Upstream of Truth: How Rules of Recognition Are Won

B.M. Scott

12 August 2025

Upstream of Truth: How Rules of Recognition Are Won

 There are moments I am entirely indifferent to the latest developments in the political sphere; at others, I am overcome by profound disgust and disappointment at what I perceive as a generation of unreflective Americans intent on regressing into the past. The ICE raids, alongside recent efforts to exert control over the sciences and humanities, resonate sharply with the exclusionary and repressive spirit of the 1920s—most notably the era of D.C. Stephenson, the Red Scare, and the Immigration Act of 1924—which institutionalized xenophobia and narrowed the horizons of American possibility. It was during this period that the American eugenics movement reached its apex, profoundly shaping public policy and cultural attitudes. Drawing from pseudoscientific claims regarding genetic superiority (and inferiority), eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin served as expert advisers to Congress, providing persuasive rationales for quota systems and draconian restrictions on immigrants from regions of Europe and Asia. The 1924 Immigration Act was explicitly crafted under eugenic guidance to stem the influx of those deemed "genetically inferior," and its quotas endured for decades. Additionally, eugenics endorsed sterilization laws and anti-miscegenation statutes, embedding racial hierarchies and control over reproduction into the legal framework. These policies were advanced not only by fringe extremists, but by respected scientific and medical authorities who shaped immigration, public health, and social welfare on the grounds of protecting the "American gene pool." The echoes of these policies serve as a stark reminder that administrative tools and cultural narratives—when wielded in service of exclusion or homogeneity—can rapidly convert contemporary fears into systems of repression. Without vigilance, the lessons of the past risk being re-enacted, not merely remembered.

Political control does not consist merely in commanding offices or disciplining personnel; it turns on configuring the epistemic conditions under which knowledge is produced, certified, and circulated. The recent Trump administration has made these upstream conditions a central arena of action. It has not confined itself to a single domain of inquiry. It has moved on two linked fronts: the empirical sciences, by recoding inconvenient findings (notably in climate and environmental science) as “politicized” and by reshaping federal advisory composition to elevate ideologically congenial voices; and the humanities, by steering museum, archival, and grant infrastructures toward “unifying” and “patriotic” narratives and by signaling which curricular lines are to be deemed improper or out of step. The strategic objective is not simply to dictate conclusions, but to tilt the procedures and interpretive frames that determine what can be licitly counted as a conclusion at all—including proposals that would sideline peer review in favor of government‑appointed boards. To dominate truth in practice is to govern both the means of acceptable evidence and its interpretive uptake. The Trump administration’s approach seeks leverage over both. On the production side, it targets research agendas and advisory mandates, narrows methodological gatekeeping by sidelining disfavored expertise, and uses agency guidance to reposition contested fields as partisan warfare. On the interpretive side, it leverages curricular debates, exhibit directives, grant criteria, and the public languages of legitimacy to privilege celebratory accounts of the nation and to marginalize critical or heterodox interpretations as “improper,” “indoctrinating,” or “divisive.” Where these levers align, scientific protocol and humanistic interpretation are pressured together; doctrine is wired into discovery, and sanctioned meanings are embedded in the criteria of sense-making. The result is an epistemic field in which resistant findings fail to register as probative and alternative interpretations fail to register as rational.

Alexis de Tocqueville argued, on the basis of his nineteenth‑century observations, that democratic societies could curtail intellectual pluralism without overt censorship, through the joint pressures of social sanction and administrative tutelage. In an “age of equality,” he wrote, citizens might distrust elites yet defer to “the great number,” elevating public opinion into a quasi‑sacred authority that narrowed the space of the thinkable and rendered dissent socially unintelligible—the tyranny of the majority over minds. He also described a tutelary “soft despotism” that multiplied minute rules, eligibility screens, and supervisory routines, keeping liberties on the books while enervating initiative and discouraging independent judgment. Because both pressures operate upstream of formal speech bans, pluralism can be degraded without juridical spectacle. The appropriate remedy, in Tocqueville’s view, was institutional - strengthening associational life and local self‑government so that citizens would develop the cooperative competencies and public‑speaking habits needed to resist orthodoxy and administrative quietism. The twentieth century showed the same grammar in sharper relief. Stalinism did not merely err about genetics; it replaced Mendelian biology with Lysenkoism because compliant science served a compliant agriculture and a compliant people. Method was bent to doctrine, and “truth” to party necessity. Nazi Gleichschaltung restructured archaeology, anthropology, medicine, and physics to fit racial mythology, purging discrepant scholars and redirecting research to ratify ideological priors. Maoist campaigns elevated “revolutionary science” while pathologizing “bourgeois” inquiry, erasing entire lines of investigation by stipulating both acceptable content and the frameworks by which content could be judged. In each case, regimes seized the standards of evidence and the canons of interpretation in concert; the Trump program adapts the same logic to an administrative, rather than coercive, register.

 The Holodomor provides a limited case of the administrative‑hermeneutic nexus at lethal scale, demonstrating the mechanism rather than asserting moral equivalence. Between 1932 and 1933, accelerated collectivization, coercive procurements, internal passport controls, and sealed borders transformed shortfalls into a man‑made famine in Soviet Ukraine. Punitive requisitions during scarcity, criminalization of gleaning, and prohibitions on flight magnified mortality; contemporaneous propaganda and information controls suppressed recognition, displaced culpability, and foreclosed mobilization. Movement was restricted, testimony delegitimated, and starvation colored as sabotage or necessity. Administration and narrative acted together to convert discretion into a weapon while occluding its operation. The structural lesson for the present is clear – viz., when access, information, and interpretive frames are jointly controlled, counter‑accounts struggle to be seen as credible. In a democratic framework, the same logic persists, softened into incremental, incentive‑based techniques that the Trump administration actively employs. Public controversy is directed toward the humanities—through exhibit guidance, grant redesign, and curricular labeling—while science is undermined by reframing evidentiary disputes as culture‑war conflicts and restructuring advisory bodies to weight loyal expertise. Cultural policy is steered through funding designs and eligibility requirements privileging “unifying” or “patriotic” framings, signaling which interpretations are safe and which are budgetarily hazardous. The method is the same - adjust procedures and frames so that disfavored truths are deflected before they appear as credible in public.

Michel Foucault’s concept of a “regime of veridiction” describes the move from policing individual propositions to policing the rules under which propositions can count as true; the Trump administration’s focus on advisory composition, grant architecture, and exhibit criteria operates exactly there. Quine’s demolition of the analytic–synthetic distinction demonstrates the leverage observation is theory‑laden; change the dominant schema and you change what can register as a fact. Control the schema, and the argument is effectively won before the evidence is gathered - panels “see” one thing, curators another, and audiences inherit a world in which rival interpretations appear irrational. This perspective collapses the false opposition between “objective” science and “subjective” humanities—the Trump approach targets them together because they are jointly constitutive of public reason. Science provides protocols for testing claims against the world; the humanities provide the ethical, historical, and cultural repertoires through which those claims are situated and contested. Tilt the protocols with viewpoint‑contingent panels while tilting interpretive institutions with viewpoint‑contingent grants and exhibit rules, and the space where fact and value meet contracts; decisions default to habit, sentiment, or brute power. In Tocqueville’s framework, the counterweights are strong civic associations and local self‑rule, which cultivate the dispositions required to keep testing and interpretation mutually corrective.

The evaporation of a “middle road” under this program follows from structure, not personality. Equality flattens ranks but heightens sensitivity to majority judgment, rewarding alignment and taxing solitary dissent. Administrative tutelage makes compliance the path of least resistance. Media and party systems sort identities into oppositional blocks that punish ambiguity and prize message discipline. Under such conditions—and especially when funding and accreditation are tied to narrative congruence—moderation is not a safe harbor but an exposed position: cognitively dissonant, reputationally costly, and materially risky. What disappears is not mere compromise but the public stage on which rival reasons can be presented and tested. Dystopian fiction, from Orwell to Atwood, exaggerate these dynamics to reveal their end state - archives narrowed, exhibits repointed, and research restricted to a ruling myth. In such conditions, not only are certain claims suppressed, but the very capacities to generate or contest claims are eroded. Binary categories harden into the sole grammar of public life; plural thought becomes literally unthinkable. That is the aim of epistemic capture by administration – viz., institutions remain open while their rules of recognition are repointed so that ideology need not argue—it can pass as nature. 

Invitation for Reflection

The foregoing analysis is not intended to supply a conclusive program, but to clarify the structural levers by which rules of recognition are altered and the public stage narrowed. If, as argued, epistemic capture operates upstream of particular disputes, then the task before citizens is not merely to defend preferred conclusions, but to preserve the conditions under which rival conclusions may be generated, tested, and heard. The episodes recalled here are not for facile comparison, but to make visible recurrent grammars of administrative and interpretive control, in forms both coercive and quiet. It is in this spirit that I would leave the reader with several lines of inquiry to engage:

- In your own sphere of work or association, how are the criteria of admissible evidence and permissible interpretation set — and by whom?

- Where do you detect non-coercive pressures that render dissent reputationally costly or institutionally precarious?

- By what means might the sciences and the humanities be jointly defended, so that each continues to correct and enlarge the other’s reach?

- Does the “middle road” still exist as a defensible position, or has it in practice become an exposed and untenable stance?

- What present-day forms of civic association could cultivate the habits Tocqueville commended — habits capable of resisting both administrative tutelage and the quiet despotism of narrowed opinion?

The answers to these will vary with circumstance. However, their common value lies in refusing to yield to the undisturbed normalization of altered rules, and in keeping such questions themselves within the realm of what may be intelligibly requested.

Further Reading

Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. Doubleday, 2017.

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Anchor Books, 1985.

Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A.M. Sheridan Smith, Pantheon Books, 1972.

Joravsky, David. The Lysenko Affair. Harvard UP, 1970.

Lombardo, Paul A. A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era.

Indiana University Press, 2011.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harvill Secker, 1949.

Post, Robert C. Democracy, Expertise, and Academic Freedom: A First Amendment Jurisprudence for the Modern State.

Yale UP, 2012.

Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis. Harvard UP, 1988.

Quine, W.V.O. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” The Philosophical Review, vol. 60, no. 1, 1951, pp. 20–43.

Schrecker, Ellen. Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Princeton UP, 1998.

Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Basic Books, 2010. 

Tulis, Jeffrey K., and Nicole Mellow. Legacies of Losing in American Politics. University of

Chicago Press, 2018.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Library of America, 2004.