“The Trump administration said Friday it was cutting off about $400 million in federal contracts and grants to Columbia University, saying the school has failed to protect Jewish students from antisemitism on campus.” (The Washington Post, Updated March 7, 2025 at 2:03 p.m. EST today at 2:03 p.m. EST).
‘Columbia’ is the American historical home of Teacher education, with long public engagement of its Teacher College (since 1898). Teachers College, Columbia University, is associated with philosopher and public intellectual, John Dewey, who served as president of the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association, and was a professor at Teachers College from 1904 until his retirement in 1930. Donald Trump and his cronies hate the 20th century history of the college, of New York intellectualism, and of everything that North-East United States Education represents. The reference to antisemitism is a smoke-screen to Trump administration’s hatred of higher education. Let’s face it. The administration is looking to getting rid of the Federal Education department, not due to any smoke-screen argument about government efficiency, but to allow regional and local prejudices to run rampant; over schemas of critical thinking, including opposing antisemitism and its wider circle of antiphoenicianism (ref. Phoenicia). It is pure ideological politics, in rhetoric and decision-making, masked by lies and propaganda. We saw it over and over again in 20th century nationalism.
In the spiral historiography, it is happening again. “The year 2016 saw a number of developments within international society, where right-wing populism gained considerable ground”, said Owen Worth (2017:19), “The victory for Donald Trump followed the success of Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines in a year that also saw Putin and Erdogan continue their authoritarian hold in Russia and Turkey respectively, …”
That the historical shift has meant destructive influences on educations under authoritarian government control, including Trump’s America (Ferguson 2019) is the historical big picture that should not be missed nor ignored. The bulk of the humanities literature agrees, particularly in socio-political anthropology and education (Shirazi 2017), that we are in a familiar pattern, when far right politics threatens civilising education. With the undereducation of a population, voter patterns reflect the very opposite of a voter’s categorial interest (Hull 2020). This is worked out as political rhetoric becoming pure propaganda.
There is from the propaganda, a description of the propaganda from a sociological model of the American Revivalist Tradition (ART; Buch 2025b); a critical counter- thesis, stating that the American history of evangelicalism had created the conditions for the cycling of the American far right, contrary to the weak scholarship (on this question) of moderate evangelicals, such as David Bebbington (I had privately offered an engagement with Bebbington to discuss this matter at the Australian EHA conference, but he declined). Trumpism was created from a synthesis of Trumpian opportunism and conversative evangelical beliefs that went to ‘the extreme’ from the influences of American neo-conservativism since the 1960s.
The Glided Age of Donald Trump (Buch 2025a) is a reference to an evangelicalism that most had believed was old-dated, and certainly believe that it is irrelevant to the 21st century. There are better and healthy versions of evangelicalism. The spiral of 1945-2020 parallels the same thinking of Progress and Popular Thinking in the United States & Australia of the 1919-1939 period (Buch 2020). During the Biden Administration the better thinking folks had thought the turn of spiral downturn had past. It had not.
The upward turn has hope in the rejection of political apologetics (Buch 2023) for comprehensive education. There are few points that need to be re-articulated in the many years of my socio-political critique (Buch 2024):
1. Academic leadership in education had, not only forgot the theories of schooling in era of critical theory (e.g. Habermas 1991a-b, 1992, 1997, 2010; Giroux 1981, 1983, 1985, 1991; etc.), from frameworks of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire, too many academic leaders do not know how they have got to the States of Affair in the present time.
2.The explanation for the spiraling and networking presentism comes in models of Randall Collins, who stated clearly the explanation, in his The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998).
3. Apologetics is entangled in the schema of the New Christian Right.
4. George Marsden is the best American historiographer for evangelical belief and American ideology. His The Twilight of the American Enlightenment provided an insight on how the 1950s Liberal Belief got into trouble with social conservatism, and provides a fair assessment in the decline of American liberalism from the perspective of Marsden’s traditional conservative beliefs.
5. A well-functioning democracy is dependent on truth itself. Trump’s success in undermining the press, undermine the availability and credibility of truth, threatens the foundations of American democracy. The nonsense of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance is rejected by all intelligent philosophers.
6. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance are not practicing the American national mythology as in its historical intentionality. The American state militias were never meant to become a permanent military force to defend state rights; least of all its violent rhetoric and its violent historical incidents.
7. It is difficult to understate the loss of memory and the inability to understand a comprehensive worldview, and it can only be understood in the decline of the American curriculum and the standard of education. The populist nonsense on Covid-19 and the presidency of Donald Trump brought together (as a reaction to), on one hand, common sense conservatives, and on the other hand, democratic rights radicals, into a much needed alliance. These are educated classes, and the United States has rejected the educated classes.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buch, Neville (2020). Progress and Popular Thinking in the United States & Australia 1945-2020, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, July 16, 2020.
Buch, Neville (2023). Why the Disciplines and No Apologetics? Part 1: The Collapse of Schaefferan Apologetics, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, June 7, 2023.
Buch, Neville (2024). It Is Not Good. This is Not Good: Do You Hope for Many Readers in Vain?, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, November 9, 2024.
Buch, Neville (2025a). The Glided Age of Donald Trump and Mass Movements, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, January 21, 2025.
Buch, Neville (2025b). Reclaiming Nothing without the deep historical analysis: ART and congregational memetic Christianity, Dr Neville Buch ABN: 86703686642, February 18, 2025.
Ferguson, M. (2019). Money, power, and education. The Phi Delta Kappan, 100(8), 72–73. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26677400
Hull, K. (2020). Lost and Found: Trump, Biden, and White Working-Class Voters. Atlantisch Perspectief, 44(5), 11–16. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48600591
Shirazi, R. (2017). How Much of This Is New? Thoughts on How We Got Here, Solidarity, and Research in the Current Moment. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 48(4), 354–361. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45176766
Worth, Owen. (2017). Globalisation and the ‘Far-right’ Turn in International Affairs. Irish Studies in International Affairs, 28, 19–28. https://doi.org/10.3318/isia.2017.28.8
Featured Image: William F. Buckley Jr. and Donald Trump.
Neville Buch
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