For those lacking a healthy dose of patrician panic, James Chandler’s The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning will fill the void. Having spent his entire career sheltered inside the University of Chicago, Chandler delivers a slender pamphlet that reads like a prolonged, agonizing sigh from a faculty lounge under siege.
The author sets the scene with masterful melancholy. He recalls waking up in London on Wednesday, November 6th, 2024, brooding over Alexis de Tocqueville, only to discover that the American electorate had rudely disrupted his study-abroad syllabus by electing Donald Trump to a second term. Chandler, outraged, decides something must be done. Naturally, he starts typing.
The crux of Chandler’s complaint is that the populist right has launched a "new Know-Nothing" crusade to "Make America Know-Nothing Again." He takes a brief, pedantic stroll through the 1850s Nativist movement, trying desperately to paste that historical caricature onto Trump and Steve Bannon. Whatever one thinks of the former, the latter is an especially bizarre target given Bannon’s virtually nonexistent influence in Washington today.
Instead of engaging with the real issues facing universities and the broader education system, Chandler retreats into a bizarre, multi-chapter obsession with professional wrestling. In a book ostensibly defending the pinnacle of human intellect, he dedicates a massive portion of his narrative to analyzing the WWE, Vince McMahon, and the concept of "kayfabe"—the blurring of reality and performance. He gets bogged down, even recounting a 2001 WWE segment where Trish Stratus was forced to "crawl on all fours, bark like a dog, and then strip off her clothes." He then launches into a breakdown of John Cena’s choreographed plot twist to explain the administration's foreign policy. It’s an unnecessarily elaborate way of making a simple point.
Chandler thinks he’s clever by applying the logic of pro-wrestling nonsense to politics, seemingly unaware that mathematician Eric Weinstein unpacked this exact dynamic years ago—an omission that looks either like a blind spot or a convenient failure to give credit where it’s due.
Chandler pathologizes the entire conservative movement as a "spectacle without thought," a collective mass of "low information" dupes brainwashed by propaganda. He has a point, but the statement’s too sweeping. If the public is angry that their tax dollars fund institutions hostile to traditional values, Chandler concludes it must be because the Secretary of Education is a former wrestling executive who treats federal policy like a pre-scripted soap opera. It’s more complicated than that, and one suspects the author knows it.
Nowhere is Chandler’s ignorance more evident than when he touches on the campus chaos of recent years. He looks at the widespread encampments and the blockaded quads, and sees nothing but a beautiful expression of the liberal arts. For Chandler, the real villain isn’t the law-breaking mob shouting down speakers and threatening to cave in heads, but the campus police who finally cleared the tents "in the dark of night" so families could actually attend graduation.
Chandler fancies himself a master of irony, yet the central contradiction of his argument escapes him. He quotes Kenneth Stern, warning that, "When we're assaulting free speech, that's McCarthyism," oblivious to the fact that conservative students and traditional scholars have faced a soft totalitarianism on these campuses for decades. With speakers routinely deplatformed and scholars banished for dissenting views, conservative thought has been systematically starved of oxygen. Chandler laments that "independent sources of information and knowledge production... would have to be replaced or brought to heel," yet he remains defensive of an academic establishment that has already dealt that fate to his ideological opponents.
Ultimately, The Know-Nothing Campaign Against Higher Learning is a piece of self-unintentional satire. It illustrates why the American public has lost faith in its highest institutions. The condescension from beginning to end is as impressive as it is infuriating, and it makes the title far more fitting than the author ever intended.
The real "Know-Nothings" aren’t Americans demanding basic accountability, but rather the insular academic elites who stubbornly refuse to acknowledge reality. James Chandler proves the point.