Corey Robin's Blog, page 37

Rally today against Trump’s Plan for Refugees and Muslims

I’m pulling my daughter Carol out of Hebrew School today so that we can attend this rally, at 5 pm in Washington Square Park, against Trump’s pending declaration that most refugees will no longer be given refuge here and travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries will no longer be welcome here. This is my obligation as a citizen and, even more important, as a Jew.

A writer once wrote:

Four hundred years of bondage in Egypt, rendered as metaphoric memory, can be spoken in a moment; in a single sentence. What this sentence is, we know; we have built every idea of moral civilization on it. It is a sentence that conceivably sums up at the start every revelation that came afterward…”The stranger that sojourneth with you shall be unto you as the home-born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; because you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

I can’t think of a better way to teach my child what it means to be a Jew, at this moment, than to stand with those who are now being made strangers in the land of Egypt.

Please share widely.

Donald Trump: His Mother’s Son

1.

I pride myself on being that guy on the left who can make meaning out of even the most mindless right-wing text. With The Art of the Deal, I fear I may have met my match. About halfway through the book—chapter upon stultifying chapter about the time he flipped a housing complex in Cincinnati, the time he bought the Commodore Hotel, the time he negotiated with Bonwit Teller, the convention center he wanted to build in the West 30s—it hits me: the book reads like the memoir J. Peterman intended to write, based entirely on stories he bought from Kramer.

2.

Thomas Friedman and Trump ought to get on like a house on fire:

I do my own surveys and draw my own conclusions. I’m a great believer in asking everyone for an opinion before I make a decision….When I’m in another city and I take a cab, I’ll always make it a point to ask the cabdriver questions.

3.

On page 52, Trump makes a big point of touting how little he cares about what architecture critics have to say about his buildings. On page 53, he writes about the response of the critics to Trump Tower, “I’m not going to kid you: it’s also nice to get good reviews.”

4.

If you’re wondering why Trump’s outfit seemed so furious about how much attention the Women’s March got and that the media reported such low numbers for the Inauguration, Trump explains it all to you:

The point is that we got a lot of attention, and that alone creates value.

5.

More than a quarter-century before he was elected, Trump set out the roadmap to victory:

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole.

Or, as Kellyanne Conway put it today on Meet the Press, “alternative facts.”

But don’t think Trump thinks you can fake your way through life. “You can’t con people,” he advises, “at least not for long.”

6.

And you thought my Jimmy Carter parallels were crazy:

Until then [the moment Carter asked Trump for a donation of $5 million for the Carter Library], I’d never understood how Jimmy Carter became president. The answer is that as poorly qualified as he was for the job, Jimmy Carter had the nerve, the guts, the balls, to ask for something extraordinary. That ability above all helped him get elected president. But then, of course, the American people caught on pretty quickly that Carter couldn’t do the job…

7.

Unlike his father, Donald Trump is willing to spend any amount of money to achieve greatness. He goes on and on—and on—about his refusal to cut corners, to do anything on the cheap. On page 61, Trump suddenly shifts gears: “That’s when I learned to be cost-conscious.” And when was that? When he began building low-income housing.

8.

In one paragraph, Trump says that while Harvard Business School may produce a lot of conventionally successful CEOs, it’s Wharton, where he attended, that produces the truly visionary entrepreneurs. “Wharton,” he says, “was the place to go.” In the next paragraph, he says that “there was nothing particular awesome or exceptional about my classmates” and a Wharton degree doesn’t mean much.

9.

On page 84, Trump tells you he has a “personal thing about cleanliness.” That’s the second time he’s said that.

10.

Speaking of repetition, you’ll recall that Trump likes to tell you, again and again, that he doesn’t go out to lunch. Yet we find him, again and again, going out to lunch. On page 91, he goes out to lunch yet again. For three hours.

11.

Like a lot of people who think they’re good judges of character, Trump likes “characters”—those outsized personalities who cut a distinctive path through life, the ones you never forget. The truth is, those people aren’t characters; they’re cartoons. But Trump loves them. “Irving was a classic.” “Pat was one of those great Irish personalities.” And so on.

12.

There’s one interesting moment of self-reflection in the book. Throughout The Art of the Deal, Trump styles himself as his father’s son. He’s tough, determined, gets the job done. The unmastered subtext of the book, of course, is the tension between father and son: the father builds low-income housing, the son shoots for the glamour of the sky; the son bridles at the father’s style, the father seems to dismiss the son’s. Like the time the father scoffed at the son’s faux-fancy tastes, expressed in the ornamentalism and indulgence of Trump Tower: “Why don’t you forget about the damn glass? Give them four or five stories of it and then use common brick for the rest. Nobody is going to look up anyway.” Trump just skates right by it.

But then Trump stops for one moment and offers this gem of self-knowledge:

Looking back, I realize now that I got some of my sense of showmanship from my mother. She always had a flair for the dramatic and the grand. She was a very traditional housewife, but she also had a sense of the world beyond her. I still remember my mother, who is Scottish by birth, sitting in front of the television set to watch Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and not budging for an entire day. She was just enthralled by the pomp and circumstance, the whole idea of royalty and glamour. I also remember my father that day, pacing around impatiently. “For Christ’s sake, Mary,” he’d say. “Enough is enough, turn it off. They’re all a bunch of con artists.” My mother didn’t even look up. They were total opposites in that sense. My mother loves splendor and magnificence, while my father, who is very down-to-earth, gets excited only by competence and efficiency.

It’s clear that Donald Trump is very much his mother’s son. Which perhaps explains the Versailles fetish.

 

Donald Trump: Six Theses

Oxford University Press has decided to publish a second edition of The Reactionary Mind, which will come out some time around Labor Day. It’ll be completely reorganized: I’m going to overhaul the ordering structure of the chapters, I’m going to delete several chapters that I don’t think really worked, I’m going to add several new chapters. One of those new chapters will be on Trump, an assessment of his philosophy, the movement and party that produced him, and his first 100 days in office. It’ll be called The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump.

In preparation for this new edition, I’ve been reading Trump’s The Art of the Deal. It was ghost-written by Tony Schwartz, who has disavowed the book as a literary Frankenstein that propelled Trump to the position he is in today. Which is odd: Schwartz seems to think the book created a fake image of Trump as a charming, brash, rakish entrepreneur, an image that Trump parlayed into a path to the White House. The truth is just the opposite: the book reveals Trump to be a cosmic bore, an epic blowhard who imagines himself to be more interesting than he is. As autobiographies go, I’d say it’s one of the more revealing ones.

Here’s what I’ve managed to glean so far:

1. Donald Trump talks on the phone a lot. Fifty to 100 times a day.

2. On page 2, Donald Trump tells you that he doesn’t take lunch. On page 7, he says it again. On page 8, Donald Trump goes out to lunch. On page 34, he does it again.

3. Donald Trump likes earth tones. He doesn’t like primary colors.

4. At 12:45 on a Friday, Donald Trump’s then wife Ivana asks him to join her on a tour of a possible private school for their daughter Ivanka. Trump says he’s too busy. She says, “You haven’t got anything else to do.” He snorts, “Sometimes I think she really believes it.” Four hours later, David Letterman shows up at Trump Tower, wanting to film a sequence between him, Trump, and two out-of-towners from Kentucky. Trump agrees.When the sequence is over, Letterman says: “It’s Friday afternoon, you get a call from us out of the blue, you tell us we can come up. Now you’re standing here talking to us. You must not have much to do.” Trump replies: “Truthfully, David, you’re right. Absolutely nothing to do.”

5. Donald Trump says that the key to entrepreneurial success is “total focus.” Successful tycoons like himself have “a controlled neurosis.” They are “obsessive, they’re driven, they’re single-minded.” (Schumpeter, incidentally, agrees.) On page 1, Donald Trump says that when it comes to work, “I play it very loose…I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”

6. Donald Trump says, “What I’m doing is about as close as you’re going to get, in the twentieth century, to the quality of Versailles.”

Trump’s Inaugural Address versus Reagan’s Inaugural Address

Trump’s Inaugural Address offers an interesting counterpoint to Reagan’s First Inaugural.

First, Trump includes an opening thanks not only to all the presidents and worthies assembled (Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Bush) and to all Americans, as did Reagan, but he also thanks “the people of the world.” Obama, like Reagan, didn’t do anything like that in his First Inaugural. Is this a first?

Second, and more important, Reagan’s sense of the political enemy was specific and ideological: it was liberalism. Reagan identified a litany of the problems that were ailing America and the targets he had his eye on: the tax system, deficit spending, big government (which he specified as the federal government against the states), and inflation. These were all the indices of the Keynesian welfare state economy created by the Democrats. Reagan also made a point of saying these were not problems created by one administration but were instead the result of a comprehensive set of norms and forms thad had developed over the twentieth century. That wasn’t Reagan letting Jimmy Carter off the hook. That was Reagan taking aim at the New Deal.

Trump’s sense of the enemy is more amorphous, its sins less specific:

For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished — but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered — but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

…

For many decades, we’ve enriched foreign industry at the expense of American industry; subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own; and spent trillions of dollars overseas while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay.

We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength, and confidence of our country has disappeared over the horizon.

One by one, the factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.

The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed across the entire world.

Notice that initially Trump’s enemies are “the establishment,” “politicians,” “Washington.” And what does this class of elites do? They sell out the nation to other countries. But notice how quickly the agents of malfeasance transition from the establishment and politicians to a generic “we.” In the end, we’re left with little sense of this elite belonging to any specific party or political formation. We’re left with little sense of this elite even being an elite. There’s just a set of processes and persons that somehow have liquidated the wealth of the nation to the world at large.

Last, there’s an interesting contrast to be drawn in how Reagan and Trump summon the people. Both men make much of the people as against the government. But where Reagan is very clear that government needs to get out of the way so that the people’s native talents and genius and initiative can flourish—

If we look to the answer as to why for so many years we achieved so much, prospered as no other people on Earth, it was because here in this land we unleashed the energy and individual genius of man to a greater extent than has ever been done before.

…

You can see heroes every day going in and out of factory gates. Others, a handful in number, produce enough food to feed all of us and then the world beyond. You meet heroes across a counter, and they’re on both sides of that counter. There are entrepreneurs with faith in themselves and faith in an idea who create new jobs, new wealth and opportunity.

…

In the days ahead I will propose removing the roadblocks that have slowed our economy and reduced productivity. Steps will be taken aimed at restoring the balance between the various levels of government. Progress may be slow, measured in inches and feet, not miles, but we will progress. It is time to reawaken this industrial giant, to get government back within its means, and to lighten our punitive tax burden.

—Trump construes the people differently. They are either the objects and beneficiaries of government action—specifically, Trump’s actions—or they are partners with the government:

Every decision on trade, on taxes, on immigration, on foreign affairs, will be made to benefit American workers and American families. We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries making our products, stealing our companies, and destroying our jobs. Protection will lead to great prosperity and strength.

I will fight for you with every breath in my body — and I will never, ever let you down.

America will start winning again, winning like never before.

We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.

We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation.

We will get our people off of welfare and back to work — rebuilding our country with American hands and American labor.

We will follow two simple rules: Buy American and hire American.

…

You will never be ignored again.

There’s a lot of “we” talk there—more shades of Obama than Reagan—and a lot of “I and thou” talk—I will fight for you, you will not be ignored—suggesting an intimacy and partnership between Trump, the government, and the people, of the sort that you don’t see in Reagan. And where Reagan’s people are entrepreneurs, producers, and consumers—creating jobs, going about their jobs—Trump’s are more stylized and specific: workers building infrastructure, supported by the government.

Despite the amorphousness and vagueness of Trump’s delineations, there’s a narrowness and brittleness to his vision that we’ve long been aware of but which this Inaugural Address puts on almost forensic display. Trump is speaking to and for one very specific, and very limited, part of the electorate. His conception of the nation he intends to serve—on even this, the most generous reading—is considerably smaller than even that small sector of the population that currently approves of his presidency.

Trumpland, Day 1: What effect will Trump have on phone sex?

I’ve been thinking of starting a diary of life in Trumpland. Less a political journal than a record of the changes in the way we live and speak, the oddities of our new existence. I’ve always been fascinated by the everyday life of politics, how high matters of state insinuate themselves into the lowest corners of our minds and manners. Trump is going to offer us a lot of material.

So here are two things I’ve noticed.

First, the frequency with which people—friends, colleagues, family, on social media and in real life—talk about Trump starting a nuclear war. What strikes me is how passive the commentary is, as if people were contemplating a coming snowstorm or stretch of bad weather. You’d never know they were discussing the evaporation of themselves, their friends, and families. It reminds me of that title of Philip Gourevitch’s book on the Rwandan genocide: We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families.

Second, the suddenly ubiquitous use of the word “pussy.” I was first struck by this in a conversation I had not long after the election with an esteemed historian, who said something in passing to me about Trump “grabbing pussy.” But now I hear and see it everywhere. Parents and children knitting their pussy hats, making signs with the word pussy on it, everyone’s talking pussy. I wonder how mothers and fathers negotiate that terrain with their adolescent sons and daughters. Or, frankly, their grownup sons and daughters.

Conversely, I wonder what kind of effect this new Trumpist vernacular will have, or has had, on people’s sex lives. Has “pussy” been permanently ruined as an item of dirty talk, whether because of what Trump said or because people now use the word so so often and so casually? Has it been removed from the lexicon of phone sex? Or maybe there’s a political valence to its effects, with liberals and leftists turned off by it, conservatives and Republicans turned on by it? Or maybe the reverse?

David Hume on the Inauguration of Donald Trump

This morning I’m reading Hume, who has a thought for us on Trump’s inauguration.

If you think your constitution is so excellent—and many of our political commentators do—”then a change of ministry can be no such dreadful event; since it is essential to such a constitution, in every ministry, both to preserve itself from violation and to prevent all enormities in the administration.”

If you don’t think your constitution is so excellent, or not so excellent as to relieve you from worry upon a change in the ministry, then you’ve got a much bigger problem: “Public affairs, in such a constitution, must necessarily go to confusion, by whatever hands they are conducted.”

In such a situation, Hume goes onto say, you need the “submission” of the patient philosopher rather than the “zeal” of the virtuous activist, for the latter will only “hasten the fatal period” of the government’s collapse.

Get to it.

On how and how not to resist Trump

I have a piece on resisting Trump in the February issue of Harper’s. The opening discussion came to me one Saturday morning in shul, not long after the election, while we were reading the parsha.

Gazing back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife is turned into a pillar of salt. Why? Other characters in the Bible disobey God without meeting the same fate. Perhaps it is her irrepressible interest in the destruction she has been spared — her sense that the evil she has left behind is more real than the possibilities that beckon — that dooms her. Instructed to choose life over death, Lot’s wife opts to find life in death. The known past is more compelling than the promised future. Hence the salt — a substance that suspends time, that preserves things by drying them out.

As liberals and leftists confront the reality of a Trump Administration, they will face a similar question of orientation. Will they…

You can read on here.

Where did I go wrong? Or, why Trump may be like Jimmy Carter

As readers of this blog well know, I predicted that Clinton would defeat Trump in November. I was wrong. Big time.

Since the election, I’ve thought a lot about what I got wrong and why I got it wrong. Part of my failure, of course, was that I didn’t read the polls carefully enough. A lot of the polls, as my more attentive readers pointed out, showed Clinton’s margin over Trump, particularly in key states, to be well within the margin of error. That should have been a warning.

But to be honest, I wasn’t so much influenced by the polls as I was by two other things: first, my understanding of conservatism as a reactionary movement of the right; second, my understanding of the presidency as an institution.

In the last chapter of The Reactionary Mind, I argued that conservatism, at least in its modern, twentieth-century American incarnation, had essentially succeeded in its goals. That is, it had destroyed the New Deal, had effectively stopped the civil rights movement, and had significantly slowed the feminist movement. Its great success was its defeat of the left. And because I understand conservatism as an inherently reactionary movement, as a movement that mobilizes against movements of emancipation on behalf of subordinate classes, I argued that its success would prove, long-term, to be the source of its defeat. We could already see the signs, I argued throughout the book, of this coming conservative crack-up. That was in 2011.

But in writing about the election of 2016, I was also influenced by Stephen Skowronek’s The Politics Presidents Make. In that book, which came out in 1993, Skowronek argues that presidents come into office not as sovereign creators of a new world, but as the beneficiaries or burdens of an established regime. That orientation to the regime—is the president opposed to or aligned with the existing way of doing things—plus the strength or weakness of the regime, gives us a sense of how a president might govern. My sense, based on my reading of conservatism and the George W. Bush presidency, was that the Republican free-market regime of Ronald Reagan was becoming weaker, and that Trump would prove to be the equivalent of the George McGovern of the right: that is, the most outré  expression of the regime’s principles, at a moment when the regime has begun to decline in popularity.

So I was obviously wrong about Trump being the McGovern of the right. The question is why?

One possibility is that I was wrong about the weaknesses of the Reagan regime. Rather than being weak, perhaps it was strong, which would make Trump an ideal candidate for election. In support of that possibility, people will point to the widespread control the Republicans have over state legislatures today, though as I said at the time this McGovern issue came up, the Democrats also had widespread control over state legislatures in the 1970s, and their control over Congress, particularly the House, was legendary and long-standing.

Another possibility is that I wasn’t wrong about the weaknesses of the Reagan regime but that I was wrong about Trump. Unlike conservatives or Republicans, he was doing something different: he was populist, he was revanchist, he was racist, he was outrageous, he was a demagogue, he reached out to the white working class. He was, in other words, the expression of an utterly new formation, not captured by the nostrums of conservatism. For a thousand different reasons, most of which I explore in my book, I think that argument couldn’t be more wrong. Virtually all the things that people point to that supposedly make Trump not like your typical Republican or conservative are, from my point of view, the emblematic features of what it means to be a conservative. And nothing anyone has said has convinced me otherwise.

But there is still another possibility: I wasn’t so much wrong about Trump or the Republicans; what I got wrong was the Democrats. What enabled Nixon to defeat McGovern in 1972, in addition to the secular factors that favor incumbents over the challengers, is that the Republicans, while divided, were moving toward a steadily more coherent sense of attack on the New Deal, and had gained some sense of how to win elections.

For a variety of reasons, I don’t think today’s Democratic Party is there. Despite the strength of the Sanders insurgency, the party leadership is not ready to make a realignment. That was clear in Clinton’s campaign, by her desperate—and ill-conceived—effort to hive off Trump from the rest of the Republican Party, by her refusal to make Trump the leading representative of the entire Republican deformation that has governed this country since the election of Ronald Reagan. In the end, I think what I got wrong about the 2016 election was not that I under-estimated Trump but that I over-estimated Clinton and the Democrats.

The real story of the 2016 election, in other words, was not that Trump won—he did, after all, lose the popular vote—but that Clinton lost. That’s what needs to be explained: not that there was a massive shift in the electorate to the right (there wasn’t; Trump’s victories came from a small group of states where there was a tiny swing of the vote), not that there was a revolt of the white working class (incidentally, an old story in American politics; Nixon mobilized the hardhat majority, Reagan mobilized the Reagan Democrats), but that Clinton lost the Democratic base: either among people who stayed home or among a tiny, tiny group of swing voters in a few Rust Belt states who jumped to Trump.

So where does that leave us today? How are we to understand Trump now? I believe that he is as vulnerable as ever: not simply because he is a weak and polarizing candidate, but also because the movement and the party for which he speaks (and against which he speaks) is fraying.

That’s what I argue in this long piece I just did for n+1: that the real precedent for understanding Donald Trump is not Hitler or Putin, not Bersculoni or Brexit, but Jimmy Carter.

Here’s a taste:

THE INTERREGNUM BETWEEN Trump’s election and his inauguration has occasioned a fever dream of authoritarianism—a procession of nightmares from faraway lands and distant times, from Hitler and Mussolini to Putin and Erdogan. But what if Trump’s antecedents are more prosaic, his historical comparisons nearer to hand? What if the best clues to the Trump presidency are to be found in that most un-Trump-like of figures: Jimmy Carter?

…

THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN CARTER and Trump are many and obvious: Carter shyly confessed to having “looked on a lot of women with lust”; Trump brags about grabbing pussy. Carter was a moralist and a technocrat; Trump, an immoralist and a demagogue. Carter was a state senator and a governor; Trump has no political experience. Carter wouldn’t hurt a fly (or a rabbit). Trump takes pleasure in humiliating others, particularly women and people of color.

The parallels between Carter and Trump are also many, if less obvious. Like Carter, Trump…

Read it all here.

 

 

Trump and the Intelligence Agencies: On the Slow Collapse of Imperial Republics

I want to step back—way back—from yesterday’s release of a declassified intelligence report on Russian interference in the election in order to point out the larger political significance of this moment.

Regardless of the truth value of the report, the nation’s intelligence agencies (the report is based on assessments by the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI) are strongly suggesting that the person who is about to walk into the White House got there with the help of a foreign power. The significance of this move by the nation’s security establishment against an incoming president, as I’ve been suggesting for some time, has not been quite appreciated. That the nation’s security agencies could go public with this kind of accusation, or allow their accusation to go public, is unprecedented. The United States used to do this kind of thing, covertly, to other countries: that is the prerogative of an imperial power. Now it claims, overtly, that this kind of thing was done to it. It’s extraordinary, when you think about it: not simply that it happened (if it did) but that an imperial power would admit that it happened. That’s the real shocker.

But we need to read the story against a larger backdrop of the slow delegitimation of American national institutions since the end of the Cold War.

It began, I would argue, with the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, even though it seemed clear to most people he committed perjury before the Senate. It continued with the gratuitous impeachment of Bill Clinton, the elevation of George W. Bush to the White House by a Supreme Court deploying the most specious reasoning, a war in Iraq built on flagrant lies, the normalization of the filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and now the ascension of Trump, despite not winning the popular vote—and supposedly with the help of the Russians.

What ties these events together is either that they cast serious doubt on the democratic legitimacy of American institutions or that they drag those institutions into the delegitimating mud of the most sordid scandals.

The simple truth is that the United States could barely have weathered one of these events during the Cold War, let alone a long succession of them. That is why civil rights activists were able, finally, to bring an end to Jim Crow when they did—the international embarrassment was too great—and why the failures in Vietnam provoked such a national crisis.

What we’re now seeing is not a cataclysmic crisis—I suspect one day we’ll look back on the language of “legitimation crisis” as itself the product of the Cold War—but a more familiar phenomenon from the annals of history: the slow but steady collapse—the real norm erosion—that you tend to see in the later stages of imperial republics. A collapse that can take decades, if not longer, to unfold.

Update (11 am)

If people could step outside their partisan selves for one minute, I’d ask you to consider the following fact as yet another sign of late imperial disjunction: For the last eight years, we’ve had a president who half the country thinks is Muslim, Kenyan-born. For the next four, maybe eight, years, we will have a president who half the country thinks is the Manchurian Candidate, Russian-born. I can’t think of a greater symptom of the weird fever dream that is the American empire, whereby the most powerful state on earth imagines, over a 12- to 16-year period, that its elected leaders hail from the far reaches of its various antagonisms.

Defend George Ciccariello-Maher

On Christmas Eve, George Ciccariello-Maher, a professor at Drexel University whose excellent work on Venezuela and political theory you may know, tweeted, “All I Want for Christmas is White Genocide.” The next day, he followed up with this: “To clarify: when the whites were massacre during the Haitian revolution, that was a good thing indeed.” After denouncing the tweets, the university said, “The University is taking this situation very seriously. We contacted Ciccariello-Maher today to arrange a meeting to discuss this matter in detail.”

Folks, we’ve been here before. Over the years, it has become a pillar of our organizing around here that no one should be punished by his or her employer for political speech off the job. This is a cornerstone of academic freedom, but many of us believe it should be extended to all forms of employment.

I’ve been absolutely consistent on this principle over the years, even when it has involved employees expressing views I find abhorrent. I defended Glenn Reynolds, a right-wing professor at the University of Tennessee Law School, against calls that he be fired after he tweeted that car drivers should “run down” protesters blocking traffic in Charlotte, North Carolina over a fatal police shooting there. I defended a nurse—also in Philadelphia, as it happens—who was fired for posting awful racist comments on her Facebook page. (I am not equating or comparing George’s tweets with those of Reynolds or the FB posts of that nurse: I’m merely noting my bona fides here, sadly, because I have to.) The principle, as I say, is simple: no one should be fired—and suffer all the consequences of what that means in a country like the US—for their political speech, particularly when it’s off the job.

From long experience, I know there will be an impulse to forget, ignore, or temporarily suspend this principle in order to get into a long debate about the substance of George’s tweet, to assess whether he crossed a line or not. I know there will be an impulse to have a long debate about how far our principles of tolerance should extend, with a whole array of hypotheticals marshaled at either end to test the limits of our principles. Or perhaps we’ll have a long debate about the problems with the left’s focus on race and whiteness.

From long experience, I ask you to resist that impulse and to recognize that there really are extraordinarily powerful forces arrayed now against George, newly empowered by the results of this election. (Breitbart’s site, for example, is all over this one.) I often point out that my posts are not meant to organize us politically, that they are places and threads to explore larger issues. This is not one of those posts. This is a simple call to arms, a plea for clarity, a request (polite, I hope) that we exercise some judgment here, and recognize that this particular controversy is not going to be the occasion of a law school seminar or a late-night Jacobin bull session.

There’s one task here, and that is to defend George. What that means will become clear in the coming days. For now, share this news far and wide.

Updated (12:30 pm)

You can contact the following leaders of Drexel at these addresses below. Be polite, be civil, and point out that the American Association of University Professors is very clear that extramural political speech ought to be protected.

Drexel’s President John Anderson Fry: jaf@drexel.edu

Drexel Provost M. Brian Blake: mbrian.blake@drexel.edu [and/or try this one: mb3545@drexel.edu]

Drexel Media Relations Executive Director Niki Gianakaris: ngianakaris@drexel.edu

Updated (4:30 pm)

As I mentioned above, I have no desire or intention of getting into a debate about the content of George’s tweets. It’s irrelevant in my experience. But George posted this statement about what he was doing, and I think it’s worth passing on for everyone to read (thanks to John Protevi for posting it in the comments below):

On Christmas Eve, I sent a satirical tweet about an imaginary concept, “white genocide.” For those who haven’t bothered to do their research, “white genocide” is an idea invented by white supremacists and used to denounce everything from interracial relationships to multicultural policies (and most recently, against a tweet by State Farm Insurance). It is a figment of the racist imagination, it should be mocked, and I’m glad to have mocked it.

What I am not glad about is that this satirical tweet became fodder for online white supremacists to systematically harass me and my employer, Drexel University. Beginning with Breitbart.com—formerly the domain of Special Counselor to the President-Elect, Steve Bannon—and running through the depths of Reddit discussion boards, a coordinated smear campaign was orchestrated to send mass tweets and emails to myself, my employer, and my colleagues. I have received hundreds of death threats.

Drexel University issued a statement on the matter, apparently without understanding either the content or the context of the tweets. While Drexel has been nothing but supportive in the past, this statement is worrying. While upholding my right to free expression, the statement refers to my (satirical) tweets as “utterly reprehensible.” What is most unfortunate is that this statement amounts to caving to the truly reprehensible movements and organizations that I was critiquing. On the university level, moreover, this statement—despite a tepid defense of free speech—sends a chilling message and sets a frightening precedent. It exposes untenured and temporary faculty not only to internal disciplinary scrutiny, but equally importantly, it encourages harassment as an effective means to impact university policies.

As my students will attest, my classroom is a free-for-all of ideas, in which anyone is welcome to their opinions, but expected to defend those opinions with argument. I teach regularly on the history of genocidal practices like colonialism and slavery—genocides carried out by the very same kind of violent racists who are smearing me today. That violent racism will now have a voice in the White House is truly frightening—I am not the first and I won’t be the last to be harassed and threatened by Bannon, Trump, and co.

White supremacy is on the rise, and we must fight it by any means. In that fight, universities will need to choose whether they are on the side of free expression and academic debate, or on the side of the racist mob.