Bedtime for Democracy

 

(Apologies…I couldn’t come up with a better title, so I borrowed from The Dead Kennedys.)

The Supreme Court wrapped up its term last week, and it was predictably disheartening.  Former (for now) president Trump got his executive immunity.  Attempted election tampering and inciting insurrection are no barriers to the highest office.  The Sackler family is immune from being sued for Perdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis. The courts no longer have to defer to the expertise and judgment of administrative agencies.  The Biden administration has been blocked from its efforts to curb air pollution.

And so forth.  None of this is surprising, just more of the usual.  Long standing protections and safeguards are falling one by one and there seems to be little will to push back.  Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate seems to augur worse tidings to come.

Time has blunted the sense of shock surrounding J6.  It’s hard to reconjure the feelings of dread pervading the pandemic year as emboldened armed nutters tested the boundaries of duly constituted authorities and the law itself.  But it seems we are careening toward a repeat performance.  Donald Trump is a master of self-reinvention, and it is becoming evident we are on the threshold of a second Trump presidency with all the implications that carries.

There’s always been an underlying current of violence beneath the placid surface of American life which periodically erupts as sudden, startling paroxysms of carnage.  Nine short years ago some laughed and shrugged as long-shot candidate Trump bragged he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight and get away with it.  But January 6^th demonstrated that his words could move bad actors to commit bad acts. 

It’s tempting to reflexively paint Trump and his devotees as fascists, which isn’t always a subtle enterprise, but there are historical parallels.  An apt comparison is the assassination of Italian politician Giacomo Matteotti a century ago.  Matteotti had challenged the victory of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party in the 1924 parliamentary elections, charging intimidation and election fraud.  Days after making the accusation on the floor of parliament, Matteotti was kidnapped and murdered.  The antifascist opposition then miscalculated and abandoned its parliamentary forum and counted on a general strike to topple Mussolini’s government.  The strike failed and the withdrawal of the opposition only solidified Mussolini’s hold on power, moving Italy toward the totalitarian state it became. Mussolini eventually took credit for Matteotti’s death, framing it as a necessity and condoning the actions of the assassination squad. 

It is not a broad inferential leap to see something comparable in present-day America.  The Democrats won’t withdraw from electoral politics to be sure, but the Republicans use razor-thin majorities in Congress much more effectively than the Democrats.  If Trump wins and the Republicans regain the Senate in November, matters could deteriorate quickly.  With SCOTUS loosening its oversight of the executive and with Trump’s stated intention to replace civil service merit hires with handpicked loyalists, it won’t take a large majority in Congress to advance the MAGA vision.  The roadmap is already there in the Project 2025 policy document published by the Heritage Foundation.  The conservative long game that began with the Powell Memorandum in the 1970s is about to pay off magnificently.

But then there is a faint glimmer of hope amidst the dark tidings.  New York state just disbarred Rudy Giuliani.  For election denial.  Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

The news media of late presents an even more skewed view than usual of the state of our institutions of higher learning.

The current skirmish in the culture wars concerns the reaction of a handful of activist students and professors to the war in Gaza.  If all your news diet consists of Fox News, pro-Palestinian activism and incidents such as the occupation at Columbia and a scattering of other, mostly private universities are rampant throughout American higher ed.  If I am to believe the clickbait headlines in my newsfeed, all of the commie elitist professors on every single campus in the country are indoctrinating all of their students in a woke orthodoxy which, if unchecked by loyal Americans, will result in the destruction of Israel.

This reportage is a cynical ploy by right wing news outlets to further polarize the electorate ahead of November’s election by appealing to the prejudices of their audience.  Tapping into festering resentments across a vocal segment of the public is profitable.  Pigeonholing anyone with any schooling beyond twelfth grade as an out of touch elitist with a head filled with useless “knowledge” is a good media strategy.

Like Fox’s audience, my only experience with the protests is what I watch and read.  The campuses where I work have been quiet.  The topics of Israel, Gaza, and Hamas are largely unmentioned by my students and I have only touched upon them in passing as they are largely tangential to the subjects I teach.  This goes to show that the people most agitated about what is undeniably a humanitarian crisis are on the fringes while the people most affected get lost in the ideological dogma of others.

Let’s begin with the campus protestors.  Let’s stipulate that the events of October 7^th and beyond have been horrific for those affected on both sides.  Having said this, the rhetoric wielded by the pro-Palestinian activists is disturbingly pro-Hamas.  It seems they are blind to the implications of “From the river to the sea.”  Quick to accuse Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, they are explicitly advocating the genocide of Israeli Jews.  Their behavior towards their critics or even towards anyone outside the group is also couched in rhetorical excess, branding them as “Zionists” without regard to the person or the arguments posed.

Now on to the cultural warriors of the right.  Unwilling to brook any criticism of Israeli policies or actions, they brand any critics as “anti-semites” who seek an end to Israel.  They willfully ignore Netanyahu’s heavy-handed policies in the West Bank and his ill-fated abandonment of Gaza to Hamas rule.  There doesn’t seem to be any questioning of the intelligence failures which led to the October 7^th attacks.  (Considering that the attacks coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War—another intelligence failure—one would think Netanyahu, his advisors, and the Israeli intelligence establishment would have been more alert.)   The delusional worldview of evangelicals for whom Israel’s existence brings us one step closer to the End Times has taken on a cult-like status across the political right, further polarizing the discourse.

The overflow effect on domestic policy has been to put American higher education in the crosshairs even more so than usual.  The focus has been upon “elite” institutions but the larger targets are colleges and universities across the board.  Conservatives want to replace so-called political correctness, which is not nearly as prevalent as charged, with their own orthodoxy.  Calls for the resignation of Columbia’s president, coming on the heels of the resignation of Harvard’s president after her congressional testimony on campus activism, is calculated to create a chilling effect.  Calls for cutbacks of humanities and social science courses and their replacement with more vocational curricula are another front in the right-wing war on academia. The limited scope activism that has the right in a lather is merely a convenient opportunity for them to advance their anti-intellectual agenda.  For them, Israel is beside the point.  The war in Gaza is a convenient opportunity, nothing more.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

The World at Our Doorstep

Last week, I spent over an hour in a disheartening conversation with a student.  She said she had spent her Spring Break watching TikTok videos of the humanitarian crises in Gaza and Ukraine.  Despite her family’s efforts to cheer her up, she told me she felt helpless to do anything.  She had donated money to relief efforts but felt it wasn’t nearly enough.

The best I can do in these discussions is to offer anodynes.  As with the student’s contributions they aren’t nearly enough.  What strikes me is that these kind of conversations with students have become more common.  It’s true that subjective life experience for young people has become seemingly grim of late.  Casual exchanges with students suggest the pandemic may have been a tipping point.  Parents are more sheltering than those of my youth.  The pandemic was probably the first indication to today’s kids that the outside world can be a scary place. 

Throw in the shenanigans of the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, and it’s understandable that young people are more anxious than in the past.  The uncertainty surrounding what may happen in November and beyond isn’t helping.  The first week of classes, I had three students ask me if I thought there would be a civil war.  Notwithstanding the polarization of the last eight years, I’d never gotten a question like that.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise.  The media have posed that question with growing frequency for months.  I have private doubts about the stability of our social and political systems but don’t express them in class or in personal conversations.  It’s hard to be reassuring, though.  A couple of months ago, I was a panelist in a discussion concerning past polarization in America.  My part was to cover the runup to the Civil War (the first one).  While the theme was to point out that we have been polarized at various times, a recap of the 1850s and its mounting evils—Bleeding Kansas, Dred Scott, John Brown’s raid—personally reinforced my sense that we are once more on the precipice.

If I’m unsettled by what’s going on, I can only imagine what my young students are feeling.  Now that I’m mostly back in the live classroom it’s hard to distance myself or feel detachment from what the students are experiencing.  During the lockdowns my online students were a mix of traditional and “mature” students, with the inevitable subpopulation of MAGA trolls.  The trolls are mostly in the past, since the internet affords anonymity and a classroom does not. 

But of course we are all online, the old and the young.  Ridiculous conjectures like Pizzagate and QAnon are fading into the past, along with the eructs of Alex Jones.  But rest assured something just as bad, if not worse, will take their place.  And while the youngsters have migrated to Instagram and TikTok, Facebook and Truth Social are still the refuge of the delusional and unhinged.  What’s been simmering the last four years threatens to boil over as we get closer to Election Day.  And I suspect that underlies the anxiety some of my students are experiencing.

For better or worse, I guess we are in this together.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar