Donald J. Trump’s victory is consistent with a global trend in favor of authoritarian national populism over the perceived inefficiencies and corruptions of liberal democracy. In this respect, it is also a delayed response to the Great Recession of 2008, especially among the broad strata of voters who are disillusioned with traditional institutional politics. These voters have come to believe that their elected representatives, on both sides of the political divide, are relatively uninterested in the cultural and economic issues that matter most to them.

Trump’s breathtaking triumph highlights a crisis of political representation: an overwhelming lack of confidence in the capacity of professional politicians to resolve the most pressing political challenges of structural un- and underemployment, social inequality, unregulated immigration flows, and the looming specter of terrorist threats.

The crisis of our republic is also a crisis of the academy. By steadily abandoning the traditional goals of liberal education in favor of more pragmatic ends and an emphasis on the “bottom line,” we have communicated to our students a retrograde message: In today’s hypercompetitive economy, there is no point in trying to survey the whole or in squandering valuable time contemplating ethereal questions of meaning and purpose. Energies devoted to such pursuits will serve neither the ends of professional advancement nor enhance the level of compensation to which students feel they are entitled upon graduation. To nurture a culture of critical discourse is a luxury that higher education can ill-afford.

In her book, American Citizenship, the political philosopher Judith N. Shklar wrote that American politics has always consisted of a “quest for inclusion” — a process whereby “outgroups” have, with varying degrees of success, pressed their case for full and equal citizenship. However, for decades the white voters who represent Trump’s core constituency have witnessed these struggles — of women, African-Americans, the LBGT community, and so forth — and concluded that the successes of these groups have been achieved at their expense.Democrats should be engaged not only in soul-searching, but in old-fashioned self-flagellation. After all, Trump consolidated his victory by humiliating them in precisely those Rust Belt states that, traditionally, had been a Democratic Party stronghold. Since the 1990s, the party has neglected the working class by countenancing trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, that patently disadvantaged its members, who rewarded this act of betrayal by turning to the one candidate who seemed to lend an ear to their plight.

Tuesday’s abysmal outcome also signified a resounding defeat for the Clintonian strategy of abandoning “progressivism” — and, along with it, the American working class — in favor of a “triangulation” approach. The net result was that it often became difficult to distinguish Democratic aspirations from Republican policies and goals.

Viewed historically, liberal democracy has been an exceedingly unpopular and maligned form of political rule. At the outset of World War I, there existed a meager total of three democracies in Europe: France, Italy, and the Netherlands. Within a few years of the war’s conclusion, Woodrow Wilson’s hopes to make the world “safe for democracy” had more or less evaporated. Instead, in response to democracy’s perceived dysfunctions, dictatorship emerged to become the preferred form of political rule.

Today, with the rise of authoritarian populist governments in Europe and the United States, we find ourselves in a parallel situation — although the significant differences should also be kept in mind. During the interwar years, disparagement of the civic and procedural guarantees that are the lifeblood of political liberalism propelled many European nations in the direction of ethno-populist dictatorship. Today, it might be easy to overlook how readily the sadomasochistic cathexis between “leaders” and “masses” metastasized into bitter geopolitical rivalries and, ultimately, world war on a previously unimaginable scale.

Both then and now, one of authoritarian populism’s chief characteristics has been contempt for the methodical procedures of representative government and, instead, a preference for a charismatic leader who claims to directly embody the “will of the people” — as with Trump’s Republican convention declaration: “I will be your voice.”

As Mark Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University, pointed out in a recent op-ed in the Financial Times, today, the relevant precedent concerns not the threat of fascism, but instead the loss of “faith in parliamentary government, in its checks and balances and basic freedoms.” Thus during the 1920s and 1930s,

many blamed the power of the legislature for society’s woes and wanted to see more power in the hands of a single leader. Parliaments were written off as façades that rubber-stamped what unaccountable lobbies and elites demanded … [and] political parties moved to the extremes and spoke about one another as if they were fundamentally illegitimate. Judiciary and police became politicized. It is this crisis of institutions that provides the most striking parallel between Weimar and the US today.

In recent years, the examples of Hungary and Poland have demonstrated the ease with which the prerogatives of constitutionalism and rule of law can be annulled by autocratic demagogues in order to advance the agenda of ethno-populist chauvinism. In both cases, the result has been the replacement of civic democracy by ethnic democracy. Equality before the law has been sacrificed to the crude entitlements of blood and belonging. From the very outset of his campaign, Trump irresponsibly embraced such regressive political temptations and tropes, demonizing vulnerable outgroups — women, Hispanics, and Muslims — in order to incite emotional fervor among his political base. Tragically, his strategy paid off.

What responsibility do members of the academy bear for the shocking devolution of American politics that has just occurred? Quite a bit, I’d say.

For one, the university’s historical role in purveying “truth” has diminished qualitatively. That it has become obligatory to put this term in quotation marks is a good indication of how far we have fallen. Whereas the pursuit of truth may retain its value at those bastions of educational privilege where a liberal education has remained meaningful, elsewhere the ideals of humanistic study have been essentially left for dead. In this respect, we have met the enemy and he is “us.”

The triumph of identity politics has also played a deleterious role. Amid the vogue of multiculturalism, the humanities have exempted strong claims to group identity — so-called “subject positions” that are embraced, sometimes inflexibly, by ethnic and cultural groups — from scrutiny, thereby sparing them from the type of withering interrogations that, since the Renaissance, have defined the culture of critical discourse.

Abetting these trends, university presidents have readily jettisoned a commitment to higher cultural and intellectual goals. In their rush to demonstrate the payoff of a four-year degree, they have shamelessly and enthusiastically hopped on the “relevance” and “bottom line” bandwagons.Historically, one of the central missions of higher education, in addition to preparing students for the rigors of the job market, has been to nurture the values of active citizenship — the encouragement and cultivation of character traits that are epitomized by the idea of “autonomy.” Brusquely put, this means producing individuals who are capable of making thoughtful and mature political judgments as well as intelligent life decisions.

This approach was exemplified by the philosopher John Dewey’s conviction that the key to developing virtues conducive to democratic citizenship lay with the anti-authoritarian, dialogic approach of the Socratic method. Thus Dewey held that emancipatory pedagogy required the abandonment of mind-numbing, rote instruction in favor of honing the skills of critical thinking. Dewey was convinced that the experience of participatory learning was an apprenticeship for the practice of democratic citizenship. To the nation’s detriment, the academy has turned its back on Dewey’s insight.

Richard Wolin is a professor of history, political science, and comparative literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.