Since 2008, Democrats have replaced much of their previous strategic defensiveness, going on offense in the culture war. Under Trump, Republican cultural appeals shifted their emphasis from religious-based moralizing to ethnonationalist and antifeminist resentment. A thermostatic backlash to Trump’s conservative policies further advanced popular liberalizing social trends during his presidency. But each leftward advance brings counterattacks. Democratic goals often require complicated national direction and implementation, which can be effectively demonized. Social activism on the left increasingly operates within prominent social institutions, reducing demand for the construction of explicitly liberal-aligned alternative institutions while heightening institutional skepticism on the right. These dynamics have reached the topic of democracy itself, with academics arguing that they must highlight risks raised by the American right and Republicans seeing scholars moving toward the rhetoric of Democratic politicians.

Much of the current scholarship on Sufism has glossed the phenomenon as otherworldly mysticism, and its spread through the Arab Ottoman lands in the post formative period as having contributed to intellectual decline or extreme scholasticism. The evidence from seventeenth-century Morocco, however, speaks to Sufism providing a productive institutional and social force for the study of the natural sciences in the Early Modern period.