1# Reflections: “Counterrevolutionary Subordination” in Trump’s America

Welcome—Here is my first Reflections—Orwell, “As I Please”-style essay or article—on a contemporary theme of my choosing. I will be writing these once a fortnight. The written piece will come out first, followed by an audio recording (for those who prefer podcasts) a few days later.

Heads up: I won’t be an expert on the issues I write about. The point, however, is to try to stretch my thinking: to reflect on how what I’m reading in history, political theory, and literature bears on our present discontents. I will try to be careful, as I will try to be generous. If you’ll allow me some understanding in this inevitably tragic—perhaps even defeated—endeavour, I would be grateful.

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Lately, I’ve been obsessed with Conor Cruise O’Brien (1917–2008), the Irish statesman and political writer who authored one of my favourite biographies of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody (1992). O’Brien modelled his life on Burke—or so it seems in retrospect. Both men “kept a foot in both graves,” as O’Brien was known to say, remaining engaged in writing and in politics simultaneously.

The similarities between the two men don’t end there. Both had Irish Catholic roots but were reared in Protestant educational institutions. Both became internationalists, though of different kinds, and at different times. Burke spent his 18th-century career countering revolutionaries in the guise of the French Jacobins and the young officers of the East India Company. O’Brien spent the first half of his 20th century fighting to save the soul of the United Nations—in which he served first as an Irish delegate, and then as a special representative in the Congo on behalf of the then Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld—from European and American neo-colonialism. After that, O’Brien went into politics as an Irish Labour MP and assailed—in a manner that made him most unpopular—violent Republican nationalism.

Reviewing a book on Bobby Sands in The New York Review of Books, O’Brien branded the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as being “a sort of hereditary priesthood of blood.” This castigating aside is a classic from “The Cruiser,” a man of mischievous passion and cunning.

Conor Cruise O’Brien (1917-2008)

What mischief has O’Brien managed to start in my own mind? In a recent conversation with the Sterling Professor of English at Yale and literary critic, David Bromwich—talking to Bromwich is like talking to Burke himself, a rare privilege for a young scholar—he referred me to a talk O’Brien delivered as part of a 1967 symposium at the Columbia University Forum, a New York intellectual institution in its day. The talk was titled “The Counterrevolutionary Reflex,” a phrase O’Brien first used in the context of the United Nations’s efforts—again, as he saw them—to suppress African decolonial movements in the interest of courting American and European neo-imperial power.

An iteration of the original phrase later turned up, in a more thought-out form, in a book edited by Max Black, The Morality of Scholarship (1967), to which O’Brien contributed, alongside the Canadian scholar-critic Northrop Frye and the Oxford philosopher Stuart Hampshire. There, O’Brien more urgently warned against the practice of “Counterrevolutionary Subordination” in the United States.

“Counterrevolutionary Subordination” is a simple idea, but one worth remembering now. It refers to the moment when the government of a so-called liberal democracy adopts the tactics used to suppress critical and creative thought by the very revolutionaries it, as a so-called liberal democracy, has sworn to scorn. These forbidden modes of intellectual co-option—and the distrust of universities, curricula, and freedom of scholarship they are made to inspire—all amount (at their worst, or perhaps their dystopic best) to the subordination of thoughts that run contrary to the government’s agenda of the day, be it domestic or foreign.

Crucially, for O’Brien, this dark-art is carried out by otherwise free intellectuals in a society who subscribe to the project of governmental suppression and convenient forgetting. These intellectuals find themselves (or willingly enlist) as warriors—state-sponsored critics driving and guarding the government’s agenda in educational institutions and in public intellectual life.

O’Brien was articulating this notion of “Counterrevolutionary Subordination” in a 1960s Cold War context, in which he was critical of the American liberal-imperialist enterprise imposed upon Vietnam. He had just helped expose the CIA’s funding of Encounter magazine via the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The magazine was home to many New York intellectuals—from Frank Kermode (whom O’Brien respected), to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (whom O’Brien came to detest), to Gertrude Himmelfarb (who also admired Burke, but had a very different idea of the Irishman), and even V. S. Naipaul, who probably didn’t know what was really going down.

Encounter posed as a bastion of free and liberal thought, but was, in fact, implicated in the secret designs and contrivances of American governmental power—then bent on promoting anti-communism and an imperial agenda. It stood in contrast to New York magazines like Dissent, then led by the intellectual Irving Howe, which remained broadly anti-war and independent from U.S. Government interests.

O’Brien was never a Marxist himself, though he was often mistaken for one—largely because of his rare attention to the self-deceptions of so-called liberal democracies like the United States, particularly in promoting anti-communism abroad while adopting counterrevolutionary methods of suppression at home. “Counterrevolutionary Subordination,” as a reflex (the word matters, in the Aristotelian sense—as something of habit, something that alters our character in the practice of it), he thought, helped explain both the McCarthy trials of the 1950s and much of the New York intelligentsia’s support for the war in the 1960s.

My hunch is that “Counterrevolutionary Subordination” is just as relevant for helping us think about the Trump Administration’s current suppression of pro-Palestinian scholars and activists in the United States today—and even those merely critical of the Israeli regime’s bloodletting in Gaza. So, let’s test my initial intuition: What does O’Brien’s concept of “Counterrevolutionary Subordination” reveal in Trump’s latest crackdowns on higher education?

Any passing glance at the American news will tell you that the Trump Administration is currently waging a war—fervently—on America’s top universities. His pretext, by now, is well-worn. Trump, like most of the Western centre rightward, believes that DEI culture has been fostered in an educational system too focused on decolonisation in the context of Israel–Gaza, racial theory (imported from prophets like Ibram X. Kendi), and the promotion of radical gender theories that lead to the inflammation of trans politics and culture wars.

To make matters worse (for Trump), since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, American college campuses have become hotbeds of protest, where students—fed up with the general complicity, as they see it, of the West in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza—have pushed their universities to divest from any and all associations with weapons companies and to adopt a more critical posture toward the United States’s support of Israel’s “genocide” against the Palestinians. Genocide is the flashpoint word—that appears in every new headline and in every student activist’s speech.

I am not a postgraduate student at an American university, so I’m in no position to adjudicate the reality of these protests on college campuses (though I admittedly stand in deep solidarity with Gaza’s afflicted and detest Netanyahu’s Government and its penchant for murder). I defer to the work of more learned contemporaries who, I believe, address the matter intelligently and effectively—see David Bromwich’s “Reflections on the New Encampment Culture” and Amia Srinivasan’s piece in the London Review of Books on open letters supporting protesting students.

To get back on track, here’s a quick recap of Trump’s recent attacks on higher education. As of 10 April (when I’m writing): Columbia University—where the majority of last year’s pro-Palestinian protests took place—has had $400 million in funding revoked by the federal Government for the university’s apparent failure to protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus, without the legal requirement for due process being met. Antisemitism must be eradicated—as must all violent forms of prejudice—but it’s very hard to trust Trump’s original intentions here. As former Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute Max Eden has stated, Trump intended to make of “Columbia University” a “prize scalp”—forcing other Ivy League schools to fall in line.

Yet it seems Trump could not resist his own bloodlust. He now has a hunting pack—and wants more scalps. Harvard University is under review, as a task force evaluates its responses to antisemitism, with $8.7 billion in multiyear grants and $255 million in contracts with the university and its affiliates under examination. $1 billion has just been frozen for Cornell, and $790 million for Northwestern, both under scrutiny for failing to prevent antisemitism and for apparent racial discrimination inflamed by DEI policies. It’s not all about Palestine. Princeton has been attacked too on the antisemitism front and has also seen funding cuts to its climate programs—programs now accused of promoting “climate anxiety.” And Trump has suspended $175 million in federal grants to the University of Pennsylvania over its policies on trans athletes.

In shock-response, the universities are buckling—scrambling to project anti-antisemitic postures on campus in order to preserve whatever funding they can.

One of the questions we’ve all seemed hell-bent on asking since Trump’s re-ascension is: How revolutionary is this guy—and his Administration—really? Ask anyone for their pub-take on the recent circus in the States, and there’s a good chance they’ll say that when Trump was first elected in 2016, they thought he was a fraud who could be reined in and kept under control. But this time around, they say, he has an agenda—and the right (or wrong, depending on your view) people around him to execute it.

This, however, can’t help but feel like an overly simplistic take. Part of the challenge we face with Trump is that we’re constantly trying to make comprehensible an essentially incomprehensible person. We attempt to pin down his actions using old 20th-century categories—suddenly Trump’s not such a threat to the Constitution if he’s not a fascist in the 1930s or ’40s sense. (For what it’s worth, I think “fascist” is the wrong label. Of all the bad takes, the least inaccurate, it seems to me, is that Trump can best be understood as a corporatist—before being a fascist—given his alliance of state executive power with Big Tech billionaires like Elon Musk, who now control much of the information environment through platforms like X.)

But our obsession with anachronism makes us miss important things. More interesting to me is that Trump’s crackdowns on universities place him in a strange genealogy of revolutionary thought—one that may have something in common with the likes of Mao Tse-tung. Viktor Orbán in Hungary is the more obvious comparison to make these days, and it’s a worthy one. But I am not being facetious here. Mao, as Lenin before him, sought to seize the reins of the state—and in so doing, do away with society. The point was to extinguish the organic space for free discussion, to forestall even the temptation of voluntary resistance, to stifle natural and critical engagement with the regime in power. This clearing out of the critical field made it possible, later, to dissolve the old state and make way for the innovation of rule by party.

Trump’s crackdowns on Palestinian protestors show him at his illiberal best. They have more Mao in them than they do even Reagan. And God forgive those Republicans who still claim Trump as a conservative in the tradition of Edmund Burke—for whom the very idea of fabricating a new government, especially in coalition with revolutionary forces, was enough to fill him with disgust and horror.

So how might we think more intelligently about Trump’s revolutionary character, especially as it influences current debates around higher education?

Well, Mao said this of the revolutionary character:

Does not Marxism destroy the creative mood? Yes, it does. It definitely destroys creative moods that are feudal, petty-bourgeois, liberalistic, individualistic, nihilistic, art-for-art’s sake, aristocratic, decadent, or pessimistic—and every other creative mood that is alien to the masses of the people and to the proletariat.

Compare that to Trump’s typical pejoratives about higher education: woke, radical, lunatic, liberal, elite, the enemy within. When it comes to rhetoric, the similarities between Trump and Mao are as striking as they are revealing.

The Cult of Mao

I didn’t discover Mao’s quote myself, nor did I originally make the comparison between Maoist methods of revolutionary suppression and the United States’s own practices of scholarship suppression. That credit, of course, belongs to The Cruiser, who wrote:

It is not just a question of danger to scholarly integrity as a value in itself. It is a question of the impairment of a function which, since it determines our knowledge of our relation to so large a part of our environment—and since the nature of that relation may affect our survival—may, without exaggeration, be called a vital function.

What O’Brien is saying is that liberal scholarship, free thinking, critique, alternative perspectives—these are the bedrock of any democratic society. They are sustained by universities, and by the intellectuals who keep them alive: feeling, thinking, countervailing.

And yet, there are clear differences between O’Brien’s time and our own. As he also wrote:

Power in our time has more intelligence in its service, and allows that intelligence more discretion as to its methods, than ever before in history... I find it evocative of one of those sinister utopias—or dystopias... in this case of a society maimed through the systematic corruption of its intelligence, to the accompaniment of piped music.

Remember, O’Brien was writing in the 1960s—the age of spies, anti-communist paranoia, and covert influence. Power was, in his day, more intelligent and more discreet. Under Trump, however, power is wielded with such brute force that it seems generated by the very weight of its own enforcement. Trump loves power for its indiscretion—so long as it is his to wield.

What matters, rather, is O’Brien’s point about the “piped music”: the idea that U.S. universities—and especially the hard liberal left (which presaged this crisis through their own institutional cultural policing)—have run out of effective ways to resist Trump’s onslaught. They are simply forced to follow the tune—however crass, however crude it may be.

As I read O’Brien on “Counterrevolutionary Subordination,” I cannot help but think of the pro-Palestinian scholars currently being silenced in the United States.

Take the primary l’accusé: Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia postgraduate student detained in March without habeas corpus. “There must be a body!” goes the old principle of English common law. That used to hold—at least in theory—in the United States. Or it did, until Khalil—a leading Palestinian activist, a Green Card holder, married to an American woman, with a child on the way—was arrested by ICE or U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Without charge. Without even reasonable grounds for suspicion, nor the semblance of due process. Here was a full trashing of the protections customarily afforded to Green Card holders in the U.S. Why!? For allegedly presenting a foreign policy threat to the government by way of protest on campus.

Consider, too, Rümeysa Öztürk, a child psychology PhD student at Tufts. Before the eye of the State, simply a foreign student activist in a hijab—who apparently critiqued Israel’s war in a student newspaper article. Right, then, that she should be detained on March 25 by federal agents. It’s all very frightening, for what we are witnessing with such detainments is the effective deployment of what O’Brien feared: “Counterrevolutionary Subordination.” The exact number of student detainees remains unclear, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio has openly bragged about revoking even more student visas. According to The Guardian (8 April): “Unrelated to the protests, dozens if not hundreds more students have had visas revoked, often for minor or non-criminal offences.”

All this is enlivened by a little-known wartime provision in the Immigration and Nationality Act (1952) which Trump is now using to cast the presence of these pro-Palestinian students as an “invasion,” in which foreign nationals “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

The goal? To intimidate Palestinian students and their allies on American college campuses. To pressure them—and those sympathetic to their cause—into silence, or into leaving the country.

Prize scalps.

O’Brien was writing about “Counterrevolutionary Subordination” in the Cold War context of the 1960s, where deep suspicion of communist sympathisers in the U.S. education system gave rise to the McCarthyite paranoia and academic blacklists of his day. Today, that same paranoid energy has been re-directed. The new orthodoxy insists that anyone who opposes the Israeli Government’s actions in Palestine is an antisemite, a Hamas supporter.

Of course, that isn’t true. This is a typically corrupt and self-unknowing argument—one that I critique in a forthcoming book review of Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza to be published in Dissent. It dishonours the true inheritance of those Jews who suffered the Shoah, and who warned against its repetition—that victimhood invites violence. There is no evidence—none that I’m aware of—that Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk are antisemites.

Credit to BBC for image

I’ll anticipate a charge from conservative colleagues, here: that what differentiates the current revolutionary moment from the original context in which Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote of “Counterrevolutionary Subordination” is that, in our recent history, it has not only been right-wing regimes that have threatened the intellectual and political independence of universities. Under both Barack Obama—and more so under Joe Biden—Democratic administrations have allowed a kind of cultish regulation of American universities. They have permitted the promotion of a narrow orthodoxy of political thought, marshalled around critical terms like decolonisation, genocide, and gender theory.

This, in turn, has spun a vicious cycle. Trump—partly elected on the back of anti-elitist sentiment and the raw, common-manner reactions of ordinary Americans (across unforeseen lines of demography, including among Latinos and Black Americans)—has now returned to office.

I happen to agree with this critique, but only in part. I do believe that much of the Left has gone too far with cultural politics—often to the exclusion of class concerns, and to the detriment of coalition-building. I’ve spoken about this elsewhere, and recently explored the question of solidarity from what I believe is a more morally imaginative angle available to the Left, in Psyche.

But that is beside the point of my argument here. (For those interested, David Bromwich offers a kind of cultural and intellectual history of how higher education in the United States got to this state of de-definition—on both the progressive and conservative sides of politics—in Politics by Other Means (1992). As an alternative to the tragic choice we are still left with between censorious cultural politics and the reactionary countenance of a counterrevolutionary order, he preserves the memory of a liberal reformist tradition of scholarship for which I remain nostalgic.)

Still, let there be no doubt: Trump, the dementedly self-declaring free speech candidate, has done more than anyone to crack down on expression.

What happens to the morality of scholarship when we censor ourselves—when the very opportunity for critique, for the encounter with ideas contrary to our own, is repressed in order to placate the illiberal authority that partly-funds our work?

I’m not suggesting this choice is easy—especially for universities that rely heavily on government funding, or for young researchers critical of the Israeli Government’s murderous actions in Palestine. What we’re facing is the principle that freedom of speech and protest is being actively negated by authority. The forces of suppression are now being utilised to extinguish what are deemed revolutionary impulses within American social life—this, in the nation long promoted as the world’s leading light for liberal democracy.

It so clearly is not that anymore.

J. William Fulbright (1905-1995)

As a closing thought, one insight that leapt out to me this week came from a piece by Noam Chomsky, “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship,” published in a collection edited by O’Brien and William Dean Vanech—Power and Consciousness (1970). Chomsky cites Senator J. William Fulbright—yes, that Fulbright: internationalist and founder of the U.S. Government’s unique and prestigious exchange scholarship.

In July 1967, speaking before the Senate against the Vietnam War—a conflict he had come gradually to oppose—Fulbright condemned American universities for failing to act as “an effective counterweight to the military-industrial complex by strengthening their emphasis on the traditional values of our democracy.” Instead, universities had “joined the monolith, adding greatly to its power and influence.”

Rümeysa Öztürk—the Tufts PhD student detained by Immigration Authorities, deported to Louisiana, and by now held there for ten days to the point of being denied her asthma inhaler—is a Fulbright scholar.

Here is the line from Fulbright that ties O’Brien together with Khalil in their critiques of “Counterrevolutionary Subordination”:

“While young dissenters plead for the resurrection of the American promise, their elders continue to subvert it.”

Suddenly, state-sponsored “Counterrevolutionary Subordination” becomes subversion. It is not a defence of the American project—but its very betrayal. Fulbright continues:

“The surrender of independence, the neglect of teaching, and the distortion of scholarship,” he warns, “has the university not only failing to meet its responsibilities to its students; it is betraying a public trust.”

And so we are brought back to our own time—to universities in their gross failure to act as a proper counterweight to Trump’s illiberal and authoritarian force.

In a recent statement dictated from ICE detention in Louisiana, Khalil places himself in a long American civil rights genealogy, stretching from protests against the Vietnam War and apartheid South Africa to the present:

“The Trump administration is targeting me as part of a broader strategy to suppress dissent. Visa-holders, green-card carriers, and citizens alike will all be targeted for their political beliefs. In the weeks ahead, students, advocates, and elected officials must unite to defend the right to protest for Palestine. At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil liberties of all.”

I do not know Mahmoud Khalil, nor have I closely followed his activism. But the contradistinction he draws—between the moral promise of the university in a liberal democracy and the pressures placed upon it by anti-democratic forces—elegantly defines what has always been the scholar’s challenge.

At the very least, such a statement should force university leaders—regardless of their personal stance on Israel-Gaza—to seriously reconsider their responsibilities to all their students: in defending their civil liberties, either as Americans or as foreign students who have chosen to inherit, and seek to uphold, the American promise.

These are noble words that cannot, by fickle human nature, apply to every student activist equally. Still they contain a threat that should make any true reformer tremble. Even Rand Paul—a Republican with whom I rarely agree—has acknowledged this: Trump’s current attacks on free speech will come back to haunt the right when they least expect it.

As Conor Cruise O’Brien urged us to remember, universities—supposed bastions of liberal thought—begin to self-destruct with the practice of “Counterrevolutionary Subordination.” And when scholarship is deformed to serve state power—whether in foreign policy abroad or censorship at home—scholarship, as a vocation and as a moral responsibility, ceases to have meaning.

O’Brien lamented the future for young scholars deprived of that inheritance:

“Young scholars in the sensitive fields are likely to believe that if they write with excessive candor about certain realities of political and international life, doors will close to them: certain grants will be out of reach, participation in certain organised research programs denied, influential people alienated, the view propagated that the young man is unbalanced or unsound.”

This is what most depresses me about the tarnishing of the liberal promise that once animated academic life.

Thinking of friends in the United States: may they keep their sanities intact, as best and as long as they can.