This is an opinion piece written by SSE President Lars Strannegård, published in Dagens Nyheter. It's been translated with the help of AI.

A truly insightful societal analysis identifies patterns through historical interpretation – patterns that are so universal they can help us understand what lies ahead.

In 1982, Marshall Berman wrote that change is at the core of every society. In market economies, it’s not only production and consumption that constantly shift, but also values, traditions, and norms. The title of Berman’s book, "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air," is taken from Karl Marx. The full quote continues: "All that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." Marx argued that everything can change—nothing is fixed or sacred—and not even the most respected parts of society are immune to the advance of market forces. In the end, he claimed, people are forced to realize that their positions, ideals, and relationships are shaped by economic forces.

What we are now witnessing in the U.S. aligns entirely with Marx’s analysis and prophecy. What we once believed to be stable and fundamental—like the democratic values the U.S. has claimed to protect around the world through military interventions—is now under direct attack on home soil. These are blatant assaults on the very foundations of democracy.

The measures being taken are undeniably fascist in nature. Election results have not been accepted. The judicial system is being destabilized through reprisals against individual lawyers. Trump openly states he will not accept just four more years in power. Journalists are threatened, discredited, and mocked. Freedom of speech is not respected. Words like “diversity” and “inclusion” are banned at institutions that receive public funding. The principle of keeping politics at arm’s length from the arts is gone –Trump has even installed himself as chairman of the board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Libraries are being ordered to purge books, and the Smithsonian museums have been told to rid themselves of “inappropriate ideologies.” The echoes of 1930s Nazi Germany and its campaign against so-called “degenerate art” are deafening.

Universities are under massive attack. They’re being explicitly portrayed as enemies of the desired social order. Funding is being withdrawn, research grants are being held back, and threats of aggressive taxation are rampant.

The Trump administration uses “wokeness” as the justification for these reprisals. Cultural institutions have allowed themselves to be politicized, they’ve failed to curb antisemitism, and they’ve replaced meritocratic principles with considerations of class, gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity. Freedom of expression has been suppressed, academic principles betrayed. The punishment is a chainsaw massacre of institutions. There’s no longer any space for complexity or careful distinctions. This is a full-on assault, and the goal is clear: the destruction of the “manic Marxist” institutions and their replacement with a digital, guaranteed-woke-free university.

The damage already done to universities is probably irreparable. Prestigious schools have imposed a recruitement freeze. Students at top programs in political science and international relations are graduating into total unemployment, as the state apparatus is dismantled. Almost a quarter of the world’s countries are on Trump’s blacklist. Students from these countries no longer dare travel home on breaks, and no new students can be recruited from them. Degrees that are expensive and under political siege are becoming less attractive to prospective students, further reducing university revenues.

Academic super stars like Timothy Snyder, Jason Stanley, and Marci Shore have already left Yale for Toronto. Science is international, and phones across Europe are ringing nonstop. In a survey of postdocs, 78 percent said their research is threatened or will be delayed. In Nature’s poll, 75 percent of researchers said they’re considering leaving the U.S. Nearly every department at Cambridge and Oxford is now fielding inquiries from American colleagues. Vrije Universiteit in Brussels is welcoming American academics who feel under threat, and Aix-Marseille University in France has allocated SEK 150 million for the same purpose. So far, Sweden has not launched any such program. While salaries here differ from those in the U.S., newly minted PhDs from a country with gutted academic freedom, slashed research funding, and hiring freezes now have their eyes on Sweden.

Sweden could take a strategic approach and attract talent we could never have reached just a few months ago. One could also argue that we have a moral obligation to resist these fascist winds from the U.S. and offer an academic haven.

But to do that credibly, we must firmly entrench academic freedom in Sweden. That means the right to independently choose research topics, methods, and publishing channels—free from political, ideological, or commercial interference. Today, this freedom isn’t strongly protected. We’ve already seen political decisions in the grey zone, such as abrupt cuts to development research funding and sudden changes in university boards. Individual researchers have faced threats, hate, and social exclusion. What we need now is a broad, cross-party commitment to safeguarding academic freedom. The government should urgently adopt the proposals from the Academies’ Committee for Human Rights.

The developments of the past months have dealt a fatal blow to Francis Fukuyama’s influential theory that liberal democracy—with its free markets and rule of law—would be the final form of societal organization.

Instead, it seems Marx was right: all that is solid melts into air, and all that is holy is profaned. One thing is certain—nothing lasts forever. As the foundations of the Western world are being torn down, we must resist the contagion. History may not repeat itself, but it often rhymes, as Mark Twain put it. That’s why now—right now—is the time to strengthen academic freedom.