Aftermath

 There is little to say.  We are truly fucked.  Welcome back to the Trumpocalypse.

One of Us

This week’s Republican National Convention has so far yielded few surprises.  Donald Trump secured his third successive presidential nomination.  Trump’s naming of U.S. Senator J. D. Vance as his running mate did not raise eyebrows either since the freshman senator was already shortlisted.

Vance’s comparatively brief public career has reflected an interesting but also unsurprising evolution.  His 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, painted a bleak picture of the lives of Appalachian transplants in Ohio.  Vance’s personal biography is presented as a paradox: A career in venture capital preceded by Yale Law School by way of Ohio State University and the Marine Corps.  The book made him a media darling, an overnight pundit on the state of poor whites.  A voice from the people who made good, one of us as it were.  Vance was a Never-Trumper that election year, at one point tempting Godwin by speculating Trump might be a latter-day Hitler.

His election to the Senate in 2022 showed that Vance, like the Republican establishment, had “evolved” on the topic of Trump.  Trump endorsed Vance, who defeated his opponent, Tim Ryan, by a healthy but unimpressive margin.  Once in office, he fell into line.  It paid off.

Vance’s positions have been variously described as national conservative to populist.  He’s certainly a social conservative; the Heritage Foundation favored Vance as a candidate.  His stated policy positions align quite well with its Project 2025 plan.  While never liberal in his beliefs, he appeared a run of the mill conservative before he actually went into politics.  To repeat, he fell into line.

Thus Vance’s views are alarming should he ever be in a position to act on them.  It’s quite possible; the 39-year-old Vance is nearly half Trump’s age.  Even if Trump completes his term, some of the editorial commentary has already anointed Vance as the heir to MAGA and he’s in scoring position for the 2028 nomination.

This week’s RNC solidifies a years-long trend.  The Republican Party is wholly the Party of Trump.  That’s the choice.  With Biden’s obvious lapses and stubborn refusal to step aside as candidate, we have seen the future after November 5^th. 

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

Something Like This

Something like this was bound to happen.  Yesterday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump is yet another manifesting of the roiling stream of violence churning beneath the surface of American life. 

It could have been worse.  But for the quick reaction to shots fired from outside the crowd by the Secret Service the incident would have joined a sordid history of political murder in this country.  It is bad enough an innocent bystander at the Pennsylvania rally died and two others were injured.  It is a sobering thought to know that even with extensive security precautions a would-be killer can come within millimeters of taking down a president.

Naturally the intended target immediately grasped the optics of his near-miss.  Blood trickling from his injured ear, Trump greeted the crowd with an upraised fist as his bodyguards hustled him away.  Predictably, he attributed his deliverance to God.  Millions of others undoubtedly believe this.  The attempt also serves to further the shared sense of grievance and need for a martyr among the base.

As time goes on the thread of our political narrative becomes snagged.  Presidential elections used to be routine affairs; they came, they went.  There were occasional complications, as in the case of the 2000 election, but for almost a half century most passed without incident.  Perhaps we should have seen it coming with the Tea Party movement, but the surprise outcome of 2016 remains just that.  More accurately, it was an all-around surprise at the time but has become a divinely ordained event to Trump’s more fervent supporters.    

Given that last tenet, the public reaction to the incident is as expected.  Commentators from the left expressed relief the attempt failed.  From the right, the rhetoric from Trump’s opponents was to blame.  As for the shooter, little is known at present other than his name, his age, and a few biographical tidbits.  He is reported to have been a registered Republican who also made a small contribution to a liberal group, but neither fact really has any bearing on what he did.  The demographics track; he was a twentysomething white male.  But his motive is a mystery.

It's certain that Trump’s brush with death will pervade the discourse at next week’s Republican National Convention.  It will likely become a theme in campaign media as we near the election.  Perhaps it will have an effect on undecided voters.  Trump’s sangfroid does enhance his image.  Whether this will be the case several weeks from now remains to be seen.  But the fact that something like this has happened is an ominous sign of our polarization.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

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

The Most Dangerous Season

I remember the fall of 1983 well.  I was in twelfth grade.  The dreary ordeal of high school would finally end in the spring.  I didn’t pay much attention to the world beyond my small town, didn’t know much about the world beyond.

Aside from the routine of schoolwork, I was engrossed in the pop culture of the moment—music, movies, the occasional book.  The Second British Invasion was underway, and the airwaves buzzed with synthpop.  But there was one artist who dominated the radio and a nascent cable network called Music Television that year.  We had heard the first singles from Michael Jackson’s Thriller the previous fall, and subsequent tracks would keep hitting through the end of the year.  We had watched MJ’s electrifying performance of “Billie Jean” on the Motown 25 television special a few months before.  We eagerly anticipated the first airing of the video of the title track, which would finally arrive in December.  That year’s yearbook would even feature a small section devoted to the Thriller phenomenon.

But there was a larger world beyond mine and that of my classmates.  Although we were aware of the ongoing Cold War, it did not register as important to us.  Our teachers never discussed it save for a passing reference toward the end of our required U.S. history class.  We were required to view the TV movie The Day After, which would air that November.  I admit it scared the hell out of me, but it quickly faded from memory as smaller concerns again filled my mind (such as the “Thriller” video).  Looking back, I should have taken a good look around.

That fall brought a number of incidents which should have driven home the precarious nature of the U.S.-Soviet standoff other than a network TV special with cheesy special effects.  These went beyond the boilerplate rhetoric emanating from Washington and Moscow.  That fall saw events that exacerbated tensions to the point where the world came closer to a thermonuclear war than it had at any time after the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

There was the stuff that was reported in the news.  In September a Soviet fighter shot down a Korean Air 747 that was off course due to a navigational error; Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia was among the dead.  The following month, U.S. forces invaded Grenada, whose pro-Cuban, pro-Soviet revolutionary regime had descended into a factional coup.  (This came on the heels of the unrelated truck bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.)  In protest of the Grenada intervention, a fringe group called the May 19^th Communist Organization planted a bomb in the Senate chamber at the U.S. Capitol.  It detonated after the Senate had adjourned for the day; no one was hurt. 

Then, there was what wasn’t reported until much later.  The truly scary stuff.  At the end of September, the duty officer at the Serpukov-15 nuclear control center near Moscow was alerted to incoming NATO ballistic missiles.  Tensions had been building for the past two years as the U.S. expanded its nuclear arsenal in West Germany; the first Pershing II missiles would be fielded by year’s end.  The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, noticed the suspected attack indicated only a handful of incoming missiles rather than the expected full onslaught.  Petrov correctly deduced a malfunction of the Oko early warning satellites and did not order a retaliatory response.  This decision earned Petrov a reprimand and effectively ended his military career.  It would be many years before he would receive the recognition he deserved.

That wasn’t the only close call.  November saw that year’s NATO Able Archer exercise.  Able Archer 83 was a command post exercise that simulated the precipitating events which would in turn lead to DEFCON 1 and the opening moves of a nuclear war.  The Soviet leadership watched what they misconstrued as an actual ramp-up to an actual nuclear attack.  Operation RYAN had been stood up in 1981 at the behest of then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov to monitor NATO war preparations.  Signals intelligence through RYAN led Andropov, by then the General Secretary, and the rest of the Soviet leadership to believe Able Archer was the precursor of a surprise attack. 

Later revelations would help explain their apprehensions.  It seems that nearly 20,000 U.S. troops were airlifted into Europe ahead of Able Archer, an airlift which required 170 aircraft flying under radio silence.  NATO headquarters moved into its wartime bunkers.  Intelligence also indicated that NATO was modifying its nuclear release procedures.

Several factors may explain why Able Archer 83 didn’t touch off World War III.  There was some skepticism within the KGB, according to double agent Oleg Gordievsky and other KGB officers who published memoirs well after the fact.  Andropov was in poor health—he would die three months later—and may have been hesitant to mount a preemptive attack despite his longtime suspicions of Western intentions.  Or it might have been that the U.S. Air Force commander in the theater advising NATO leaders not to respond to the reactive Warsaw Pact military buildup.  Some of the decision process on both sides may remain unknown to both historians and the public.

Much of this did not come to light for years, though subsequent releases of classified documents have expanded our understanding.  I can only express relief that nothing escalated to the point of war.  And that I was blissfully ignorant of it all at the time.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar