C. Wright Mills Warned Us: The End of Ideology Was Always a Trap
In 1960, renowned sociologist C. Wright Mills offered an incisive warning in his widely-read essay “Letter to the New Left.” When powerful actors declare that ideology has ended, Mills argued, they are not rising above politics; they are insulating prevailing power relations from critique by recasting them as “civil,” “neutral,” and—today—the supposed antidote to “wokeness.”
In other words, claims of post-ideology enforce political conformity. The assertion that we have moved beyond ideology is itself ideological—one that disguises power as reasonableness and suppresses structural critique in the name of balance (Mills, 1960).
While Mills' letter was not to Americans, but rather to address authoritarianism in Eastern bloc countries like Hungary and Poland, as well as Latin America (Menand, 2021), his warning nevertheless speaks directly to our current moment in higher education, where accusations of “ideological tribalism” and “political indoctrination” are routinely invoked to justify state intervention.
Texas’s SB 17 and SB 37, along with a growing wave of anti-DEI legislation nationwide, are framed as responses to an alleged "crisis" in the academy. Mills asks us to beware of crisis rhetoric in the academy.
We are told universities have been overtaken by ideology, that classrooms have become politicized, and that the remedy lies in restoring objectivity, neutrality, and balance. But as Mills insisted, facts severed from structure are not neutral. They are fragments that obscure power rather than illuminate it.
Hence, our responsibility as professors, scholars, researchers, and public intellectuals, among other things like conducting research, advising students, and publishing our work, is to connect the dots—to reveal patterns, name structures, and make power visible.
Mills argued that all public thinking of consequence is ideological because it necessarily involves judgments about institutions, authority, and human values. What he called the “end-of-ideology” posture was not the absence of politics but its concealment. It allowed criticism only in pieces, never in patterns; permitted facts but forbade their connection; tolerated dissent so long as it never rose to the level of structural analysis. This, Mills warned, is how democratic debate quietly dies.
In Mills’ terms, claims of crisis function as ideological instruments. They frame the university not as a site of inquiry and contestation, but as a problem to be managed, disciplined, and re-aligned with state priorities. Under this logic, teaching about race, gender, colonialism, or power is recast as partisan excess, while laws that restrict such teaching are presented as neutral safeguards of objectivity. When those in power declare an “end of ideology,” Mills showed, what they are really demanding is compliance with their own.
This rhetoric of reasonableness—measured in tone, managerial in posture, and deeply political in effect—isolates facts from structures and treats conflict as aberration rather than evidence. It forecloses the very questions universities exist to ask. The supposed crisis thus becomes a justification for intervention: curriculum oversight, faculty discipline, and the dismantling of DEI infrastructures under the banner of restoring balance.
SB 17 does not ban speech outright; it bans connection. SB 37 does not eliminate academic freedom; it conditions it. Together, they regulate how knowledge may be assembled, which histories may be contextualized, and whether patterns of inequality may be named as systemic rather than incidental. This is precisely the condition Mills warned against: a public sphere in which ideology is disavowed even as it is rigorously enforced.
Mills was especially clear about what happens when traditional democratic channels grow brittle or complicit. In such moments, the responsibility to name public issues does not disappear—it shifts to students, educators, writers, and cultural workers. Their refusal of apathy is not extremism; it is the lifeblood of democratic life. Universities are not endangered by ideological conflict; they are endangered by enforced quietism.
If there is a crisis in higher education today, it is not one of excessive ideology. It is a crisis of suppressed imagination. Mills’ lesson remains urgent: when power demands neutrality, we must ask whose values are being protected—and whose truths are being rendered unspeakable.
Reference
Menand, L. (2021, March 15). The making of the New Left: The movement inspired young people to believe that they could transform themselves—and America. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/22/the-making-of-the-new-left
Mills, C. W. (1960). Letter to the New Left. In Power, politics and people: The collected essays of C. Wright Mills (pp. 227–246). Oxford University Press.
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