Throughout the first decade of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, sociologist Stuart Hall wrote furiously with one overriding aim: to convince the Left that her movement was not just a conservative parliamentary majority. Instead, Hall argued, it was a counterrevolution against social democracy itself, which, consequently, required total mobilization in opposition. The Left, he felt, saw Thatcher and Reagan as temporary traffic delays on the road of Raymond Williams’s “long revolution,” which would continue to bring democratization in culture and communication as well as politics and economics. In reality, Thatcherism had canceled it.

Thatcherism was redefining Britain’s entire way of life, and was winning by doing so, warned Hall in his essay “Gramsci and Us” in 1987. It was creating not just new economic rules, but a new (neoclassical) economic subject, a new (restored) family, a new (traditional) British identity, and a new (regressed) British culture. Dialing his demands of the Left up to 11, Hall insisted that Thatcher’s new Britain had to be countered on an epic scope. The Left could only combat Thatcherism by building “a new cultural order.” The choice, he wrote, was “between becoming historically irrelevant or beginning to sketch out an entirely new form of civilisation.”

Today, this same choice is faced by all—both the Left and liberals—opposed to the degenerated and gangsterized Thatcherism of Trump. Trumpism shreds the structures of liberal accommodation, which once maintained institutional overlaps between Clintonism and Reaganism, Obama and Bush. Moreover, Trump’s axis is destroying the administrative state, decapitating cultural institutions, and taking full ownership of the federal knowledge infrastructure. And Trump’s movement seeks the final subjugation of the knowledge institutions—the nation’s colleges and universities—and the knowledge classes. It is waging war on knowledge itself.

All of Trumpism’s methods are larded with illegality, when not simply unconstitutional. They regularly lose in the lower courts. These limited victories within the liberal constitutional framework might lull the center and the Left into trying to wait Trump out. This strategy will fail.

One reason waiting will fail is that Trump is starting to nullify court orders that he especially dislikes. Another is that the US Supreme Court has supported Trumpian executive power when the relevant cases reach them. A third is the nearly total absence of opposition among US corporate chief executives and heads of state to Trump replacing procedural frameworks with the methods of sultanistic oligarchy.

But a deeper concern is the power of Trumpism over US culture. Hall’s problem is still our problem, and his solution is still the one that can succeed: to build a new cultural order, a new civilization. To do so, academics must embrace an unusual new role: as knowledge workers, they must seize the means of knowledge production.

The building of new cultures happens all the time. The delirium of the attacks on liberal compromise practices like diversity in college admissions or NCAA rules on the inclusion of trans athletes reflect the attackers’ fear that Left-liberal values (they do not distinguish) have achieved an iron hegemony that must be destroyed. The elements of a new Left civilization are indeed present in abundance, and are operative.

But this raises the question of why Trumpism has been able to seize state power, and why he can slowly strangle universities.

Here I’ll mention just one major factor that doesn’t get enough attention: the failure of knowledge workers to enter US history as an independent Left political force, that is, in keeping with their general repudiation of anti-intellectual conservatism in America. The victory of a minority MAGA Right owes much to the disorganization and compromises within a professional-managerial class (PMC) that now, for the first time, is facing a mortal battle for its academic institutions.

Hall published most of the Hard Road essays in Marxism Today and New Socialist. A rough US analogue was South End Press in Boston and Z Magazine. Not long after Hall published “The Great Moving Right Show,” South End Press issued a collection called Between Labor and Capital (1979). Discussion revolved around Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s lead chapter, “The Professional-Managerial Class.”

The PMC consists “of salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production,” explain the Ehrenreichs, “and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” Put simply, professional work—that is, most white-collar jobs, including knowledge workers in elite professional service firms in corporate law, finance, and property development, as well as network administrators and building inspectors—serves capital. And this is also the case with the professoriat in a university sector, who are officially dedicated to job placement for students and technology transfer from scientific research to corporations. Even so, a large share of knowledge workers are alienated from this service to capital. And most try to carve out zones of autonomous agency.

No wonder, then, that Trumpism targets these zones of intellectual autonomy for obliteration. Trump and his people have made categorical attacks on every trace of conceptual divergence from current far-right orthodoxy. Trumpism doesn’t defund this or that diversity program; it seeks to eradicate everything—whether program, grant, or person—that mentions diversity, for any reason. Unacceptable nonconformity includes college courses on the history of slavery, public health policy, and developmental biology that does not support binary sex determination. Nonconformity consists, in other words, of ordinary advances in knowledge, developed in large part by PMC labor over the past century.

Universities have existed as partial exception to demands for complete intellectual loyalty from presidents, bosses, executives, financiers. Such internal freedom, university people have assumed—at least since the 1960s—was respected by the establishment, or at least accepted as necessary to the good working order of knowledge societies.

But Trumpism has canceled the knowledge society.  PMC autonomy has been under culture war attack for 40 years, but is now targeted in a final push for extinction.

We must work step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities.

Academics are not well prepared for this moment. This was unfortunately foretold by the Ehrenreich prophecy: the PMC was too subservient to capital and its representatives to build an independent power base, in the teeth of disapproval. Not a class but a contradictory class position, academics have a diverse membership that lacked a class interest in aligning with the noncollege working class, in spite of such an interest held by many individual members. They also failed to build organizational power for themselves; instead, they bonded with senior managers and their superiors through academic senates and status-based private bargains, in a stable PMC-capital overlap of interests.

Generally, we academics have carved out private agency within our universities, rather than seeking collective agency by running them. We are attracted to ideas of self-managed craft and nonmarket investigation, and we pursue these individually. Yet we regard them as impractical or marginal to public and collective life, best suited to exceptional people who have merited tenure and the like. In the academy, the strong forms of intellectual independence are less a necessary feature of democracy than an individual privilege, the result of personal merit rather than its collective cause.

Academic freedom remains an important value, but we mostly see it as constituted by procedural safeguards rather than by the self-directed work processes of individuals in groups. Academia generally operates as managerial humanism, and faculty are its submissive individualists.

Worst of all, we’ve treated knowledge as a privilege that depends on the university’s complex managerial structures. We could have been seeing knowledge as crucial to our own collective self-determination.

The current moment requires building Hall’s new cultural order: a “new civilisation” of greater ambition, justice, and appeal than that of the Thatcherite-Trumpian counterrevolution of the past fifty years. One prerequisite is the professoriat repudiating its PMC legacy of institutional passivity.

Instead, we must work step by step, in an organizational way, toward direct control of universities. If we do, we’ll be of real use to our knowledge allies—government scientists, public health advocates, local news journalists, community researchers, theater company directors, et al.—in building the self-governing knowledge systems we need to block authoritarian implosion and get a future we want.