Tangled Up in Blue
Academia’s Role in the Trump Backlash
There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief. In All Along the Watchtower, Bob Dylan’s cryptic anthem, the wind howls with warnings of upheaval, a world turned upside down. I argued in my original piece that Donald Trump is that wind, a disruptive force shaking the foundations of political discourse and exposing the fault lines of our cultural psyche. Glenn Geher, in his response, Steal a Little and They Throw You in Jail, channels Dylan’s moral clarity to argue I’m romanticizing a conman, a felon whose divisiveness has fractured our society.
He has a point: Trump’s rap sheet (fraud convictions, election meddling allegations, etc.) ain’t exactly a protest song for the ages. But like Dylan’s tangled tales, the story’s deeper than one man’s flaws. The real howl comes from our own ivory towers, where we academics let radical leftists build a culture of fear, sowing the seeds for a backlash that’s as inevitable as a hard rain and as healthy as a voice crying in the wilderness.
The Times They Are A-Changin’
Picture a university in 2025, not the freewheelin’ folk clubs of Dylan’s Greenwich Village but a fortress of orthodoxy. The radical left, armed with the righteous zeal of Masters of War, hasn’t just joined the faculty; they’ve taken the wheel. Data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) shows 66% of students fear speaking freely on campus, silenced by the specter of “harmful” speech. A 2024 survey reported by Inside Higher Ed reveals 62% of faculty self-censor in their work, dodging professional backlash. This ain’t the academy of open roads and bold questions; it’s a Desolation Row where dissenters are exiled like lonesome sparrows.
How’d we get here? We let ideology trump inquiry (pun intended). Diversity statements, safe spaces, and bias response teams sound like Blowin’ in the Wind promises of justice, but too often they’re chains, binding thought to a narrow script. Hiring favors those who sing the “correct” tune, while curricula swap Socratic debate for dogmatic hymns. When a professor gets fired for a tweet, or a student is shunned for questioning the gospel of identity politics, the message is clear: toe the line or get tangled up in blue. We’ve built a house of cards, and the joker’s come to call.
A Simple Twist of Fate
Psychologically, this monoculture is a Highway 61 Revisited - a road of alienation and rebellion. Humans don’t take kindly to being muzzled; we’re wired for truth, or at least the fight to find it. When campuses punish free thought, they don’t just stifle speech, they breed resentment, the kind Dylan captured in Like a Rolling Stone. Trump, with his wild-hair bravado and middle-finger rhetoric, steps into this void not as a savior but as a mirror. Geher calls him a “dark triad” manipulator, and sure, there’s narcissism in that orange glow. But Trump’s power ain’t just snake oil; it’s the raw, unfiltered cry of folks who feel betrayed by elites who preach freedom while chaining their tongues.
Gallup polls show trust in higher education crashing from 57% in 2015 to 36% in 2023. That’s not Trump’s doing, it’s ours. We taught a generation to question authority, then branded their questions “problematic.” We promised The Times They Are A-Changin’, then handed them a script. Is it any wonder they rally to a man who, like Dylan at Newport ’65, plugs in and goes electric, damn the boos? Trump’s not the answer, but he’s the question we forced them to ask.
The Backlash: Shelter from the Storm
Geher warns that Trump’s disruption, his coarsening of discourse and his erosion of trust, is a wrecking ball. He’s absolutely right; the man’s no Forever Young idealist. But in Dylan’s world, destruction often clears the way for truth. This backlash, messy as a Subterranean Homesick Blues rant, is healthy because it exposes what we’ve buried: the hypocrisy of an academy that preaches diversity but demands conformity, the fragility of a cultural elite that forgot how to listen. It’s inevitable because suppressed voices don’t fade: they roar, like a hurricane or a rolling thunder revue.
This isn’t about excusing Trump’s sins, as Geher fears. His Dylan lyric (steal a little, go to jail; steal a lot, become king) stings because it’s true. But the bigger theft is ours: we’ve robbed students of the right to wrestle with ideas, to stumble and grow. And where’s the outrage for the “respectable” hypocrites, i.e., the politicians and academics who dodge accountability with slicker words? The backlash is our mirror, showing us a culture craving Shelter from the Storm of our own making.
So here we stand, at the gates of a new watchtower. We can keep stubbornly condemning Trump, painting his supporters as lost and deplorable souls, and pretending our hands are clean. Or we can heed Dylan’s call to get out of the road if we can’t lend a hand. The path forward is simple but hard: tear down the walls of fear in our universities. Hire for ideas, not ideology. Protect speech, especially when it rattles us. Teach students to clash, not conform. If we don’t, the next joker will come with a louder harmonica and a sharper tune.
The wind’s still howling, and the thief’s at the gate. We academics wrote this song - now it’s time to change the chords.
This post first appeared on Nate’s Substack.
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GLENN’S HERE
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You're exactly right, Nathaniel. As the Left continued to radicalize, many of us in academia had to keep our mouths shut for fear of being ostracized and canceled. I do NOT like what Trump is doing, but I can definitely see why some people see it as poetic justice.
"This is a military history class but it is called History of Conflict. We are going to discuss homicide and slaughter from the Pleistocene to the present day. Sex difference drives human violence so we will explore the disparate impacts of warfare on the two sexes as well as the role 'gender' plays in historical conflicts. There has never been a time of peace on earth. Here are slides showing evidence of cannibalism from around the world, all taking place in prehistoric times. Every single one of you sitting in this classroom is at the end of an unbroken chain of survivors reaching back to the Rift Valley in Africa. Survival cannibalism is just one reason why our ancestors ate the non-survivors -- yes, you and you and you and you and me, us, we, everyone here is the descendant of cannibals who survived in the deep past. There will be no trigger warnings in this class. This class ought to trigger you. By the time we have finished, your most precious, closely-held beliefs about peace and war and human nature will be completely overwhelmed and defeated by the archaeological, historical, and anthropological record. It will probably hurt to learn what I am teaching. Don't worry. That is merely the normal sensation of not being a psychopath."
I will never be able to deliver this lecture at an American university.