the so-called authoritarian personality Adorno et al., 1950; Altemeyer, 1981; Jost et al., 2003), my fielding perspective looks at different types and amounts of cultural capital individuals employ in strategic action to achieve symbolic power within the academy and beyond.

Fourth, field analysis tries to avoid two tendencies in a sociology of intellectuals: one that focuses just on their ideas (or discourse) and the other focusing on just their underlying social locations.⁹ It does not reduce the political ideology of these conservative academics to their social class origins. Nor does it just explore the intrinsic features of their ideas. Rather than separating discourse and structure for separate analytical treatment, field analysis connects views and stances to the underlying power resources (capitals) that these professors use in navigating their actions in the proximate arenas where they work.¹⁰ This study finds an embrace of traditional conservative values by some and support for right-wing anti-establishment populism by others. But this study connects these opposing views to field positions, capital investment trajectories, and social network strategies (types of think tanks, academic productivity, commitment to academic life or status competition, etc.) for political intervention showing where these are shared by these two groups of academics and where they differ.

Fifth, network analysis brings an important collective dimension to field analysis by showing that strategic action can have a network dimension as well as an individual one. Traditional social network analysis does not bring in a field perspective that stresses power and hierarchy (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012). My fielding analysis identifies important network ties among these academics but goes beyond traditional network methodology to differentiate the two groups of professors in terms of competing scholarly and professional hierarchies. The networks identified here point up strategies of political identity that collectively prove quite enduring and resistant to significant challenges to those identities. They also link the academic field to the field of power.

Finally, critics (e.g., Eyal, 2013) have pointed up the limitations of focusing on just individual fields. Fields intersect, subdivide, and vary in degree of autonomy from outside forces (Sapiro, 2014, 2018, 2020; Swartz, 2016). Moreover, there can be relatively unstructured social spaces between fields (Eyal, 2013). And actors often occupy positions across multiple fields (Boltanski, 1973). Bourdieu (2015) himself pointed to the importance of some of these variations in field analysis. While my previous Theory and Society article (Swartz, 2020) pointed out the critical concern that Trumpists have with liberal campus culture, this article extends the analysis on how the differing field locations of the two groups reach beyond the field of higher education to the field of power of think tank politics and the state. It also shows how the political stances by the two groups vis-à-vis the controversies surrounding the Trump presidency endure and are buttressed by different intellectual strategies relative to the academy and networks of political identity beyond.

The findings from this field analysis show that the academic Trumpists and their conservative academic peers differ significantly in where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, where they network with think tanks, scholarly professional associations, and government agencies, as well as their views and stances on key issues surrounding the Trump presidency. The anti-Trumpist critics hold more symbolic capital in terms of institutional prestige and more scholarly capital in terms of publications. The Trumpists are less invested in the academy and scholarly associations than are their conservative peers. By contrast, they have stronger ties with right-wing think tanks. Views and stances relative to the most controversial issues of the Trump presidency and its aftermath follow with remarkable consistency the field positions relative to symbolic capital, scholarly capital, and strategies of affiliations external to the university. The academic Trumpists embrace the right-wing populist wave mobilized by Trump and the conservative academic critics resist this move. Trump’s character flaws and the anti-establishment and populist rhetoric by the Trumpists appear to be the most decisive factors dividing the two groups. This study shows this polarization of views and stances between the two groups of conservative professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) to be enduring and rooted in two distinct social networks that reinforce their respective political identities and engagements.

The data

This article reports on the institutional prestige, intellectual orientation, scholarly productivity, extra-academic networks, and political stances of 102 conservative professors who supported the Trump presidency and 80 conservative professors who opposed Trump.¹¹ All 182 individuals are public intellectuals; that is, they not only teach and do research in universities but also take public stances on the Trump presidency. All 182 individuals identify as politically conservative, libertarian, and/or Republican. Both groups are overwhelmingly male, white, older, and tenured.¹² Only 7 of the anti-Trump and 10 of the pro-Trump are women—less than 10 percent of the total number. There are even fewer people of color, only 5.

I identified these professors through internet searches, political opinions appearing in blogs, essays, op-ed pieces, public lectures, tweets, YouTube talks, links to news items, books, and journal articles, but not by voting records. They all intervened beyond the classroom or the laboratory to promote a political agenda either supportive of Trump or against him. They have been public intellectuals during the Trump presidency, either as academic Trumpists or as sharp critics of Trumpism.¹³

I selected only individuals who held full-time teaching positions in colleges and universities. While a few write regularly for the news media, such as Daniel Drezner (anti-Trumpist) who writes for the Washington Post and Charles R. Kesler (pro Trump) who is editor of the Claremont Review of Books, all are clearly academics as measured by their institutional positions, professional peers, and academic publications.¹⁴

That said, these data should be understood as illustrative samples of conservative professors who support Trump or who do not; they do not represent the complete population of supporters or critics, nor should they be considered as nationally representative samples selected by random sampling methods. The samples here may well undercount the actual number of relevant individuals. Other professors may advocate their positions either for or against Trump in local media or other venues that my internet searches did not pick up. Moreover, there could be many professors who actually support Trump or Trumpism but are reluctant to voice their views within the dominant liberal campus culture (Gross, 2013). They would illustrate that spiral of silence thesis for which there is some evidence (Noelle-Neumann, 1984; Norris, 2021). On the other hand, conservatives who publicly oppose Trump have not endeared themselves in Republican Party circles. Because of the small number of cases (N = 182), this article reports raw numbers and a few simple percentages (all rounded to whole numbers) for the two groups of 80 and 102 individuals.

Symbolic capital in the higher education field

To situate these two groups of academic conservatives in terms of the field of American higher education, this article looks at the type of school and its national standing as measured by the widely used U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) rankings for 2022.¹⁵ In Bourdieusian terms, institutional ranking can be considered a measure of symbolic capital.¹⁶ The 182 professors teach in 112 different institutions of higher learning. For the most part, they are in major private and public research universities. The 80 anti-Trumpists teach across 53 different schools whereas the 102 Trumpists teach across 74 different schools. In terms of locations within the field of American higher education, these schools are situated closer to the prestigious center than to the periphery. Thirty-three percent (60 of 182) of these professors teach in the 50 most prestigious universities. Only 14 percent of the 182 individuals teach in liberal arts colleges. Only two teach in two-year public community colleges, which are at the less prestigious margins of the American higher education system. This is clearly a culturally elite group of professors.

Nevertheless, there are some significant differences between the two groups. The anti-Trumpists were more likely to obtain their graduate degrees from higher ranked institutions: sixty-six percent of the anti-Trumpists obtained their highest degrees from one of the top 50 schools in the United States where fifty-three percent of the Trumpists did – a difference of thirteen percentage points. The Trumpists, however, were more concentrated around just a few schools. Most striking is that 13 of the 102 pro-Trump professors obtained their highest graduate degrees from just one institution: Claremont Graduate University. The number of graduates from Claremont and the number of current positions held by Claremont Trumpists make it possible to identify Claremont as a center of political reproduction of Trumpism, to use the term of Pierre Bourdieu. (I also note below that Claremont functions as a hub for Trumpists outside of the academy as well.) Sixteen Trumpists are affiliated with the Claremont Institute and/or the Claremont Review of Books. Moreover, 5 of the graduates from the Claremont Graduate University hold teaching positions at Hillsdale College – another academic center of Trumpists. There is no similar concentration of anti-Trumpists around a comparable set of institutions.

One also observes clear differences between the two groups regarding where they teach. The anti-Trump conservatives teach in the more prestigious universities. Forty-three percent (34 of 80) of the anti-Tumpists hold positions in the 50 top ranked universities whereas only twenty-six percent of the 102 Trumpists do. Moreover, the Trumpists tend to cluster in just a couple of lower ranked religious schools, such as the University of Dallas, conservative Catholic, (5), and Chapman University, Disciples of Christ and United Church of Christ (3).

Two observations are worth noting. While both groups clearly tend to concentrate in the more prestigious sector of the US field of higher education, the anti-Trumpists are clearly the more advantaged. They benefit from greater institutional symbolic capital. Second, the Trumpists are less likely to convert their credential capital into prestigious organizational positions within the academy (into organizational property – to use a term suggested by Collins (1979)) than are the anti-Trumpists. If half (53 of the 102) of the Trumpists obtained their graduate degrees from among the 50 most prestigious schools in the academic field, only half of those (26 of 53) were able to secure teaching positions in similarly ranked schools. By contrast, sixty-six percent (53 of the 80) anti-Trumpists graduated from one of the top 50 schools, and two-thirds (34 of 53) of those were able to make that kind of capital conversion. The anti-Trumpists were more able than the Trumpists to reproduce their location in the institutional prestige hierarchy from graduate school to the academic job market. Thus, on the whole, the anti-Trumpists hold greater institutional symbolic capital than do the Trumpists.

From credential capital to scholarly capital

But graduate credentials alone do not make a successful scholarly career. One must publish in peer reviewed journals or with academically recognized book publishers. Is it possible that the Trumpists were not as successful in converting their academic credential capital into productive post-graduate scholarship as were the anti-Trumpists? Could differences in scholarly productivity explain some of those differences? The Rothman and Lichter (2009) study finds that socially conservative professors tend to work at lower ranked institutions than their publication records would predict. Their findings suggest that conservative academics are actively discriminated against-a view held by conservatives.¹⁷ In the case of elite law schools, there is the 2016 Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy finding that libertarian and conservative professors publish more than their peers (cited by Shields, 2018). By contrast, Gross (2013:308) reports from a national representative survey sample of American professors that “conservative professors have lower levels of intellectual capital on average than liberal ones, including lower rates of doctoral degree holding, and this goes a fair way towards accounting for their lesser presence in elite institutions.” My sample includes only those with PhD or law degrees. Although this article deals with cultural elites, its data still offer some support for the survey findings reported by Gross.

Review of the 182 professors suggests that the publication records of the anti-Trumpists are stronger than of the Trumpists.¹⁸ Does this observation hold up when examining more objective scholarly publication data? Does one group show greater accomplishments in terms of scholarly output recognized by their peers? One measure of such a difference is citations. Does one group have a higher citation capital, as a form of scholarly capital, than the other? To assess this, I looked at the widely used h-index citation index based on citations reported by Google Scholar, using the Harzing Publish or Perish software (harzing.com) to analyze them.¹⁹

Since current evidence shows that citation rates vary across disciplines, this article looks at the anti- and pro-group citations in just one discipline: political science.²⁰ In political science the sample has 23 Trumpists and 19 anti-Trumpists. The average h-index for the Trump critics is higher than for the Trumpists: 14 vs 7.6. This difference appears to be due to several extremely high h-index scores among the anti-Trumpists and several very low scores among the Trumpists. Five anti-Trumpists have h-index scores of 24 or higher, that is 10 or more points above the mean. There are fewer relatively high h-index scores among the Trumpists, but none of these approaches the high scores of the five anti-Trumpists. Only one Trumpist has an h-index score of 20. The other four scorers among the Trumpists (13 and 16) just hover around the mean (14) of the anti-Trumpists. At the opposite extreme, 5 Trumpists have extremely low h-index scores (2 and 3). Among the anti-Trumpists only two have very low scores.

Thus, the anti-Trumpists in political science appear to have stronger publication records than the Trumpists as measured by the widely used h-index citation measure.²¹ This suggests that on the whole the anti-Trumpists are significantly stronger carriers of scholarly capital than are the Trumpists. This indicates a division between these two groups that parallels political ideological differences; namely, a difference based on scholarly capital. It provides some support for a Bourdieusian capital conversion strategy; namely, that Trumpists have been less interested in converting their academic credential capital into established scholarly capital, or less capable because of more negative reactions in mainstream peer-reviewed journals.²² It suggests a difference in actor strategies with the conservative critics of Trump being more invested in mainstream competitive academic status than the Trumpists.

Types of scholarly capital

We know from previous national survey data on the politics of American professors that they tend to be more liberal than the general American population and social scientists to be the most liberal of all (Gross, 2013; Gross & Fosse, 2012). Gross (2013, pp. 62–63) finds that “economic and strong conservatives… tend to cluster in fields like accounting, management information, marketing, and electrical engineering, while economics contains a higher proportion of strong conservatives than do social science fields such as sociology and psychology.” Sociology in particular is described as one of those no-go zones where “outspoken cultural conservatives…confront a life of isolation and persecution” (Shields & Dunn, 2016, p. 5&7). Where are the two groups of Trumpists and anti-Trumpists located in the academic disciplines? Are these two groups of politically conservative academics randomly distributed across the academic disciplines and, if not, do patterns suggest a significant relationship between their scholarly capital and their politically activist capital?²³ In Bourdieusian language, is there is a significant relationship between their scholarly capital and their political activist capital?

Political science/government and law are the most represented disciplines in the sample: 27 percent in political science and government and 14 percent in law. The virtual absence of the physical and life sciences, the social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and the humanities is noteworthy, especially among the Trumpists. Four factors help explain this. First, these are all politically conservative professors and we know from previous research that conservatives tend not to teach in the social sciences and humanities (Gross, 2013; Ladd & Lipset, 1976; Shields & Dunn, 2016). Second, these are all public intellectuals and faculty in the natural sciences less frequently opine in the public sphere. Third, political science/government, law, and economics are disciplines that intersect with public policy. Finally, the kinds of critical orientation found in the social scientific disciplines, particularly sociology and anthropology, do not lend themselves to the alternative facts claims by Trump and his followers.

A more refined analysis of the Trumpists in political science, law, and history, shows intellectual orientations toward political theory (rather than political parties or voting patterns), constitutional law (rather than contract or corporate law), and early American history (rather than late nineteenth or twentieth centuries). These intellectual orientations within the disciplines show preferences for original intent of the founding Fathers, the Constitution, and fundamental values of the Republic. More detailed examination of the individual cases of the much larger number of Trumpists in history (13 percent versus 5 percent) reveals a focus on early American history and constitutional history rather than more recent or world history. It is as if the Trumpists cultivate a particular type of intellectual capital that fits with their anti-establishment political identity. An idealized version of the national origins permits this radical posture.

Similar intellectual orientations do not generally characterize the anti-Trump conservatives. While there clearly is some disciplinary overlap between the two groups, particularly in political science and law, a more refined analysis suggests there may be particular forms of scholarly capital that right-wing Trumpist academics may mobilize to justify their political views.

One surprise is the relatively large number (13 percent) of anti-Trump faculty in religion departments and theological faculties. Earlier research (Swartz, 2020) on areas of interest and teaching among 103 Trumpists revealed that 13 indicated special interest in the philosophy of religion, religious education, and particularly the abortion issue. The comparative research reported in this article, however, shows that those with a scholarly rooting in religion as an academic discipline are much more likely to oppose Trump. This shows a greater investment by the critics in the scholarly exploration of religion than among the Trumpists. Not religion per se but the scholarly approach to religion appears to differentiate these two groups.

Thus, in Bourdieusian field analytical terms, the Trumpists tend not to be located in the centers of the highest concentrations of academic capital and symbolic capital or at the lowest margins. They tend to locate in the upper-middle tier of American universities. This contrasts with some previous research reporting that political conservatives tend to be underrepresented at elite institutions (Gross, 2013).²⁴ By contrast, the anti-Trumpist critics are clearly situated closer to the most elite sectors in the American field of higher education. They hold positions in relatively more prestigious institutions. Their institutional locations convey more symbolic capital in the academic field. The anti-Trumpists also tend to be carriers of relatively more scholarly capital in terms of citations than the Trumpists. Though politically conservative, they do not cultivate anti-establishment intellectual capital.

External affiliations beyond the academic field

In the sociology of intellectuals there is a long tradition of identifying networks and institutions where intellectuals can exercise their public intellectual roles. One important measure of political activism by academics is their affiliation with and participation in organizations external to the university, such as civic, cultural, or political associations, professional scholarly bodies, think tanks, and government entities. What do the 182 conservative academics identify as their affiliations external to the university where they can express their political views to receptive audiences and in doing so try to shape public views and policies in conservative directions? It is important to not confine this analysis to just the field of higher education. How do the academic Trumpists and their conservative critics compare in their affiliations in the public intellectual roles beyond the university?

Inspection of the data led me to identify the following four types of external affiliations: cultural/political societies, such as the League of the South, academic professional associations, such as the American Political Science Association, think tanks, such as the Heritage Foundation, and government services/agencies, such as clerkships for Supreme Court justices. There can be considerable variation in these types of affiliations, the modes of intervention they offer, and the ones chosen by the individuals in our sample.²⁵ Some can be extensions of academic life, such as professional meetings of academic disciplines like the American Historical Association. Others can involve explicit formulation of political statements or policy recommendations, such as most think tanks like the ultra-libertarian Cato Institute. Further, the modes of intervention can vary as well. Some individuals can play consulting roles whereas others can take on administrative roles more directly concerned with the orientation and functioning of the organization.²⁶

Conservative think tanks

My analysis of think tanks draws inspiration from the seminal work of Medvetz (2012) who draws on a Bourdieusian field perspective to analyze think tanks. Medvetz (2012, pp. 23–46) conceptualizes think tanks as hybrid organizations that are “part academic research center, part technocratic agency, part advocacy group, part PR or lobbying firm.” They hold privileged positions within “an interstitial field” of power relations in which they produce public policy knowledge that reflects the cross-cutting and frequently opposing interests of scholarship, business, and media. In Bourdieusian terms, think tanks constitute a significant subfield within the field of power.²⁷ Think tanks produce newsletters, journals, reports, conferences, and forums for public officials and the general public. Documenting their importance in American political life, Medvetz (2012) writes: “Over the past half-century, think tanks have become fixtures of American politics, supplying advice to presidents and policymakers, expert testimony on Capitol Hill, and convenient facts and figures to journalists and media specialists.” They have come to “exert a tremendous amount of influence on the way citizens and lawmakers perceive the world.” Vying with the media and universities, think tanks have come to exert tremendous amounts of symbolic power by helping to shape how policy makers, political leaders, and journalists understand the social world. They are prime sites where academics can exercise public intellectual roles.

The development of conservative intellectual markets, such as think tanks, has provided a voice—for some employment—and a venue of political solidarity outside of the purview of liberal campus politics. They function as opportunity structures for political engagement by conservative professors beyond the liberal academy.²⁸ Medvetz (124–129) documents the tremendous growth and success of conservative think tanks beginning in the 1970s. Medvetz attributes their success to three key factors: their significant material support from big business, their relative freedom from state repression against left-oriented think tanks, and their relative freedom from university regulations. Freedom from identity politics and the left political culture of the universities proved attractive to conservative academics. Medvetz (128) writes that already by the 1970s and 1980s “conservative movement leaders had come to regard the university as a hostile territory.” This view is echoed and lamented by the conservative political scientist Shields (2018) at Claremont McKenna College. Outside conservative think tanks represent an attractive place for their right-wing political preferences beyond the reach of the university. Today, eight distinctly conservative think tanks number among the top 50 most influential in the country.

How do the Trumpists and their critics line up? There are significant differences between the two groups in terms of external affiliations beyond the academy. As my earlier article (Swartz, 2020) reported, 75 percent of the Trumpists had external ties to non-governmental organizations, all conservative think tanks. In this data set, the 102 Trumpists hold 254 affiliations across 135 think tanks. The 80 anti-Trumpists hold 242 affiliations across 193 think tanks. Thus, the anti-Trump group affiliates across a broader range of think tanks.²⁹ Moreover, the anti-Trumpists network to a greater extent than the Trumpists (3.1 connections per person to 2.5). It is as if the greater symbolic power in the academy translates into more activist capital in the field of power.

There are interesting contrasts in clusters of affiliations. The Trumpists tend to cluster around a few think tanks. There are 35 think tanks with 2 or more Trumpists, 19 with 4 or more, and 5 with 8 or more. The clustering tends to occur around ideologically oriented right-wing centers, such as the Claremont Institute (16), the Heritage Foundation (9), the Federalist Society (8), the Heartland Institute (8), the Independent institute (12), the League of the South (5), and the Abbeville Institute (4) (see Table 1) .³⁰

Table 1 Overlapping affiliations & differences

Among the anti-Trumpists, 33 think tanks have 2 or more affiliations, and only 5 think tanks have 4 or more individuals affiliated. Thus, the Trump critics cluster less in think tank affiliations.

There is some degree of overlap in affiliations with a few large nationally important conservative think tanks, such as the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, and the Witherspoon Institute, where there are similar numbers affiliated from each group (Table 1). These think tanks can be described as broadly conservative or libertarian as in the case of the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute. There are considerably more Trumpists affiliated with the Federalist Society (8), the Independent Institute (12), and the Heritage Foundation (9) that have more distinctly conservative orientations. Many in the Federalist Society supported Trump for the purpose of conservative appointments to the Supreme Court. These would fit into the satisficed partisan category proposed by Kidder and Binder (2020). That appeared to be the case of Calabresi (2020), a co-founder of the Federalist Society and who voted for Trump in 2016. He protested as unconstitutional the Robert Mueller investigation, he opposed Trump’s first impeachment, but then was "appalled by the president's later tweet seeking to postpone the 2020 November election.” Calabresi (2020) considered “this latest tweet… fascistic and is itself grounds for the president's immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate."

The Heritage Foundation is also notably more conservative politically in support of the Trump administration than the Hoover Institution, judging from a review of their respective web sites. Appreciably more (9 compared to 2) of the Trumpists are affiliated with the Heritage Foundation than of the non-Trumpists. Table 1 shows other important differences between the two groups. More striking, however, is the pattern of Trumpists affiliations with a large number of smaller right-wing think tanks, such as the League of the South (5) and the Abbeville Institute (4), and particularly the concentration around just one—the Claremont Institute (16). These types of external affiliations held by many Trumpists point up their narrower extreme right-wing political ideological orientation. Notable examples would be the League of the South and the Abbeville Institute that celebrate the Southern history of the old Confederacy and embrace white nationalism.³¹ By contrast, one finds a more diverse range of conservative thinking represented by the think tanks where the anti-Trumpists affiliate.³²

The Claremont Institute

One external affiliation stands out. The Claremont Institute (independent of Claremont McKenna college) attracts the largest number of Trumpists (16) but only 2 of the anti-Trumpists.³³ It is the most important network hub for the Trumpists. It publishes the Claremont Review of Books, sometimes considered the conservative counterpart to the New York Review of Books, and runs a web site that has featured some of the most virulent populist support for Trump and criticism of traditional Republican conservatism (see Field, 2021). See in particular the writings of Anton (2016, 2019). It is the center of West Coast Straussian conservatism under the leadership of Charles R. Kesler.³⁴ “If Trumpism had an intellectual home, it would be the Claremont Institute” writes Sean Illing (2021).

Figure 1 shows that the 16 Trumpists affiliated with the Claremont Institute create ties to 35 other think tanks and to 7 with two or more ties. Three of these think tanks rank among the 50 most influential in the United States. The graph points up the centrality of the Claremont Institute among the Trumpists. No other think tank, including the Heritage Foundation whose 9 Trumpists connect the Heritage to 25 other think tanks, comes close to the network centrality of the Claremont Institute. This suggests that the Trumpists participate in a fairly dense network of ties across several think tanks. This does not mean that every individual associated with each of these think tanks is a Trumpist. The Heritage Foundation would be a case in point. Though conservative, not all affiliates with the Heritage Foundation support Trump. But the graph does suggest a concentration of Trumpist network ties within a limited number of think tanks rather than being broadly distributed across the entire spectrum of the most influential think tanks in the United States. By contrast, there is no analogous network hub for the anti-Trumpists. They distribute across a much broader array of external affiliations ³⁵.

Fig. 1

Centrality of the Claremont Institute

Scholarly professional associations

Another important contrast displayed in Table 1 is the larger number of anti-Trumpists affiliating with diverse and explicitly scholarly associations, such as the American Political Science Association (8), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (4), the American Academy of Religion (5), or the American Historical Association (2 – not shown in Table 1). Only 1 Trumpist is affiliated with any of these scholarly organizations. A separate analysis (not shown in Table 1), found that across 10 nonpartisan scholarly and public policy oriented organizations, there are 33 affiliations among the anti-Trumpists but only 6 among the Trumpists.³⁶ By contrast, Table 1 shows that 7 of the Trumpists are associated with National Association of Scholars (NAS), which devotes much attention to attacking in the name of academic freedom progressive campus issues. None of the anti-Trumpists appears to belong to the NAS.

Three Trumpists also affiliate with the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, another external political and professional association devoted explicitly to attacking liberal campus culture. Two Trumpists list affiliations with College Republicans, one with Young America’s Foundation, and one with Turning Point USA, all conservative campus organizations focused directly on campus political culture. Although many of the anti-Trumpists share concerns about the general liberal orientation of campus culture (see, for example, Shields, 2018), they do not join organizations explicitly dedicated to attacking it, such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or the National Association of Scholars. Indeed, Shields (2018), who laments the decreasing number of conservative professors on American college campuses, explicitly criticizes the right-wing attack against the universities since this has the effect of discouraging conservative students from considering careers in the academy.

Finally, another interesting contrast can be seen in the global orientation held by many anti-Trumpists and its absence among the Trumpists. The anti-Trumpists clearly have a more global orientation than do the Trumpists. Two institutions that cultivate a global perspective are the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Bank. While 4 Trumpists are affiliated with the conservative Foreign Policy Research Institute, 5 of the anti-Trumpists belong to the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, which does not invite any of the Trumpists. Three anti-Trumpists are affiliated with the Aspen Institute that focuses on international affairs. And 2 anti-Trumpists are associated with the World Bank but none of the Trumpists are.

Thus, there are important network differences between the two groups in their intersections between the academic field and what Medvitz calls the interstitial field of think tanks politics. These network differences extend from the positions of symbolic capital and scholarly capital within the field of higher education. These differences in affiliation patterns suggest a network basis for the more nationalist, state-rights, anti-globalism positions among the Trumpists that corresponds to the right-wing populist wave that Trump was able to harness.

Governmental agency affiliations

The field of power includes not only the interstitial sphere of think tanks but also the state, which Bourdieu (2014) also theorizes as a field of agencies, commissions, and bureaucratic organizations that attempt to regulate relations between other power fields. Do the tentacles of academic conservatism extend beyond think tank lobbying into government agencies themselves? Indeed, they do. Sixty-six (36 percent) of the 182 individuals in the sample report affiliations with government agencies at the Federal level. They hold 162 ties across 125 different agencies of government. The distributions of the Trumpists and anti-Trumpists, however, are different. As in the case of think tanks and associations in the private sector, the anti-Trumpists affiliate across a greater range of government agencies (65 to 60). The Trumpists tend to concentrate in the US Commission on Civil Rights (11 to 2), which dates to the Reagan administration’s explicit policy of populating that agency with conservatives. By contrast, the anti-Trumpists are more likely than the Trumpists to have held positions with the Department of State (5 vs 2). Both groups report an equal number of affiliations (5 each) in the Department of Justice. Overlapping affiliations between the two groups are minimal. Individual anti-Trumpists affiliate with a greater number of government agencies (2.2 versus 1.6 per person) and hold a greater number of ties (2.9 versus 2.1 per person) than the Trumpists. The anti-Trumpists accounted for 11 clerkships that included 3 for the Supreme Court, 3 for a Court of Appeals, and 3 for a US Circuit Court. Just 4 of the Trumpists held 5 clerkships. This contrast reflects the greater scholarly orientation in legal matters of the anti-Trumpists. Of note, John Eastman, who drafted the widely debunked (by legal scholars) memo arguing that Vice-President Pence did not have to certify the 2020 presidential electoral results, clerked for the conservative Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas.

At the state level, the Trumpists are much more likely to play roles than the anti-Trump critics. Fifteen Trumpists worked with state government agencies, whereas only 4 anti-Trumpists did. Two, for example, played key roles in organizing California Proposition 209 and 4 others participated in other conservative initiatives in the state of California.³⁷ The state and local level roles also parallel Republican Party strategy of gaining control of state and local governments. Despite a little overlap, the two groups tend to navigate different sectors of the State: anti-Trumpists at the Federal level and Trumpists as the state level.

The government agency affiliation patterns suggest some issue orientations that likely differentiate the two groups and merit further investigation through content analysis of public statements made by these academics. The criticism by many Trumpists of the deep state may reflect their lesser involvement with federal government agencies. The importance of a global vision for the role of the United States in world affairs separates the Trump critics from the Trumpists. In foreign policy, the Trumpists tend to be isolationists whereas the conservative critics of Trumpism are not. The latter affiliate with those think tanks that stress the importance of a global role for the US to play whereas the Trumpists do not. Two of the anti-Trumpists worked with the National Security Council, for example. While some of the conservative critics have misgivings about critical race theory, none would go so far as to embrace the Old Confederacy under the pretext of states’ rights or the correlated white nationalism that a few Trumpists do, such as Donald Livingston and Clyde N. Wilson. Or consider the extreme libertarian position held by Walter E. Block of the J.A. Butt School of Business at Loyola University New Orleans. He (Block, 2007) argues that secession could be justified on the basis of the law of free association and that the war between the states “was not a ‘civil war,’ but rather a war of northern aggression.” None of the conservative critics of Trumpism does that. Finally, the relationship to right-wing populism is one of the most significant differences. The think tanks where the conservative critics affiliate tend not to be sources of right-wing populist ideology whereas that is more likely the case in the Trumpists affiliations. The Claremont Institute is one of the most prominent of Trumpists’ voices of populism. Many of the Trumpists’ think tank affiliations suggest the stance of true believers in Trumpism.

From field positions to enduring views & stances

How do the views relative to the Trump presidency differ between these two groups of conservative academics? One the objectives of Bourdieusian field analysis is to show connections between the field positions held by actors and their views and stances. My 2020 article (Swartz, 2020) identified the following principal reasons held by the Trumpists for their support of Trump: anti-Hillary sentiment, populist charisma, anti-establishment instrumentalism, abortion, nationalism, and campus culture. It made a field relational argument that reaction against liberal campus culture was a key motivating factor leading the academic Trumpists to support Trump. Moreover, the Trump candidacy and presidency fit into their anti-establishment views that included the universities as well as both political parties.

Review of the criticisms offered by the anti-Trumpist critics shows that it is without doubt the anti-establishment populism they find most objectionable. None would go so far as Marshal DeRosa, professor of political science at Florida Atlantic University, to see Trump as a welcomed wrecking ball against the political establishment. As DeRose put it: “I’m looking forward to voting for Trump, because I see him as a wrecking ball and I want to see those sons of bitches squeal in Washington, to be quite frank.” While many of the conservative critics share with the Trumpists objections to the liberal climate of the college campuses, few actively support organizations, like the National Association of Scholars or Turning Point USA, that specialize in attacking campus concerns, such as diversity, affirmative action, safe spaces, or identity politics. Shields and Dunn (2016) report that conservative tenured professors find universities to be a congenial place to work even if the prevailing political culture is liberal. Moreover, Shields (Green, 2016) points out that many conservative professors viewed Trump as an opportunist who rode the wave of populist discontent found in the Tea Party and other right-wing organizations. Harvey Mansfield, government professor at Harvard considers Trump to be a demagogue playing to populist grievances rather than being a true conservative. Shields and Dunn found little support for populist politics among the 153 conservative professors they interviewed. Even the few conservative critics who acknowledge the importance of populist sentiment rejected support for Trump. C.C. Pecknold, theology professor at Catholic University of America, for example, acknowledges that Trump tapped into the popular grievances that the political establishment has failed to address. Pecknold noted in 2019 that “Mr. Trump was elected by ordinary Americans, many struggling in the Midwest and the Rust Belt, who have been exhausted by socially liberal elitism and by neoliberal policies that served the 1 percent better than the 99 percent.” Yet, that did not lead him to support Trump. Moreover, Pecknold added that Trump was elected by ordinary Americans not by the “alt-right ethnonationalists” such as Paul Gottfried, Elizabethtown College professor, who is among the academic Trumpists.

But there is also another key issue that the Trumpists downplay but looms high in the objections by the critics; namely, Trump’s temperament. Steven Calabresi, law professor at Northwestern University, put it this way: “as important as the Supreme Court is, there are other things that are much more important, like defense and foreign policy.” Trump is “by temperament unable to do a good job at these. Trump is impulsive, totally lacking in self discipline, and petty and vindictive” (Parloff, 2016). Robert P. George, at Princeton University, who endorsed Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, "fiercely opposed" the candidacy of Donald Trump, saying that he is "a person of poor character." Perhaps the most damning of Trump’ personal character is Daniel Drezner, political science professor at Tufts University, whose book title tells it all: The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us about the Modern Presidency (2020). In that work, Drezner argues that Trump is not only ill-suited for the presidency, but he is also incapable of being a mature adult. In sharp contrast, the Trumpists are so anti-establishment that they are willing to overlook the character flaws as they see Trump taking a wrecking ball to the corrupt system. As Hayward (2017) senior resident scholar at the University of California Berkeley, put it: “In assessing Trump’s accomplishments, let’s not get too distracted by his unconventional conduct.” However, Trump’s character flaws loomed large in the minds of many of his conservative critics. Additionally, it is the anti-establishment and populist rhetoric that appear to be the most decisive rhetorical factors dividing the two groups.

How do the two groups compare in their public stances regarding the key crises that rocked the Trump administration: the coronavirus, the impeachments, the November 2020 election loss, and the January 6 mob assault on the US Capitol? Several journalistic accounts document the chaotic years of the Trump presidency, one unmatched by previous presidencies in recent memory (Baker & Glasser, 2022; Leonnig & Rucker, 2021; Woodward & Costa, 2021). Of significance is whether the academic Trumpists continued their support of Trump throughout his presidency and following his election loss to Joe Biden in November 2020. I reviewed the positions of 98 of the Trumpists on these issues.³⁸

Despite numerous and highly visible controversies surrounding the Trump White House (tweeting, lies, West Wing constant turmoil, high turnover of advisors, indictment of several appointees, two impeachments, etc.) virtually none of the 98 Trumpists rescinded their support since the 2016 election. This of course was true of the Republican Party leadership in general. A few lamented his personal behavior but only one (Calabresi (2020)) broke with Trump’s claim that his election loss in November 2020 was because of fraud.³⁹ Sixteen of the 98 signed an October 2020 support list for the November election. All the anti-Trumpists not surprisingly opposed Trump’s re-election in 2020.

As for the coronavirus, the academic Trumpists largely remained silent regarding the highly criticized actions (denial, incompetence, false information, etc.) by Trump and his administration. This is significant since these individuals played public intellectual roles in support of Trump. Hanson (2020) opined that “entrepreneurs and individuals will better save us” than “elite researchers.” Here he echoes the populist anti-expert trope expressed by many Trumpists, in this instance, against medical science. By contrast, none of the anti-Trumpists raised questions about the scientific basis or treatment of the coronavirus.

Of particular interest is how the Trumpists responded to the November 3, 2020, election loss to Joe Biden and the January 6, 2021 mob assault on the US Capitol. While there were many contentious issues during the Trump presidency, such as the handling of Covid 19, those two events seem particularly significant politically in the Trump era. Remarkably, the academic Trumpists support has been unwavering in spite of Trump’s loss in the November 3 election and even after the January 6 predominately white mob assault on the Capitol. Indeed, fourteen joined Trump in claiming that the election was stolen from him by voter fraud. In a December 19, 2021 Tweet, Peter Navarro said that it was ‘statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 election.” John Eastman spoke at Trump’s January 6 rally saying, “I know there was fraud.” Opining without evidence (in the American Thinker) Frank Tipler (2020) declared: “The evidence is overwhelming that Donald Trump won the honest election. Crooked Joe won the dishonest election. I’m not going to give a link for this.”⁴⁰ Darren Beattie and Thomas Lorenzo actually defended the Capitol assault as a legitimate expression of populist outrage against political elites. Angelo Codevilla believed that the riot was started by Antifa agitators. Twelve condemned the assault but defended Trump. “Trump was reckless…in calling the rally,” Charles Kesler of Claremont Graduate University admits, but insists that Trump did not incite the insurrection on the Capitol. In Kesler’s (2021) view, “there isn’t a word of ‘incitement of insurrection’ in the speech.”⁴¹ Almost half, however, remained silent on the internet – unusual for public intellectuals. In sharp contrast, none of the anti-Trumpists offered excuses for the assault on the Capitol. For Harvey Mansfield (2021), Trump played the role of a classic demagogue inciting “this event of mob rule” against the established government.

For conservatives, the Trump presidency did achieve some success despite the turbulent distractions. Most notably there were the tax cuts and conservative appointments to the courts, and particularly the conservative appointments of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Many conservatives applauded these achievements. Yet, none of the 80 critics of Trump switched sides. They remained steadfast in their opposition in spite of the gains on these traditional conservative political issues.

The contrasts in stances by the two groups suggests the importance of the documented institutional field patterns. Stances appear to follow with remarkable consistency the field positions relative to symbolic capital, scholarly capital, strategies of affiliation with conservative think tanks and academic professional associations, and service positions in government bodies. The evidence points to two distinct field trajectories and social networks that buttress the respective political outlooks of conservatism and right-wing populism.

Peter Berger (1966) remarks that for an individual to change religious orientation and practice likely also means that they change their friendship groups as well. By analogy, despite some gains on conservative policies, the critics did not see the gains as reasons to move away from their criticisms. And the turmoil did not dissuade the Trump academic supporters. Both the principled objectors and the true believers remained steadfast in their beliefs. This field analysis suggests that there may well be good sociological reasons undergirding personal assessments that help account for the persistent patterns of these two groups. This analysis points to underlying strategic networks of political identity that differentiate these two groups of conservative professors. Polarization was not just ideological but field based as well.

Discussion

A taken-for-granted view of the US political situation today is one of polarization, where increasingly homogeneous blocks of political forces are coalescing into unitary blocks that are fundamentally antagonistic. Thus, there are the red states versus blue states, Republicans versus Democrats, college educated versus those without post-secondary training, white versus racial minority, and etc. In each case, one hears claims that these opposing binaries are becoming more homogeneous and self-reinforcing. However, a critical social science will examine those claims with some skepticism, intellectually and empirically. This is not to deny these realities – there certainly is some empirical evidence supporting such binary oppositions. But it is also important to look for sources of diversity within political blocks.⁴² This is what our fielding framework brings to institutional analysis by privileging conflict as well as consensus. By looking for a variety of power resources (capitals), social networks and their connections to opportunity structures, field analysis offers a more differentiated view of social worlds than institutional theory. And better than traditional network analysis, our fielding framework situates the two networks within a hierarchy of scholarly investment strategies that connect to political opportunity structures beyond the academy.

This study shows there to be a field basis for division among conservative faculty. Trumpists and anti-Trumpists differ significantly by where they teach, their intellectual orientations, their scholarly productivity, where they network beyond the academy, and their stances on key issues surrounding the Trump presidency. Of course, this study does not analyze the entire population of academic conservatives, either those supportive of Trump or against him. But it does offer illustrative samples of those most visible in the public domain, those who function as public intellectuals as well as professors.⁴³

A field perspective shows that these individuals are not randomly distributed across the American field of higher education. This may appear obvious to the seasoned sociological eye, but Durkheim's (2005) classic argument in Suicide that social forces can infuse quite individual acts is worth repeating given the strong culture of individualism in American society. The 182 professors are based in just 112 schools out of more than 4000 institutions of higher education. They — especially the Trumpists — tend to be concentrated in just a few schools, such as Hillsdale College and the University of Dallas. While survey data on faculty politics show that conservative faculty tend to be concentrated in the less prestigious, religious, and military schools (Gross, 2013), this study finds that academic support for Trump is by no means confined to the margins of the American academic field, such as the less prestigious two-year schools. Many Trumpists obtained their highest degrees from prestigious institutions. Most hold professorships in mainstream research universities. Yet, this study also shows that the conservative critics of Trump tend to hold more prestigious positions in elite colleges and universities than do the Trumpists. The critics are carriers of more symbolic capital by virtue of their institutional prestige. They also are producers of more scholarly capital as measured by their publication records. And they are more likely to affiliate with scholarly and professional associations outside of their immediate university realm enhancing their professional social capital. The political activist capital of the anti-Trumpists finds expression across a broader range of institutions within the field of power than does that of the Trumpists. The think tank affiliations of the Trumpists concentrate in a limited number of very conservative or right-wing think tanks.

These professors are all successful academics who follow certain rules that life in the academy requires and share some common conservative values such as small government, little regulation, free markets, and individual liberties, as an institutional perspective would stress; they nonetheless pursue different strategies of academic capital investment and accumulation and social networking beyond the academy that our fielding perspective better highlights. This differing scholastic capital investment and social capital networking to types of conservative think tanks helps explain the more anti-institutional views of the Trumpists and the enduring stances of both groups despite the challenges brought by the Trump presidency (White House turmoil, impeachments, and COVID response for the Trumpists and tax cuts and conservative judicial appointments for the critics).

It is as if the collective orientation among the academic Trumpists is relatively greater than among the Trump critics. The Trumpists cluster more in a few schools, think tanks, professional associations, and types of government service. In opposition to the predominately liberal cultural climate of the universities, they appear to follow a compensatory strategy of networking with like-minded right-wing thinkers. Opposition to the dominant liberal culture of the academy can breed solidarity as a relational perspective can suggest. The Trumpists come closer than their conservative critics to the collective intellectual ideal, originally theorized by Bourdieu (1989) and elaborated by Sapiro (2009), by virtue of their signed lists in support of Trump and their concentration around a few right-wing think tanks. Yet, the conservative critics of Trumpism work in a similar liberal academic environment and show, despite their conservative preferences in a dominant liberal academic environment, that they are more willing to embrace the scholarly life rather than bring a wrecking ball to the institution. They are more invested in the well-being of the university.

This study illustrates the utility of not confining one’s attention to just one field. It points up the important intersection between a sector of the academic field and one in the field of power: between conservative professors who support or do not support Trump and their conservative think tank politics external to the university field. The study shows that these divisions within the academic field extend beyond the academy into the interstitial space of conservative think tanks in the field of power. The two groups of academics tend to participate in two relatively separate networks of affiliations with conservative think tanks outside of the universities. The Trumpists networks represent the voice of radical right populist sentiment whereas the anti-Trumpists participate more in established conservative think tanks. Conservative think tanks represent opportunity structures for maintaining political identities and practices for these conservatives outside of the purview of liberal campus politics. They function as opportunity structures for the academic Trumpists in two ways: they offer intellectual engagement outside of the Republican party that lacks the resources and will to cultivate an academic elite; they also offer a sphere of intellectual exchange outside the purview of liberal campus culture where they are a very dominated political identity. Because the academic Trumpists cluster around just a few right-wing think tanks, such as the Claremont Institute, they can maintain their political identities that are challenged both by the liberal campus culture and the shortcomings of the Trump presidency.

The Claremont Institute stands out as the central network hub for Trumpists and their radical populist rhetoric. It is the network hub for radical Trumpism. Recently Claremont extended its organizational reach by creating the Center for the American Way of Life in Washington DC. It has jumped on the bandwagon of Trumpist populism. While it may fashion itself as a conservative intellectual center providing guidance on natural rights, the Constitution, limited government, patriotism, and the family, evidence suggests that it has been more of a follower than a leader in championing Trump and Trumpism (Field, 2021, 2022; Fisher & Stanley-Becker, 2022). By contrast, the anti-Trumpists do not concentrate their conservative views or criticism of Trumpism through just a few institutions.

This field analysis adds support to the earlier finding by Kidder and Binder (2020) that Trumpism has been a divisive force among conservative white American undergraduates. This study shows Trumpism to be a divisive force among faculty as well. Trumpism pits principled rejecters (anti-Trumpists) against the true believers and satisficed partisans (Trumpists). Beyond Kidder and Binder, our analysis situates these ideal types in a field hierarchy of contrasting academic investment strategies and political opportunity structures that generate distinct networks of political identity and engagement.

Fielding the right-wing populist anti-establishment views and stances of the academic Trumpists permits contrasting them to those of their conservative critics as well as the dominant liberal campus culture. Fielding also means situating these opposing views and stances in terms of contrasting investment strategies in scholarly capital in the academy and engagement opportunities in think tanks beyond. Thus, views and positions are related in two parallel sets of oppositions.

Too often it is assumed in field analysis that by showing the connections between positions and stances that those stances have some significant effect within the intellectual world and beyond. But significant effects do always follow from stances. Collins (1998) shows in his monumental study of significant philosophers that by the law of small numbers and rival networks not all new ideas in intellectual fields take hold. Baert (2015) persuasively argues that whether intellectual stances have an effect beyond their immediate cultural worlds should be a research question rather than an assumption. It is still too early to offer a reasonably comprehensive assessment of what effects the academic Trumpists have had but here is what we see thus far.

The public policy impact has been limited. Despite Trump occupying the White House, very few of the academic Trumpists played key administrative roles in his administration. Unlike previous administrations, both Democratic and Republican, Trump recruited his administration from conservative think tanks and business leaders rather than from the elite universities (Kirkner, 2018). An exception, Peter Navarro, an economist with a Ph.D. from Harvard and formerly at the Paul Merage School of Business University of California-Irvine, was a White House economic advisor. Navarro was recruited because of his book Death by China (2011) that fitted Trump’s negative view of trade relations with China but was widely dismissed by fellow economists.⁴⁴ Indeed, one of the most visible public intellectuals inside the Trump administration for a short period was Steve Bannon and he came from the universe of corporate finance and right-wing advocacy groups rather than from the university.

In terms of intellectual impact, early indications suggest the effects have been limited to the small circles of like-minded individuals clustered around a few publications like the American Mind and conservative think tanks like the Claremont Institute. Anton's (2016) famed Flight 96 call to arms was a mobilizing statement for the ultra-right and those Republicans with misgivings about the Trump candidacy. But it appears to have recruited few adherents beyond these limited circles and has received no serious intellectual attention since. As the critic Lozada (2020) points out, Victor Davis Hanson's book, The Case for Trump (2019), spends more time attacking Trump's opponents than it does charting a new political direction for conservatives to follow. Indeed, his book has received limited review beyond the Trumpists faithful. And John Eastman’s legal claims challenging the House ratification of Electoral College votes of the 2020 election have been entirely discredited by reputable legal scholars.

The academic Trumpists did not invent Trumpism, nor have they been a guiding intellectual force for Trumpism. They have been followers and advocates. Their future will likely follow that of Trumpism. The consequences of the academic Trumpists thus far appear limited to maintaining identity and solidary as a dominated intellectual group in the broader field of American intellectual political thought. Short of a resurgence of right-wing populism under new leadership, the academic Trumpists are likely to remain confined to relatively small circles of fellow travelers.

Finally, this study also shows that these political divisions within the academy are enduring. The Trumpists did not abandon Trump even after his poor management of the coronavirus, his two impeachments, his election loss in November 2020, and the January 6 mob assault on the US Capitol by his supporters. None of the principled rejecters joined the Trump political bandwagon during his administration. None of the true believers changed their minds. Only a couple of the satisficed partisans altered their views. This may seem unsurprising given the widely acknowledged political polarization currently in the United States, but it also points to the advantages of relative institutional autonomy afforded by the academy from political parties, activist organizations, and think tanks. Many of the neoconservative critics of Trump as a candidate came around to support him during his presidency in large part because their political advocacy jobs required it. For example, The National Review published an Against Trump issue that featured essays from twenty-two prominent conservatives who all argued that Trump should not be the Republican nominee in 2016. At least half of those writers soon went public in support of Trump as president (Peters, 2019). This general pattern of switching allegiance did not occur among the academic critics of Trump. None of them switched support for Trump. This study shows this polarization of views between the two groups of conservative professors (Trumpists and anti-Trumpists) to be rooted in two distinct field trajectories and social networks that reinforce their respective political identities and action. Polarization there is indeed, but one that cuts through the ranks of conservative intellectual elites in the academy.