Corey Robin's Blog, page 38

December Diary: From the Political to the Personal

1.

About a month before the election, I found myself—don’t ask how or why—in an audience listening to a speech by Jeffrey Wiesenfeld.

For those of you who are not CUNY insiders, Wiesenfeld is a former member of the CUNY Board of Trustees. He’s also an ultra-right Zionist who’s got a lot of nice things to say about Meir Kahane (“misunderstood”) and who’s been behind or involved in pretty much every dustup over Israel/Palestine that we’ve had at CUNY these last ten years or so. His most notable effort was trying to deny an honorary degree to Tony Kushner. (I was pleased to find out from his lecture that our massive pushback against him led him to lose a bunch of clients—all Jewish, he made a point of noting—from his Wall Street firm.)

Anyway, in the course of this lecture, which was basically an extended critique of the forces arrayed against the State of Israel and how anti-Zionism parallels the Holocaust, Wiesenfeld let slip something interesting. Talking about all the SJP groups and BDS movements on college campuses today, he said (almost these exact words): The biggest threat to Jews today is not the Arabs. It’s not the Muslims. It’s the Jews. 1/3 of them—mostly Orthodox, he said—love Israel and will protect it. 1/3 of them don’t care. And 1/3 of them hate it. (Most SJP groups, he said, are headed by Jews.) So, he concluded, we can only count on 1/3 of the Jewish people; the rest are useless or dangerous to us.

All of which is to say: this is the milieu from which Trump’s proposed Ambassador to Israel comes.

2.

As I’ve argued in a piece that may or may not find a home somewhere, the Trump coalition and the Trump presidency may be far more divided and vulnerable than we think. I have a lot more in that piece about the various divides and fissures, but there’s no doubt that trade is going to be one of the immediate flash points.

More than anything else Trump said during the campaign—on race (certainly on race, actually), on immigration, even on entitlement cuts (about which he waffled)—Trump’s positions on trade were by far the most salient signs of his willingness to break with GOP orthodoxy. And there is virtually no evidence he didn’t mean it. Which the GOP’s leaders are about to discover, much to their regret:

These sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the conversations with the Trump team were arranged as confidential, said the reaction was one of fierce opposition. Priebus, the sources said, was warned such a move could start trade wars, anger allies, and also hurt the new administration’s effort to boost the rate of economic growth right out of the gate. One of the sources said he viewed the idea as a trial balloon when first raised, and considered it dead on arrival given the strong reaction in the business community — and the known opposition to such protectionist ideas among the GOP congressional leadership.

But this source voiced new alarm Tuesday after being told by allies within the Trump transition that defending new tariffs was part of the confirmation ‘murder board’ practice of Wilbur Ross, the President-elect’s choice for commerce secretary.

At the same time, despite making several appointments of hardliners against free trade, Trump has a Cabinet filled with orthodox free traders. Hold onto your seats!

3.

This is a fascinating article, in spite of itself, about the aura of power that the Bannon/Breitbart operation behind Trump tries to create. If you read it quickly, it sounds scary: message discipline enforced by Bannon from on high, gets transmitted to terrified members of Congress down low.

But what’s the actual threat these guys wield? Tweets. Tweets. In other words, they’re depending on that old dream of politics watchers in the US—the presidential bully pulpit—hoping it can be more of a power than it has ever really been.

Beyond the bully pulpit, there are two kinds of threats to members of Congress: first, having funds cut off or denied to your favored pet projects in your state/district or not being able to get critical legislation that you want passed; second, being primaried if you’re up for election. In other words, this is pretty much the landscape of presidential action we already know, and the question will be whether Bannon/Breitbart with their tweets, and Trump with his, will have any more power over their own party in Congress than presidents and congressional leaders have ever had over theirs.

I have my doubts, but this is why resisting the politics of fear is so important. Power like this, resting in tweets, relies a lot on atmospherics. The purpose of that atmospherics is to magnify power: so that its wielder can hold that power in reserve, and thereby deploy it more efficiently, or because its wielder doesn’t have that much power in the first place, and needs to generate fear in order to make that power seem more potent than it is. Hobbes understood this all too well. So did the forces around Joe McCarthy. We need to understand it, too, and oppose it: not to cooperate with it, not to contribute to it, not to participate in it.

4.

Internal dissidents and civil servants within the Department of Energy managed to secure the first victory we’ve seen against Trump, forcing his transition team to back down on a questionnaire regarding the position of DOE employees on climate change.

It’s stories like this that lead me, in part, to emphasize the cracks and cleavages, the dissonances, within the Trump coalition. As I’ve said, I don’t see my posts as organizing tools. I really am just reporting what I see and offering my interpretations. But if there is a political uptick to what I say, it’s to get us to see opportunities and take advantage of them, not to add to the considerable and justifiable fear that Trump already generates, not to be cowed or overly impressed by his rhetoric.

I’ve never quite understood an organizing model that tries to mobilize people by emphasizing how implacable, unified, and impervious an enemy is to challenge or contestation, by emphasizing how absolutely, utterly terrifying its power is. That kind of talk runs the risk of putting the awe into awful, and sometimes betrays a secret fascination with the power it decries. Maybe it’s because I’m a congenital coward (I really am), but that kind of talk makes me want to run for the hills. (Or take a nap.)

Far better, I’d have thought, to point out vulnerabilities, to show how, when challenged, these bullies can be forced to beat a retreat.

So again, no real political point here, but if you want to take one away, it’s not “be complacent, all will work out.” It’s “they’re a lot more vulnerable and disunited than you might think.”

5.

The most important Arendt text for understanding Trumpism is not Origins of Totalitarianism but Eichmann in Jerusalem. At the heart of the latter text is not the pulverized individual or the rootless mass or populism run amok; instead we find the careerist and the collaborator, both figures of ambition and advance, working their way through the most established institutions of society.

As right-wingers in Congress introduce legislation that would punish universities (and, not far behind that, I’m sure, will be cities or states) that offer sanctuary to the undocumented, watch out for these collaborators and careerists who argue for cooperation rather than confrontation. Trumpism cannot happen without an extended network of these types, whose arguments are powerful precisely because there will be real costs at stake in any resistance.

Here’s an old post on this topic.

6.

One of the few bright spots since the election was the overwhelming vote of Columbia grad students to unionize. Now the Columbia administration is challenging the election, in the hopes that a new Trump NLRB will overturn the Obama NLRB’s decision to recognize grad students as employees.

Even worse, Columbia deploys some of the telltale tools of Trumpism. The university claims that “tactics like voter coercion”—hmm, sounds an awful lot like voter fraud—”may have tipped the balance in favor of the union.” As if that weren’t enough, the Times reports that “Columbia also faulted the regional body of the N.L.R.B., saying a last-minute decision not to require voters to present identification might have allowed ineligible voters to cast ballots.”

This is the real face of the “normalization”: while virtually everyone in the Columbia administration, I’m sure, opposes Trumpism of the state, they’re more than happy to embrace a Trumpism of society. Any employer, I don’t care how liberal, that refuses to recognize this most basic right of its employees, is practicing social Trumpism. And ought to be called out as such.

We need to attach the label “Trumpist” to wherever we find it: in North Carolina, Michigan, or the Ivy League.

7.

If I’m reading this Nate Cohn article correctly, it seems that in the 2016 election, Clinton did worse than Obama among black voters, among working-class white voters (where Obama had actually made major strides over his predecessors), and among working-class Latinx voters. The one group where Clinton improved upon Obama was wealthier, educated, mostly white voters.

In other words, the candidate whose calling card during the primary was that she, and she alone, could speak to issues of identity and race lost votes among working class, poorer voters of all races, and gained votes, almost exclusively, among wealthier, better educated whites.

That’s certainly speaking to issues of identity and race, but not quite in the way Clinton or her supporters meant.

8.

I thought Michelle Goldberg got a lot of things wrong during the campaign—though who I am to throw stones? And I certainly didn’t appreciate being told by her that we on the left somehow weren’t wise or mature enough to understand political realities in the United State—even those of us, apparently, who study politics for a living and are probably at least a decade older than she is.

Nevertheless, this article by Goldberg, on a group of voters who support Planned Parenthood yet voted for Trump, is incredibly important and offers an analysis that has gone almost completely unreported in the media:

But if they’re maddening, the focus groups are also revelatory. They suggest that the Clinton campaign made a fatal mistake in depicting Trump as outside the bounds of normal conservatism. Clinton’s camp had hoped that doing so would lead Republicans to defect. Instead, it helped some people who distrust conservatism to reconcile themselves to Trump….

But many of the people in the focus groups didn’t know he’d made this assurance [to defund Planned Parenthood], and those who did didn’t take it seriously. It seemed as if Trump’s lasciviousness, which Clinton hoped would disqualify Trump with women, actually worked in his favor. The focus group participants couldn’t imagine that Trump would enact a religious right agenda….

If Democrats ever want to regain power, they don’t need to wedge Trump away from the Republican Party. They need to yoke him to it. These voters might be OK with Trump talking about grabbing women by the pussies. What they didn’t know is that they were voting for the federal government to do it.

9.

Not long after the election, I was up at Cornell and had dinner with Seth Ackerman. We were talking about all things political, and Seth said that he thought the focus on the DNC chair race, in which congressman (and prominent Sanders supporter) Keith Ellison has made a surprisingly strong bid, was just another instance of progressives foolishly getting distracted over an essentially meaningless fight. I was inclined to agree. Chuck Schumer had already come out for Ellison, which made me think there was no way this was going to be a fight at all. And with Schumer behind him, it didn’t seem like Ellison could really make a credible claim to be taking on the establishment.

But after weeks of intense attacks on Ellison—many of them, it seems, spearheaded by the White House—I’ve begun to wonder if there is not more to the race than Seth or I realized.

Perhaps it’s a genuine reprise of the Clinton/Sanders fight from the campaign? Though if it is, how to explain Schumer and Harry Reid coming out for Ellison?

Perhaps it’s just about Israel, though again, the Schumer question intrudes.

This article has Obama-Clinton insiders basically saying that at this moment of needing to appeal to white working class voters, the last thing the DNC needs is an African-American Muslim at the helm. I gather that they think Perez, Ellison’s strongest opponent, codes more as white?

Which should, if nothing else, tell you all you need to know about how identity politics was used during the primary campaign: When it served their purposes, the Obama/Clinton wing of the party made a big to do about Sanders being white, from Vermont, and out of touch with black voters; now they’re going after Ellison for being black and Muslim. And Sanders is pushing, hard, for him.

10.

The vacuum of leadership at the highest levels of the Democratic Party is stunning.

Besides Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Ellison, who in national office or power is speaking out against Trump?

Before the election, it was all fascism all the time; now it’s silence, wait and see.

As Jeremy Kessler suggested to me the other night, maybe all that fascism talk pre-election has been internalized. At the time, I thought that talk was just a tactical ploy. What I should have remembered is that tactical ploys can work their magic on their wielders. Tacticians can become captives of their tactics.

In any event, there’s a vacuum of leadership on the liberal left, which means there’s a real opportunity for any moderately ambitious, ideologically coherent politico or activist in her 20s or 30s—or groups of moderately ambitious politicos and activists—to make her mark right now.

11.

Whenever I push my line that Trump and the GOP are more vulnerable than we might think, I get a lot of pushback. One frequent counter I hear is: “If there’s another terrorist attack, it’s all over. They’ll turn the country into complete and total fascism.”

I’d be the last person to claim with any certainty what would or wouldn’t happen in such an instance. (Again, I have my doubts that such an attack would do the work of the right that people think it would do, but that’s another conversation for another day.)

But I think it’s worth examining the claim less as a prediction of the future, less for what it says about Trump and the GOP or the US, than what it says about the state of the American left.

There’s an assumption built into the claim that national security and national security crises are inherently the province and the project of the right, that such situations always redound to the benefit of reactionaries and revanchists. I think that’s wrong—revealingly wrong—on two fronts.

First, historically, as much as they were moments of revanchism and repression, national security crises were also moments of advance, offering opportunities to the left.

The main moments of African American progress, as Rogers Smith and Phil Klinker argued in The Unsteady March, were times of warfare (the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War). During the Cold War, civil rights activists faced a tremendous amount of repression from the American state; they were tarred as Communists and traitors and much else. Yet, they also knew how to turn the Cold War into an opportunity for themselves.

Outside the US, similar dynamics obtain. Lenin would certainly have greeted it as news that national security was the domain of the right: Despite the setbacks World War I posed to the left, he saw it in the end as an incubator of the revolution in Russia. And would the French have abolished the monarchy outside a context of pan-European war?

I’m hardly saying we’re in a comparable situation today; we’re not. But the fact that we’re not in a comparable situation is something that needs to be interrogated, historically and critically, and not naturalized as some sort of ontological fact of politics.

What we’re facing today is, among other things, the product of the weakness of the left, both in terms of its organizational capacity and its political analysis, and the multiple ways in which the American state can conduct warfare and police the globe without mobilizing all of society. But again, these developments need to be understood historically and not reified.

Second, this change in the historical relationship between the left and crises of national security also reveals our failure on the left to fully develop something like a foreign policy, much less a larger analysis of the relationship between domestic and international politics. This was made painfully clear during the Sanders campaign.

In the face of the depredations of WWI and the abdication of the Tsar, the Bolsheviks offered peace, land, and bread. What have we to offer?

At some point, the war on terror, and its underlying assumptions, will have to be confronted by the left. We have to have an answer, an analysis, about the global situation, what the relationship is between American action and international developments, not just in the context of war but also in the context of peace. So that if/when there is another terrorist attack, we have something to say beyond “no dumb wars.” (It’s telling that Obama’s position against the Iraq War is probably the most coherent statement—on the order of peace, land, and bread—to emanate out of the liberal/left side of the spectrum since 9/11.)

The fact, in other words, that we think a terrorist attack will redound solely to the benefit of Trump and the GOP says as much about us as it does about Trump, the GOP, and the rest of the country.

12.

One of the advantages of political trajectories like my own—where you come to the left somewhat later in life, where you start out as a fairly moderate, in some ways even conservative, liberal type, and are dragged to the left by a combination of events, friends, teachers, circumstances, reading, and your own head—is that you don’t see non-leftists (including liberals) as a permanent, intractable enemy, incapable of changing their views. You tend to see possibilities for transformation, and you have faith in things like organizing, and you tend to see liberalism as a multivalent ideology that can go in any number of ways. So while I criticize liberals a lot, I’ve always resisted the polarization that sees liberalism as a static, benighted formation or leftism as something you’re somehow born to.

The other advantage is that you don’t have to do that thing that some liberals—especially the ones with radical pasts, whether as anarchists, Marxists, Maoists, members of the ISO or the SWP or PL or whatever—do. You don’t have to slay some youthful ghost within yourself, you don’t have to patrol the boundaries of reasonableness (lest you or someone around you backslide), you don’t have lecture other people on the need for compromise and coalition, as if you were the first person in the world to discover such virtues, and you don’t have that perpetual feeling of embarrassment and anxiety about other leftists acting foolishly. Because you know—from personal experience—that even the moderate man of reasonableness can sometimes act the fool, too.

13.

Reading Vasilly Grossman’s Life and Fate on a winter’s day up at my parents’.

I don’t know if it’s my mood, the cold, the dark, or the political climate outside, but I feel a sad sense of identification with these Jewish commissars trying, against all odds, to teach the troops that communism requires the overcoming of all forms of ethnic chauvinism, including Jewish chauvinism, because chauvinistic forms of identity are always the voice of fascism.

I also feel a sad sense of identification with these Old Bolsheviks in Stalin’s labor camps, idiotically, haplessly holding onto their sense of revolutionary virtue against all the criminals and thugs arrayed against them, these not quite yet broken Bolsheviks trying desperately to believe that their political morality is not just superior to but stronger than that brutal lowlife cynicism that always claims to be more in touch with the world than the revolution that brought the world into being.

We, all of us, seem to have been fighting this fight for a very long time.

14.

I’ve always been suspicious of the discourse of conformity.

Whether the object of critique is totalitarianism or the midcentury man in the grey flannel suit or the denizens of the welfare state, the tendency is to depict a society without individuals, a mass of unthinking automatons, blindly following the crowd, merging themselves with the crowd, losing themselves in the crowd.

One of the reasons I love Life and Fate—and why I think novels like 1984 or treatises like The Origins of Totalitarianism (at least the last third, which everyone pays the most attention to or books like The Captive Mind are off the mark—is that it gives the lie to that image of conformity precisely at a moment when you’d most expect it: the Soviet Union during the war years.

In one of the most amazing scenes in the novel, Grossman narrates what’s running through the heads of a small tank brigade, and it’s the sheer accumulation of differentiating detail that makes you realize how wrong Orwell, Arendt, critics of the 50s, and others were/are:

One soldier was singing; another, his eyes half-closed, was full of dire forebodings; a third was thinking about home; a fourth was chewing some bread and sausage and thinking about the sausage [I love that little detail]; a fifth, his mouth wide open, was trying to identify a bird on a tree; a sixth was worrying about whether he’d offended his mate by swearing at him the previous night; a seventh, still furious, was dreaming of giving his enemy—the commander of the tank in the front—a good punch on the jaw; an eighth was composing a farewell poem to the autumn forest; a ninth was thinking about a girl’s breasts; a tenth was thinking about his dog…an eleventh was thinking how good it would be to live alone in a hut in the forest, drinking spring-water, eating berries and going about barefoot; a twelfth was wondering whether to feign sickness and have a rest in hospital; a thirteenth was remembering a fairy-tale he had heard as a child; a fourteenth was remembering the last time he had talked to his girl—he felt glad that they had now separated for ever; a fifteenth was thinking about the future—after the war he would like to run a canteen.

The humanism of that passage is so much more powerful than the putative humanism that critics of totalitarianism or of midcentury conformity in capitalist America/welfarist Britain claim to stand for.

15.

When I assumed my three-year term as department chair in May 2014, I realized I was taking over from a long, long line of crazy hoarders.

The first thing I did was to dismantle an entire wall of filing cabinets in the chair’s office that were filled with useless paper stretching back to the 1970s. Most of the stuff was tossed; the documents of historical importance or institutional interest I had converted into electronic files or sent to the College archives. That took about a semester.

The second thing I did was to have Barbara Haugstatter, our department administrator of unflagging energy and bottomless devotion to the faculty and students, go through and toss out the pounds and pounds of crap—ancient printers, crusty blue books, and God knows what else—that had accumulated in our storage room, which is about the size of a Manhattan apartment. That has taken about two and half years. But now it has the airiness of a loft in Soho.

And last week I spent a few days completing my long dreamed of, and most cherished, project: converting the electronic Dropbox system that my genius predecessor, Paisley Currah, set up, God love him—a filing system so sophisticated and insane, only John Nash could understand it—into something more manageable that I can pass onto my successor when I step down as chair (yay!) at the end of the spring semester.

This is the legacy I’m most proud of: not our battles for academic freedom, not our internal reforms and transformations of the department, but this massive housekeeping effort.

Alas, only my mother will appreciate it.

16.

I’ve been waiting two and half years to launch this document. Now it begins: “Notes For the Next Chair.”

 

 

 

Against the Politics of Fear

This is a confession.

In the last few days, I’ve gotten a lot of emails and comments asking me why I seem, in my Facebook posts and tweets, to downplay the threat of Trump. Why I resist the comparisons to Hitler and the Nazis, why I emphasize the continuities between Trump and previous Republicans, why I insist on attending to the fractures and cleavages within his coalition.

Now, of course, nothing I say is meant to downplay the threat at all; it’s all designed to get us to see it more clearly (clearly, of course, by my lights), and while I don’t see my posts or tweets primarily or even secondarily as organizing tools, I’d like to think they give us some potential sense of leverage over the situation. But let me not get too fancy or fussy in my response; let me simply take this criticism head on.

There are a lot of academic, intellectual, and scholarly reasons I could cite for why I say what I say about Trump, and you probably know them all, and they’re all relevant and important. But there is, I recognize, something deeper going on for me. And that is that I am fundamentally allergic to the politics of fear. That term is complicated (I explore it a lot in my first book), so forgive the very truncated, simple version I’m about to give here.

The politics of fear doesn’t mean a politics that points to or invokes or even relies on threats, real or false. It doesn’t mean a politics that is emotive (what politics isn’t?) or paranoid. It means something quite different: a politics that is grounded on fear, that takes inspiration and meaning from fear, that sees in fear a wealth of experience and a layer of profundity that cannot be found in other experiences (experiences that are more humdrum, that are more indebted to Enlightenment principles of reason and progress, that put more emphasis on the amenability of politics and culture to intervention and change), a politics that sees in Trump the revelation of some deep truth about who we are, as political agents, as people, as a people.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe this kind of politics. At a very deep and personal level. I loathe its operatic-ness, the way it performs concern and care when all it really is about is narcissism and a desperate desire for a fix. I loathe its false sense of depth and profundity. I loathe its belligerent confidence that it, and only it, understands the true awfulness of the world. I loathe the sense of exhilaration and enthusiasm it derives from being in touch with this awfulness, the more onerous citizenship, to borrow a phrase from Susan Sontag, it constructs on the basis of this experience.

And so if I have a weakness or a blind spot—and I genuinely see how it can be a blind spot—it’s to political discussions and mobilizations that repeat this kind of politics, even when they come from the left. I say it’s a weakness or a blind spot because in the course of trying to avoid this kind of politics, I may wind up, inadvertently, giving the impression that something is not as dangerous as it is. I may wind up overstating its familiarity and intelligibility. While I still refuse to believe that pointing out the precedents for a current danger somehow diminishes that danger, I know my Burke well enough to know that when we pare back the exoticism, novelty, and strangeness of a thing, when we try to make it more proportionate to our understanding, it can have the accompanying effect (and affect) of making that thing seem less dangerous.

In any event, among the many reasons the election of Trump has so depressed me, why I’ve not commented much since the election and have mostly stayed off social media, is that it has given license to the politics of fear on the left. Particularly on social media. Once again, we have that sense that we are face to face with some deep, dark truth of the republic. Once again, we have that sense those of us who insist that the horribles of the world should not and cannot have the last word, are somehow naifs, with our silly faith in the Enlightenment, in politics, in the possibility that we can change these things, that politics can be about something else, something better. I find that sensibility deeply conservative (not in my sense of the word but in the more conventional sense), and I resist it with every fiber of my being.

I feel like how I imagine left-wing socialists in Europe must have felt in August 1914: having imagined—and readied themselves for the possibility—that the world was heading to a confrontation on their terms, they suddenly found themselves dragged back into what seemed like the most ancient of disputes. This is just not the kind of politics I believe in.

And while some will say, pfff, regardless of what you believe in, it’s the politics we have, I think their putative realism is as intoxicated with an ideal, a dream—the ideal that we traffic in dark and deep truths, that when the world is horrible, we suddenly know it for what it is—as mine is. More so. I want no part of it.

So while I won’t ever look away from what Trump is, I insist on looking upon him through the categories that I would look upon any other political formation. I insist on focusing on things like policy, law, institutions, coalitions, ideology, elites, and so on. (Matt Yglesias is quite good on this issue.) I insist on seeing in him the normal rules of politics and the established institutions of politics: it wasn’t the beating heart of darkness that sent him to the White House, after all; it was, in the most immediate and proximate sense of a cause, the fucking Electoral College.

Viva Las Vegas!

As we head into the final days of the election, some thoughts, observations, and provocations—by turns, cantankerous, narrow, and crabby, and, I hope, generous, capacious, and open to the future.

1.

As the polls tighten, there’s a lot of left-blaming and left-fretting among Clinton supporters. That fits with a long-standing psycho-political syndrome among liberals of attacking the left—a syndrome in which the left often plays its own not so healthy part.

But there’s little basis for that syndrome in reality, at least in this election. Not that this particular reality has much impact on the self-styled reality-based community. But it’s important to register that reality nonetheless:

“The problems Hillary Clinton is having do not have to do with the left,” says Matt Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State, in an interview….”There is not much of any evidence of a drop-off in support for her from the left-wing of the ideological spectrum.”….Like Jill Stein or not, the drag she has been on Clinton basically amounts to a rounding error.

2.

A story Jacob Levy reported on Facebook today leaves me with this embittered thought.

Liberals in the media, academia, political circles, and on social media who support Clinton act as if your one vote—out of the more than 100 million cast—determines the fate of the republic. If you vote for Stein (whether in a safe state or not), you are personally responsible for Trump’s inauguration.

These voices are often the very same people who, when challenged about Clinton’s voting record in the Senate or Obama’s policies, will say: Clinton was only one voice in a Senate, out of…a hundred voices. Obama was one lonely man arrayed against…three veto points.

Somewhere in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith has a passage about how we identify with the trials and travails of a king, giving him all of our sympathy and understanding, yet are so repelled by the tribulations of the lowly that we can scarce understand what they’re going through.

The difficulties and challenges of the most elite sectors of the political class are acutely felt by liberal journalists and commentators. And the calculations and concerns of the lowly citizen? Fuhgettaboutit.

3.

Someone, please, please, write a parody soon of the latest fashion of white men tweeting and posting about those intuitively sensible women and black people voting for Hillary—without any need to be organized because “they just get it”—and thereby “saving our democracy one more time.” The whole genre, with its pandering assumptions about the unschooled, hardheaded good sense of these authentic, sturdy souls who are uncorrupted by fancy ideas of social change because they studied at the school of hard knocks, makes me want to puke. It’s pure Nixonism for liberals.

4.

Aside from Chris Christie—who terrified me at a visceral level, in the same way Trump scares a lot of other folks; I think it was the way Christie went after schoolteachers—the GOP candidate I was made most nervous by was Rubio. Not because Rubio was an especially good candidate—he wasn’t—but because it always has seemed that the only way the GOP could ever reverse its downward fall would be to appeal to Latino voters.

But there was a reason that’s never really frightened me much either. Because I’ve been hearing this line of bullshit for years: once the Republicans start appealing to Latin@s, all will be well. People forget the ballyhoo around the fact that George W. Bush could say hello in Spanish. That was going to change everything forever. (Though it’s true, as Joe Lowndes reminded me last night, that Bush did get a bit more than 40% of the Latin@ vote in 2004.) Or remember Romney’s son Craig, who was fluent in Spanish? That was going to win him Nevada.

There are two reasons Latin@s haven’t become a reliable part of the Republican coalition.

The first, of course, is the racism and revanchism of a considerable part of the GOP base. Just look how they took to Bush’s compassionate conservatism.

(Little tangent: In 2000, Irving Kristol said to me, in disgust, look at those idiots, arguing on the convention floor about the prescription drug benefit; it’s not Athens, it’s not Rome; give them the goddam benefit and be done with it. Well, they did, and it nearly destroyed the party.)

The second reason, though, is this: what GOP fantasists imagine creating is a multicultural, identity-friendly party of capital. The problem is we already have such a party. Who needs two?

5.

Untimely meditations:

…to present hitler as particularly incompetent, as an aberration, a perversion, humbug, a pecuilar pathological case, while setting up other bourgeois politicians as models, models of something he has failed to attain, seems to me no way to combat hitler.

—Brecht, Journals, February 28, 1942

6.

Two nights ago, I had a terrible anxiety dream that Trump won the election (defying all my claims in my waking life that Clinton will win handily.)

There I was, the day after the election, in the streets, watching some kind of militia or band of street fucks marching by and declaring, Pinochet-style, that from now on women had to wear skirts. (I think I got this from a scene in the movie Missing.)

While watching this thuggish display of misogynistic power, my heart pounding with fear, I found myself wondering, in the dream, what part of the Constitution the Trumpists would find most amenable to their purposes, and how they’d get around Article I, which in my dream, seemed like a major constraint on Congress.

I kept saying, in my dream, “enumerated powers, enumerated powers,” with that ghostly mantra “big boys don’t cry” from this classic 70s tune echoing throughout my head.

7.

I once asked Steve Skowronek—who’s probably one of the four or five most fertile minds of the last quarter-century’s political science—what kind of role opposition parties play in toppling partisan/presidential regimes. What role did the 1932 Democrats play in overthrowing the Gilded Age regime? What role did the 1980 Republicans playing in overthrowing the New Deal regime?

Not much, he said, rather bleakly.

Regimes tend to collapse of their own weight, driven to destruction by the long-term consequences of the actions of their own elites and activists. While they ultimately need an opposition to topple them, the only reason the opposition can do that is that these regimes are already tipping over on their own. I think Skowronek ultimately got this from Skocpol’s (early Skocpol) theory of states and revolutions.

In any event, that’s how I see the GOP and conservatism today. When it goes, it won’t be because of the left; it’ll be, ultimately, because of George W. Bush, who more than anyone sowed the long-term seeds of the GOP’s decline, and whatever unlucky bastard—like Jimmy Carter or Herbert Hoover—happens to be the last guy or gal on the watch.

8.

To paraphrase Hans Gruber: You asked for down-ballot evidence of the coming realignment. Theo, I give you the Silver State (see 11/5/16 update, 7 am).

Donald Trump will be in Reno on Saturday, but the Republicans almost certainly lost Nevada on Friday. Trump’s path was nearly impossible, as I have been telling you, before what happened in Clark County on Friday. But now he needs a Miracle in Vegas on Election Day — and a Buffalo Bills Super Bowl championship is more likely — to turn this around. The ripple effect down the ticket probably will cost the Republicans Harry Reid’s Senate seat, two GOP House seats and control of the Legislature.

9.

Not only is Trump about to do on a national scale what Pete Wilson did in California—that is, drive up the Latin@ vote, consigning the GOP to a longterm decline—but Latin@s, who in many states gave Sanders the margin, or close to the margin, of victory, are set to play a similar role in the liberal/left coalition that southern and eastern European immigrants played during the New Deal years, reconstituting our sense of the working class, the middle class, and national identity.

10.

One day, the story of the Culinary Union in Nevada will be told.

How a union whose membership is now 56% Latin@ was built from the bottom up, in Las Vegas, in a right-to-work state, and how that union is now poised to politically and economically transform this state in fundamental ways that go far beyond the election.

How this union was seeded back in the 1980s by organizers from New Haven, fresh from their victory in organizing women and people of color at Yale, organizers who had cut their teeth on the antiwar and civil rights struggles of the 1960s, organizers who had come to an understanding that the progressive future of this country lay in a reconstitution of organized labor as a multiracial and intersectional movement of men and women, rather than in the abandonment of organized labor as the alleged and archaic bastion of white working class men, which is what the neoliberal forces of the Democratic Party were coming to believe.

After Election Day, this will be the real question for liberals and the left: Will we settle for a corporate identity politics of symbols and circuses or will we create what the culinary workers in Nevada have created, a genuinely multiracial working class politics of justice and solidarity?

The US: Is She Becoming Undun?

One of the things we’ve been seeing more and more of this past decade, and now in this election, is that state institutions that many thought (wrongly) were above politics—the Supreme Court, the security establishment, the Senate filibuster—are in fact the crassest instruments of partisan politics, sites of circus antics of the sort the Framers (and their hagiographers) traditionally associated with the lower house of a legislative body.

This, I’ve argued before, has been increasingly the case since the end of the Cold War.

Think of the Clarence Thomas hearings, impeachment over a blow job, Bush v. Gore, the manipulation of the security establishment and intelligence (and the sullying of national icon Colin Powell) going into the Iraq War, the rise of the filibuster-proof majority, the comments of Ginsburg on Trump that she had to retract, and now, today, the revelation of possible FBI interference in the election.

Let’s set aside the question of how new any of this is (I’ve argued that most of it is not). What is new, maybe, is an increasing brazenness and openness about it all, as if it simply doesn’t matter to the fate of the republic if our elites reveal themselves to be the most self-serving tools of whatever cause they proclaim as their own.

And here I think there may be something worth thinking about.

Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, the American state was, relatively speaking, a young thing, still a fledgling (compared to those elder civilizations in Europe or Asia) that had undergone a catastrophic civil war and had—again, relative to Europe—only the most recently acquired sense of international standing. And suddenly it found itself catapulted, in the late 1910s, onto a truly global stage (not just across the Pacific but across the globe) with a commanding international presence. A republic fated (and feted) to fend off tyranny.

And for 70 years, thanks to communism, the US managed to keep its shit together, to maintain its sorry-ass, jerry-rigged state apparatus, legitimated as it all was by the fear of the Soviet alternative.

And then that all ended in 1989.

Suddenly those institutions no longer felt the need to be quite as disciplined by an external threat as they once perhaps were. Suddenly, Supreme Court justices, Wise Men and Women of the national security establishment, and wielders of the counter-majoritarian veto were freed of their historic constraints. Suddenly, people were freed to talk about domestic fascism, to name the leader of one of the two major political parties as a Hitler, and his millions of followers as Nazis, in a way that they would have been terrified to do when communism was still an alternative and such rhetorical moves could have devastating international consequences.

The United States has certainly seen major and fundamental challenges to the legitimacy of its institutions before. So much so that Samuel Huntington would speak, in recent memory, of a crisis of governability here (though he cleverly called it a “crisis of democracy,” when he clearly thought democracy itself was the problem).

But where Huntington thought the threat lay in the citizenry, and the crisis acute and immediate, I’m seeing, maybe, something else: a slow-motion erosion, over decades, of legitimacy, brought about not by a cynical or radicalized citizenry but by a ruling class that seems to have lost all sense of responsibility. As if there simply is no country left for it to govern.

The US: Is she starting to become undun?

Edmund Niemann, 1945-2016

Edmund Niemann, the pianist, has died. He was a member of Steve Reich and Musicians. The New York Times said, upon his debut in 1984, that “his playing was technically dazzling, his musicality unquestionable.”

I wrote this about Ed, who was my piano teacher when I was younger, thirteen months ago on Facebook:

In 1979 or 1980, when I was 12 or 13, I started taking piano lessons on the Upper West Side.

I rode the train from Chappaqua to Grand Central, and then took the Shuttle and the Broadway/7th Avenue line (I don’t know what it was called back then) up to 92nd and Broadway. The neighborhood was sketchy; looking back, I’m surprised my parents let me do this on my own.

My teacher was Ed Niemann. I had met him at music camp. He was a fantastic teacher and accomplished pianist (he was part of Steve Reich’s ensemble and is on the original recording of Music for 18 Musicians). He introduced me to the music of Stefan Wolpe, Milton Babbitt, and Laurie Anderson.

For a time, I wanted to be a pianist (I was in fact pretty bad), mostly, I think, because I was captivated by that neighborhood and what seemed like the fugitive glamor of the struggling artist in bohemia.

Anyway, today, heading to Brooklyn College on the 2 train, I ran into Ed. I hadn’t seen or been in touch with him in 30 years. He didn’t recognize me, but when I told him who I was, he remembered me and said, “You write things now, don’t you” (or something like that).

I’m not exactly living a life of fugitive glamor or struggling in bohemia, but it made me smile to think of the through line linking my life today to my fantasies back then.

As a teacher, Ed set high standards. I never lived up to them, but there were few teachers whom I wanted to please more. He had a ponytail then—we were just coming off the 1970s—which in my suburban, sheltered adolescence seemed somehow out of synch with those standards. I quickly learned that it wasn’t: a good life lesson about where authority truly lies and how it actually works.

Ed was wide-ranging in his tastes, segueing seamlessly from Bach to Bartok to Marvin Gaye. (He once loaned me his copy of What’s Going On? I don’t think I ever returned it.) That was another life lesson: attend to the work, ignore the larger social meanings and cultural trappings of “high” and “low,” “popular” and “serious.”

He taught me to listen to music, to look out for motifs and harmonic lines, to attend to unanticipated counterpoints, to hear echoes and comments both ironic and sad. I sometimes think I learned how to read music before I learned how to read texts. Not that I ever learned how to really read music: what Ed taught me was to listen and to look, that there was something there to be seen and heard, something there to be found.

Ed also, inadvertently, taught me my limits. As I said above, for a time, I thought about being a pianist. I never discussed this with Ed; I would have been too embarrassed. But seeing him play and watching what it took for him to play, I realized I could never do it. I didn’t have the talent. I didn’t have the will or the wherewithal. That was also important for me to learn.

Most of all, Ed instilled in me a love of music. He didn’t teach me that. He just gave it to me. A gift for which I will be forever grateful.

The Limits of Liberalism at Harvard

One of the claims you hear a lot these days is that the new progressive coalition of the liberal left will consist of women, people of color, and urban professionals of the sorts you find at universities or in the media or Google or places like that. This coalition was first mooted by the McGovern campaign, and a lot of breathless commentary now sees the Democratic Party, particularly in its Clintonite wing, as the fruition of that vision. On any given night on Twitter, you’re sure to find some liberal journalist or academic braying about his happy association with this constellation of forces.

But the recent, successful strike of Harvard’s dining hall workers, many of whom are women and people of color, is a useful demonstration of the limits of that vision. While Harvard’s liberal scholars get $10 million grants to study poverty, Harvard workers like Rosa Ines Rivera are forced to manage realities like this:

I can’t live on what Harvard pays me. I take home between $430 and $480 a week, and this August, I fell behind on my $1,150 rent and lost my apartment. Now my two kids and I are staying with my mother in public housing, with all four of us sharing a single bedroom. I grew up in the projects and on welfare. I want my 8-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son to climb out of the cycle of poverty. But for most of my time at Harvard it’s been hard.

As Rivera explains, the strike brought out into the open all the issues that are so dear to the contemporary liberal imagination: spiraling health care costs, stagnating wages, and the invisibility and disrespect generally shown toward the poor, immigrants, and people of color. (The problem, it should be noted, isn’t limited to Harvard: a recent survey of the University of California found that 70% of its workers struggle to put a decent meal on the table, and nearly half sometimes go hungry.)

The dining hall strike seems like a natural cause for the liberal Harvard professor, no?

While the union and its supporters did a heroic job of mobilizing support on the Harvard campus and its surroundings, the fact remains that only 130 to 150 of Harvard’s instructional staff even signed a petition in support of the strike. And of those, many seem to be instructors, lecturers, visiting faculty, and the like. According to one count, Harvard has nearly 1000 tenure-track or tenured faculty, of whom only  65 signed. Less than 10%, in other words. I can think, off the top of my head, of a lot of big names on the Harvard faculty who are prominently associated with contemporary liberalism, who think Trump and all that he represents is a shanda, who love the multicultural coalition that is the Democratic Party, and who are nowhere to be seen on that petition.

I suspect, though I can’t be sure, that some portion of the faculty who didn’t sign don’t necessarily oppose the cause of the workers. But neither could they be bothered to do much of anything to support them.

William F. Buckley loved to say, “I would rather be governed by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the two thousand people on the faculty of Harvard University.” But when it comes to the working class lives of women, immigrants, and people of color, perhaps Buckley, were he alive today, wouldn’t mind living under a government of the Harvard faculty.

 

1980 v. 2012

In 1980, women made up 49% of the electorate, and voted for Reagan over Carter by a one-point margin. In 2012, women made up 53% of the electorate, and voted for Obama over Romney by an 11-point margin.

In 1980, non-whites made up 12% of the electorate, and voted for Carter over Reagan by anywhere from a 20- to a 70-point margin. In 2012, nonwhites made up 28% of the electorate, and voted for Obama by anywhere from a 50- to a 90-point margin.

In 1980, under-30 voters made up 23% of the electorate, and split evenly between Reagan and Carter. In 2012, under-30 voters made up 19% of the electorate, and voted for Obama over Romney by a 23-point margin.

In 1980, union households made up 26% of the electorate, and voted for Carter over Reagan by a three-point margin. In 2012, union households made up 18% of the electorate, and voted for Obama over Romney by an 18-point margin.

In 1980, liberals made up 17% of the electorate and voted for Carter over Reagan by a 43-percent margin. In 2012, liberals made up 25% of the electorate and voted for Obama over Romney by a 75-point margin.

In 1980, moderates made up 46% of the electorate and voted for Reagan over Carter by a six-point margin. In 2012, moderates made up 41% of the electorate and voted for Obama over Romney by a 15-point margin.

In 1980, conservatives made up 28% of the electorate and voted for Reagan over Carter by a 50-point margin. In 2012, conservatives made up 35% of the electorate and voted for Romney over Obama by a 65-point margin.

Moral of the story: Trump’s defeat in 2016 is/was a foregone conclusion. And reverse the decline in union and younger voters.

Six Reasons for Optimism (and one big one for pessimism)

Below are six causes for optimism. But I should stress, as I have since The Reactionary Mind, that the reason I think the right has not much of a future is that it has won. If you consider its great animating energies since the New Deal—anti-labor, anti-civil rights, and anti-feminism—the right has achieved a considerable amount of success. Either in destroying or beating back these movements. So the hopefulness you read below, it needs to be remembered, is built on the ruins of the left. It reflects a considerable pessimism and arises from a sober realism about where we are right now.

1.

An ABC News poll has Trump at 38% of the popular vote. It’s only one poll, and I haven’t been paying much attention to the polls (what’s the point?), but if Trump does get 38%—which is about what I’ve been thinking he’ll get, plus or minus a point—he’ll be squarely within McGovern territory. With a very few exceptions, he’s rarely broken, in a four-way race, above 40%. (That said, Clinton, with her 50%, according to ABC, won’t be in Nixon territory.) No major-party candidate of the last 50 years, aside from George H.W. Bush, has gotten less than 40% of the vote, and in Bush’s case, it had a lot to do with Perot. This will go down as a catastrophic defeat, at the presidential level, for the Republican Party.

Side note: I notice that my Nixon/Clinton and Trump/McGovern comparisons, along with my silent majority reference, are becoming less controversial.

2.

For all of Trump’s bluster at the third debate about not accepting the election results, I’m confident that once it’s over, and the verdict is in, he and his followers will go, more or less gently, into that good night.

We on the left—perhaps liberals, too—are so used to being defeated, demoralized, and depressed, so used to losing to the right, that we have no sense that the right can suffer the same. We have no sense of the impact this election will have on the Trumpites. We believe their bullshit: we take their sense of entitlement as a sign of deep wells of conviction, of belief in their right and authority, or perhaps even of their actual right and authority, as if this really is their country.

They have a better, more accurate sense of their dwindling political fortune. It’s what gives their rhetoric its enervating rather than exhilarating character. Listen to Pat Buchanan in the 1970s and 1980s: the inventiveness of his brutality, the energy of his cruelty. There’s a world of difference between the expansiveness of that revanchism and the narrow straits that is Trump’s. The former speaks in pages and paragraphs; the latter in two- or three-word fragments, without any Marionetti-like patter of power.

Trump’s is not the voice of confidence, of right, of command. This is not the voice of a man who can lead a rearguard revolt in the streets. This is the voice of a man—and a movement—who is tired, beaten, and demoralized, who starts sentences he can barely muster enough energy to finish.

3.

Consider the decreasing half-life of the American right’s various populist experiments over the past four decades.

In the lead-up to Reagan’s victories in the 1980s, that right-wing populism was represented by the Moral Majority. And it lasted quite a long time, in part because it skillfully fused the racism of the segregation academies issue with the religiosity of school prayer and the gender politics of abortion. That brand managed to carry the GOP all the way from Reagan into the first Bush administration.

Then it was the Christian Coalition, and it lasted a slightly less long time, and with less success. Clinton was president during much of its heyday, and its only electoral victory was the 2000 election of Bush. One of the reasons for its diminution of power, relatively speaking, is that it no longer had the issues of busing and school desegregation to mobilize against the way the Christian Right had in the 1970s and 1980s.

Then it was the Tea Party, which, despite the claims of its defenders and critics, has seen an even shorter time in the sun, in part because the Christian Right had been so successful on the abortion front, at least at the state level.

And now it’s Trump and the alt-right. And you know what I think about how much time it has left on this earth.

Analysts of the right tend to think that conservatism is a permanent feature of modern political life, and it is. But what they don’t get is that its existence is cyclical. It has a rise and fall, a life and death, in response to the success or failure of the left.

We’re coming on the years of its fall, and it has been long in the making (since the administration of George W. Bush, I’ve argued). Among the best pieces of evidence for that decline, I think, are the decreasing half-lives of its populist expressions, these ever more desperate attempts to recreate the magic of its originating moment in the backlash against the labor movement, the Civil Rights Movement, and the women’s movement.

4.

Some time around the election of George W. Bush, Irving Kristol—not Bill Kristol, but Bill’s father, the real brains of the operation—told me:

American conservatism lacks for political imagination. It’s so influenced by business culture and by business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left. If you read Marx, you’d learn what a political imagination could do.

That (and the end of the Cold War), he said, is “one of the reasons I really not am not writing much these days. I don’t know the answers.”

This was not the voice of a tired, old man, though he was tired and old and a man. This was the voice of a movement that had lost its way, its raison d’être.

5.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, California was the pacesetter for the right. It gave us Nixon, Reagan, and Proposition 13.

In the 1990s, California was again the pacesetter, only in the opposite direction: Pete Wilson tried to do on the state level what Trump is now trying to do at the national level. It proved to be a spectacular political failure, long-term, driving much of the state, which previously had been a Republican state (between 1952 and 1992, California went for the Democratic presidential candidate only once), into the hands of the Democrats.

6.

I hear a lot of folks saying how terrible it is that a third to 40% of the electorate would support Trump. And it is.

But put this in historical perspective: once upon a time, not so long ago, that kind of racism and cruelty propelled the Republican Party to the White House. Not once, not twice, but again and again and again. No more.

And if you think that the difference is that the racism and cruelty were once quiet but are now loud, that argument too can be flipped on its head: It once took only the faintest of dog whistles to get the majority out to the polls. Now it takes a blaring speaker system and even that doesn’t work.

The country that elected a black president with a foreign-sounding name—twice—may have turned a certain kind of corner.

Private Goods, from Florence Nightingale to Wendy Brown

Yesterday, Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown gave a once-in-a-lifetime talk at the Graduate Center—the kind that reminds you what it means to be a political theorist—about the way in which financialization—not just privatization or corporatization—had transformed the academy. Through a deft re-reading of Max Weber’s two vocation lectures, Brown showed how much the contemporary university’s frenzied quest for rankings and ratings has come to mirror Wall Street’s obsession with shareholder value.

In the course of her talk, Brown briefly dilated on the suspicion of public goods in today’s academy. She referenced one university leader saying, with no apparent irony, that the problem with state funding is that it comes with strings attached. The unsaid implication, of course, is that private funding is somehow free of those constraints, a comment that Brown used to open a window onto our contemporary infatuation, even in the academy, with the world of private money and private funding.

So it was with a weird sense of dissonance that, after I got home from Brown’s talk, I stumbled upon this passage from Lytton Strachey’s infamous essay on Florence Nightingale in his Eminent Victorians. Strachey is talking about Nightingale’s expedition to the Crimean War in 1854, where she takes over the nursing care in a hospital for Britain’s wounded in the outskirts of Istanbul. The conditions in the hospital are atrocious, but Nightingale takes to remedying that with a sense of Napoleonic purpose. So skilled and effective is she that a Mr. Macdonald, the administrator of a private charity for the wounded funded by the London Times, makes sure that all of his fund’s monies go directly under her control.

Most observers are ecstatic. The response of the British government, Strachey notes archly, “was different.”

What! Was the public service to admit, by accepting outside charity, that it was unable to discharge its own duties without the assistance of private and irregular benevolence? Never! And accordingly when Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, our Ambassador at Constantinople, was asked by Mr. Macdonald to indicate how the Times Fund could best be employed, he answered that there was indeed one object to which it might very well be devoted—the building of an English Protestant Church at Pera.

Autres temps, autres mœurs.

 

Why I Won’t Be Appearing at the Brooklyn Commons on Wednesday

On Wednesday, as I announced in my last blog, I’m scheduled to appear on The Katie Halper Show, which is being broadcast live from the Brooklyn Commons. I’ve decided I can’t go on the show because of the venue.

Brooklyn Commons is the space that last month hosted Christopher Bollyn—an anti-Semite who seems to find a Jewish conspiracy wherever he turns, who can’t seem to speak of a crime or injustice in the world without saying the word “Jewish”—despite repeated requests from prominent progressives and leftists that Brooklyn Commons not do so. Though I knew of that controversy, I hadn’t made the connection to the venue when I agreed to come on Katie’s show. After it was pointed out to me, I asked Katie if we could move the show. When she said it couldn’t be moved, I told her I couldn’t do it.

I’m sure that many institutions and venues where I have spoken probably have hosted equally odious, if not more odious, speakers. Universities are the obvious example. And it seems that Brooklyn Commons, in addition to providing inexpensive, subsidized space to a variety of progressive groups, including many of my friends and comrades at Jacobin, hosts the occasional speaker propounding a different view.

I’m making a more limited and personal decision here. This is a local venue, not far from where I live, that has come to be identified not as a free-speech zone, not as an academic seminar or university lecture series, but as a space for progressives. Bollyn is a vile anti-Semite. I am Jewish. I am also an anti-Zionist. I have long insisted that we must make a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Because of my Judaism, and my anti-Zionism, I feel a special obligation not simply to denounce anti-Semitism, but also not to associate with it or with non-university-type institutions that cater to it or provide a platform for it. Particularly when those institutions were asked and provided every reason not to do that, and in response, could only proffer what seems like an ever-shifting and shady litany of excuses and excuse-making.

I tend to shy away from pro forma denunciations of faraway acts. I dislike the ritualized tsk-tsk-this-is-terrible-now-go-back-to-whatever-you-were-doing that we’re all called upon to perform against obvious and universally acknowledged wrongs like anti-Semitism or racism. But when an issue touches me in so many ways, when it is so close to home in every sense—geographically, politically, personally—I feel that I have no choice.

I want to be clear that I am speaking here for myself. This is not a criticism of Katie, for whom I have the greatest affection and respect and who I know has zero sympathy for Bollyn’s views, or of Jacobin or other organizations that have vigorously protested the hosting of Bollyn yet, for a number of practical reasons (cost being the most important), have elected to remain at Brooklyn Commons. I do not in any sense read their decision to remain as an endorsement of Bollyn or the decision to host him. I’m not trying to organize people or rally them to a cause; mine is more a personal than a political decision. I simply could not feel clean walking through those doors.