In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Grant Mearsheimer his premises. Men are tribal first. Reason sits below socialization and inborn sentiment in setting what a man wants. Universalist, individualist talk is a shield, not a description. Run the Amy Wax affair through that frame and the academic-freedom story and the inclusion story both thin. Instead, we see a fight between two coalitions for the engine that forms the next elite.
Wax argues that all cultures are not equal and defends mid-century bourgeois culture, the Anglo-Protestant legal inheritance, and assimilation. Her enemies hear White supremacy. Her friends hear a brave defense of the West. The frame hears Wax defending a value infusion. She tells the society that its order rests on a code drilled into children, and that the code holds the state together. On Mearsheimer’s account she has this right. The childhood infusion does most of the work, more than reason, and a people that loses its infusion loses its cohesion.
Then she breaks her own insight. She treats the Anglo-Protestant matrix as an open system that any individual can enter by learning the script. That is the conservative-liberal hope folded inside her realism, assimilation as a merit on-ramp for the atomized newcomer. She names a real friction, the strain when millions arrive carrying other infusions, and then she prescribes a cure that assumes the tribe is a club a man joins by reading its handbook. Mearsheimer’s man does not join a tribe that way. The script he lives by went into him in childhood, before he could weigh it, and an adult does not swap one infusion for another the way he changes an opinion.
Wax’s case rests on culture, not blood. She says the bourgeois script can be taught and absorbed, which puts socialization above inborn sentiment, the order Mearsheimer sets. The hereditarian leans the other way, on genes.
Now the institution. Penn argued professional norms and equal learning opportunity. The Heterodox Academy and the free-speech camp answered with the Chicago Principles and the marketplace of ideas. The frame treats the marketplace as a story the engine tells. The elite university transmits a moral code to the class that will run things, generation after generation, and a managerial faction now holds the engine and runs a code built around diversity, equity, and inclusion. The sacred premise of that code is the equality of groups and the openness of the multicultural settlement. Wax attacks the sacred premise by name and in public.
The sanction follows from that function. Her offense, in the frame, is the breach of the sacred said out loud. A tribe punishes the spoken heresy harder than the private doubt, because the spoken heresy threatens the cohesion the code exists to hold.
Penn left her tenure standing. One year of suspension at half pay, the loss of her named chair and her summer pay in perpetuity, a public reprimand, and a standing order that she state at every appearance that she speaks for herself and not for the law school. The faction measured the cost. A tenured chair is an expensive target. Dismissal makes a martyr and hands the courts a clean claim. So the tribe drew the boundary, shamed the heretic, and contained her, all short of the rupture that firing brings. The disclaimer is the sharpest stroke and the most telling. It cuts her voice away from the tribe’s name. You may speak, it says, but never again in our name. Against a peripheral affiliate the tribe can expel outright. Against a tenured insider it calibrates. The cost of the target sets the maneuver.
Her legal strategy then walks into the frame. She files under Titles VI and VII and her tenure contract, appealing to colorblind, neutral principle. The court reframed the suit as breach of contract and set the speech claim aside. The district judge dismissed the case in August 2025. She stands now on appeal before the Third Circuit, with a separate contract suit filed in Pennsylvania state court in November 2025 waiting behind it. The realist reading says the neutral-rights vocabulary she reaches for belongs to the order the faction has already displaced, and that law serves the arrangement in power, so she pleads the old rules into a room that keeps new defaults.
If law were only an instrument of the dominant tribe, Wax would hold no case. She holds one. A contract claim has teeth a captured institution cannot wish away. Procedure binds even a faction that runs the engine. Belief and contract suits sometimes lose in the first round and win on appeal, as Forstater did in Britain. Pure realism overshoots here. The old liberal rules are not a fiction all the way down. They run weaker than Wax hopes and stronger than the frame allows, and the appeal is the place to watch which reading the law bears out.
Then the symmetry. Both sides reject the neutral university, and both dress their tribe in a universal creed. The new faction wields inclusion and harm reduction to purge dissent and enforce its code, and it tells itself it serves a borderless human equality. The traditionalist camp wields academic freedom and merit to hold ground for the old alignment, and it tells itself it serves universal reason and the open society. Each pairs a true tribal instinct with a false universal story.
The affair resolves where the Cofnas affair resolves. No neutral seminar room. No value-free university, because the university is always a site of socialization and never anything else. The only live question is which faction holds the engine and which code it pours into the students who pass through. Wax names the engine and defends one code for it. Her enemies hold the engine and defend another. The contest is great power competition over the right to form the next elite, and the rest, the principles and the statutes and the reprimands, is the vocabulary the two sides speak while they fight for the prize.
Wax defends the bourgeois infusion as the ground of a stable order, and then she asks colorblind law and open debate to rescue her, as though reasoned principle stood above the fight. The frame says reasoned principle ranks junior to the value infusion and serves whoever holds the engine. If she has it right that childhood socialization rules the man, then her appeal to neutral reason is the weakest card in her hand, and her strongest holding is the one her enemies hold too, a tribe that will fight for the engine. She asks the room to honor a creed the room no longer teaches its young.
