Crime, Democracy, and Higher Education: An Interview with Conservative Commentator Helen Andrews

By: Elizabeth L’Arrivee

Furman University, February 27, 2024

 

This past February, the Tocqueville Center hosted an event exploring diverse facets of American conservatism. Panels featured public intellectuals David Brooks (The New York Times), Matthew Continetti (American Enterprise Institute), Helen Andrews (The American Conservative), and Matthew Martens (WilmerHale). We had a chance to sit down with Helen Andrews and ask her for her opinion, as a conservative commentator who writes on some of today’s most controversial topics, on matters relevant to conservatives today, especially those involved in higher education.

About Helen Andrews (from The American Conservative): Helen Andrews is a senior editor at The American Conservative, and the author of BOOMERS: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster (Sentinel, January 2021). She has worked at the Washington Examiner and National Review, and as a think tank researcher at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, Australia. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, Hedgehog Review, and many others. You can follow her on Twitter at @herandrews.

 

Tocqueville Center: 

What is your understanding of the relation between truth and power, particularly within the conservative tradition in America and its contemporary expression?

 

Helen Andrews: 

I think Matthew Martens started his remarks by mentioning the “DC Gulag,” as it’s called by people who are worried about the fate of the January 6th prisoners. And his point with that was that conservatives tend not to think about criminal justice because the people who are on the wrong end of it are, to be blunt, not our voters. So we have seen since January 6th what happens when people, who conservatives think of as their people, get caught up in this system. And it has been a glimpse of a world a lot of conservatives knew nothing about except from watching reruns of The Practice. And it doesn’t look great. So hopefully that raises some awareness. 

 

Looking at it from a political philosophy perspective, as you say, my number one concern with the state of law and order and criminal justice in the United States is how much of it has been removed from political judgment. That is, police departments have become so hemmed in by lawsuits, particularly civil rights lawsuits brought by the Justice Department, culminating in consent decrees with various police departments around the country, that they’re not able to do their jobs the way that they think is best or the way the elected officials think the job should be done.

 

It used to be that when law and order became a problem in a community, voters would say, hey, let’s elect somebody who’s going to do something about it. You get a tough-on-crime elected official, you can change policies, and then you get New York in the 90s under Giuliani. Now, the links in that chain have been broken because if any kind of tough-on-crime crackdown leads to any kind of disparate impact the Justice Department Civil Rights Division can come after you, and suddenly you’re on the hook. So I think the enforcement of criminal law should be a lot more democratic. I think elected officials should have a lot more flexibility in how they go about and set those policies. When I look at the landscape of criminal justice today, that’s the biggest problem that I see. 

 

Tocqueville Center: 

Conservatives have typically stereotyped liberals as the party of emotion, and themselves as the party of reason. Are conservatives today expressing more or different emotions than they did in the past? 

 

Helen Andrews:

Conservatives indeed like to think of themselves as on the facts, side of facts versus feelings, but there’s a flip side to that where the left thinks of themselves as the party based on facts and science.  The way I see this play out on a number of issues is that conservatives will look around and say, “gosh, there sure is a lot of shoplifting in San Francisco. There sure is a lot of crime and disorder in the city where I live. Things seem to be getting worse.” And the left will stick their hand up and say, “Actually, reported incidents of shoplifting in San Francisco have declined over the last five years. So really, you’re just trying to foment a moral panic based on anecdotal impressions.” Of course, in the case of shoplifting in California, the reason why the numbers have gone down is that nobody bothers to report it anymore because the police don’t prosecute it — because it has become so pervasive. People just walking into CVS and filling up a garbage bag and walking out. So a big problem of the last almost a century now, but definitely the last few decades, is that conservatives very often see a problem with their own two eyes, but then are told by the left that those are just anecdotes. You don’t have a study proving that that’s actually a problem, or that that problem you’ve identified is getting worse.

 

But the reason why that’s the case is that all of the institutions that produce facts and studies are completely controlled by the left. Any sociology PhD who is a grad student or professor hoping to get tenure knows it will be completely toxic to their career to become known for a paper that has conclusions that are not favorable to the left. Take for example Mark Regnerus. He did studies showing poorer outcomes for children of gay and lesbian couples. And now his name is mud in his entire professional community. He is genuinely devoted to the truth, so he goes through with it.

 

But everybody else looks at that and says, “I don’t want that to be me”.  George Borjas, the economist from Cuba who does a lot on the effects of immigration, writes in his memoir that he was told numerous times by leaders in his field, including people with Nobel Prizes, and everybody who gave him advice as he was an up and coming grad student and economist, don’t publish any studies that show negative economic effects from immigration, because that’s just going to give aid and comfort to nativists. You don’t want to become identified with the nativists, do you? They’re bad. And if people are willing to even say that out loud in so many words, just imagine all of the subtle cues that people just from a genuine sense of self-preservation pick up. People conclude that I know my career will go badly if I produce facts that are helpful to the conservative side.

 

That’s getting better in some ways because conservatives are coming up with their own institutions that can produce facts and studies and graphs that are, you know, legible to government officials in that way. But that’s been a real disadvantage. And I think it’s fair for a conservative layman, just a regular voter or even a conservative, you know, commentator like me, to see something in reality and say, I’m going to trust that even if it seems to be merely anecdotal, as opposed to these studies that have been produced by leftwing University departments because they are interested in shaping my reality and I don’t necessarily trust them to do so.

 

Tocqueville Center: 

It seems like what you’re describing over the last several decades is a rise in the emotion of fear among conservatives. Would you agree?

 

Helen Andrews: 

I hadn’t even really been thinking in those terms. But that’s obvious. There’s an arising fear of saying what you think to be actually real. I know people who are grad students or people who advise conservative grad students. I also know people who are trying to start more conservative institutions in higher education. And the consensus from all of these people who are involved in academia is that the atmosphere for conservatives has gotten decidedly worse.

 

Harvey Mansfield was, for decades, the conservative professor at Harvard. He just retired and everyone looked around and said, is there another Harvey Mansfield coming down the pike here at Harvard? And there’s not. And genuinely, even if there were conservatives on the faculty of your school, those conservative professors are not going to advise promising young undergraduates to pursue a career in academia if they know they’re going to be blackballed because they’re of their political persuasion.  So there might have been a time when there were a lot of untenured conservative would-be professors around for maybe a conservative university of the future to collect and use to staff their faculty. But there are fewer and fewer of them every year because there are fewer and fewer conservatives enrolling in these programs because they don’t want to gamble their entire professional future. They don’t want to be in a position where everybody in their department is going to be out to get them. 

 

Tocqueville Center: 

So if the current state of higher education, in your view, has gone astray, what ought to be the value of higher education, particularly a liberal arts education, or the university as an institution? 

 

Helen Andrews: 

One of the reasons why the share of the population that has a BA has been growing so rapidly and consistently since the 1970s is that the Democrats figured out that people who have been to college are more likely to vote Democrat. Colleges are machines fermenting Democratic voters. So they decided it was favorable to their electoral fortunes to have as many people go through higher education as possible, and in some ways that is a debased version of the function of education. Higher education for a couple of centuries served as the institution that made people question the received wisdom of established churches or aristocracies. If you have been liberally educated, you’re not a peasant anymore. You can think for yourself and you’re more likely to be lowercase ‘L’ liberal, as in, you favor more individual liberty and question the conservative institutions that shouldn’t have unquestioned power in your society.  I think that era is over because if the purpose of education is to equip a young person to question the assumptions on which their society rests, those assumptions now and those institutions are all liberal, including the university.

 

There are lots and lots of people who adopt the tenets of progressivism because they are prestigious, because they think adopting them will sort of make them more high class. What I want to see education do for young people is to make them question the powers that be today.  You should be able to question your professors and the liberal assumptions that colleges have been indoctrinating their students in for decades now. In other words, the measure of whether a person has been liberally educated has become whether they unquestioningly adopt the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. But actually, the real test of a liberal education should be whether you can question the premises of diversity, equity, and inclusion. And so your school is doing its job if it’s turning out students who don’t think adopting the latest letter in the LGBTQ plus rainbow is the height of intellectual open-mindedness. If there’s somebody who can look at the DEI apparatus and say, I don’t think that makes a lot of sense to me. The universities have been machines for creating liberals for a long time, but I think right now they should, if they’re really inculcating independent thought the way that they say they should be, include conservatives.     

 

Note: Interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views expressed are the respondent’s own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Tocqueville Center or Furman University.