In January of 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration, I gave my first public talk on the culture wars, research that was relatively new to me at that stage. In the talk, I discussed the politics of higher education in the 1990s through the lens of conservatives like Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, and Lynne Cheney. In the Q&A that followed, an audience member whom I will call Liberal Academic Superstar asked me some version of the following question: “In light of Obama’s historic victory, which ushers in a new era of liberalism, and in light of the financial meltdown, Read more