Anyone wondering what motivates the ferocity of the Trump administration’s attack on higher education and technological investigation in America might look at the numbers behind this past weekend’s triumph of the Trump-aligned presidential candidate in Poland.
Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist who narrowly defeated liberal the pro-European Rafał Trzaskowski, is no average conservative. The erstwhile boxer and football hooligan with alleged ties to organized crime is backed by the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023 with a Trumpian determination to mutate the country’s hard-earned democracy into authoritarianism. So he is backed by Trumpworld.
During its stint in government, PiS did all it could to neuter the independent judiciary, attack independent news media, consolidate political control over the civilian service and undermine civilian society. Nawrocki is now positioned to block the fixes being attempted by centrist Prime Minister Donald Tusk and engineer his replacement.
Why would anyone want an all-powerful, unchecked government, which could easy tip into fake democracy and dictatorship, as Russia has done? How is it sold? The answer usually lies, to a degree, in the culture wars – the effectively weaponized demonization of all criticism as “wokeness,” the opposition to gay marriage, and the appeals to white nationalism. But there is simply a secret sauce.
Because who tends to buy it? Exit polls in Poland showed the following: Among voters with higher education, Trzaskowski won by 63 to 37 per cent; Among those with only simple education, Nawrocki led by a crushing 52 to 16 per cent. Trzaskowski besides won backing from two-thirds of elder managers and most business owners. Nawrocki’s base was mostly rural, working-class, and poorly educated. These groups are easiest to pry distant from the institutions that defend them – and sustain liberal democracy, a.k.a. democracy.
In Poland as in many another places, including the United States, education was the single strongest predictor of support for democracy and regulation of law (and the European Union).
In Romania, voters 2 weeks ago rejected, just barely, the far-right demagogue George Simion, electing as president pro-western academic and Bucharest mayor Nicușor Dan. He won by a whisker – about the mirror image of what happened in Poland, on the strength of overwhelming support from urban and university-educated voters. Simion, a Putin admirer who had already begun bragging about his plans for political arrests, drew strength from agrarian areas and from those will lower levels of education.
In neighboring Hungary, the nationalist, pro-Putin Viktor Orban was easy reelected in 2022 by a base of voters with only primary or vocational education, while pro-democracy opposition parties dominated among graduates, peculiarly in cities like Budapest.
The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom followed the same pattern. Areas with higher concentrations of university graduates overwhelmingly supported remaining in the European Union, while less-educated regions favored leaving.
Anticipating this and pandering to his base, pro-Brexit minister Michael Gove famously declared, “People in this country have had adequate of experts” – the ones who were informing of an economical shock that has indeed materialized. The line clarified the strategy: Brexit was never just about sovereignty but about rejecting the institutions, cognition structures, and elite consensus that had guided Britain’s postwar alignment with Europe. The economical fallout, the simplification in labour mobility, and the trade disruptions were seen by many as worth it — due to the fact that the vote was framed as a rebellion against elite control.
This increasing divide between educated electorates and populist demagogues is not coincidental — it’s causal. And it helps explain president Trump’s increasingly aggressive run against universities and technological research in the United States. In just over 4 months in office, the Trump administration has:
- Slashed backing for university research, especially institutions promoting diversity.
- Proposed ideological screening for national grants.
- Called for abolishing the Department of Education.
- Worked to defund or defang technological institutions seen as “elitist.”
- Gleefully gone to war against Harvard, Columbia and another elite schools, attempting inter alia to sabotage their ability to accept abroad staff and students.
These moves aren’t just about “wokeness.” They reflect a deeper strategical goal: disempowering the institutions that make expertise. The administration is attempting to reengineer the function of universities in American society, prioritizing backing only for those that show ideological alignment with its agenda — effectively creating a loyalty filter for public investigation grants.
Administration officials are pushing to destruct tenure protections that shield academics from political retaliation. And incredibly, the administration has proposed tying all technological grant backing to political approval via a fresh oversight board, bypassing conventional peer review. This would chill basic research, especially on climate change, weapon violence, and reproductive wellness — topics where data frequently contradict Republican dogma.
In this way the US risks following the trajectory of autocratic states like Hungary, where academic independency has been gutted in the name of Orban’s political agenda – and to delight his base. Orban’s government forced the respected Central European University into exile, placed full academic institutions under the control of loyalist boards, and banned full disciplines like sex studies. His party, Fidesz, demonized intellectuals as out-of-touch “elites.” The consequence was a brain drain – an own goal and a boon for another countries.
While efforts to advance ideological diversity in higher education are defensible, this level of politicization is certain to deflate innovation and drive possible innovators out of and distant from the United States as well. But that’s a feature, not a bug: disempowering the institutions that make expertise and eliminating educators who care about them deeply, due to the fact that these besides tend to make voters that argue the demolition of liberal democracy.
It is beautiful simple, really: If you make cognition itself suspect, you open the way for regulation by instinct, impulse, and ego. So erstwhile experts say tariffs are destructive, Trump doubles down. erstwhile scientists urge public wellness measures, he mocks them. erstwhile pedants note that Trump capitalizes the incorrect words in his tweets, his supporters are delighted.
But even supporters of this madness may be dismayed erstwhile the resulting dictatorships come after them, and there are no “unelected judges” left to offer protection.
Educated elites, erstwhile functioning responsibly, make systems to defend liberty, individual rights, and reasoned governance. Modern populists search to teardrop them down by convincing voters that these are their enemies. erstwhile academic, scientific, and journalistic institutions are discredited, fact itself becomes negotiable, and the only remaining authority is popularity, manufactured through grievance and outrage.
So it bears repeating, time and again: democracy, as it has developed since the Enlightenment, is not simply the regulation of the majority. It is simply a strategy of guardrails — constitutional checks, independent courts, free media, and rule-bound institutions — frequently designed by the educated classes precisely in order to prevent the tyranny of the majority. From the US Constitution to the east European post-communist frameworks, democracy’s architects understood that freedom must be protected from mob rule.
Poland’s election is simply a warning. An educated citizenry remains the last bulwark against authoritarians. That is why Trump and others like him are so committed to their war on education, and to dismantling the very thought that cognition matters. We should be trying to broaden education to scope as many as possible – not spread ignorance so that leaders of bad religion can oppress us with impunity.
Dan Perry is the erstwhile Cairo-based mediate East editor and London-based Europe/Africa editor of the Associated Press, the erstwhile president of the abroad Press Association in Jerusalem, and the author of 2 books. Follow him at danperry.substack.com.
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