Corey Robin's Blog, page 45

Michael Tomasky, from June to December

Michael Tomasky today, seven days after the attack in Orlando:

I want to advance a theory: Americans in 2016 may have a less reactive response to terrorism than they had 15 years ago….We may also have figured out, or most of us may have, that the bluster and gasconade of the fear-mongers hasn’t really done us much good.

Michael Tomasky in December, four days after the attack in San Bernadino:

…the rights you [Muslims] have as Americans have to be earned, fought for….If anything Obama should have been more emphatic about this. He should now go around to Muslim communities in Detroit and Chicago and the Bay Area and upstate New York and give a speech that tells them: If you want to be treated with less suspicion, then you have to make that happen.

 

 

 

If you want Trump-ism to go, you have to reform the Democratic Party

A thought.

One of the reasons that big business hasn’t been able to step in and reverse the electoral train wreck that is the Trump campaign is not that the racist rank and file of the GOP base has so much power that big business is helpless. It is instead that big business feels relatively assured that even if the GOP goes down to defeat, it will have a friend and ally in Hillary Clinton’s administration and neoliberal elites within the Democratic Party.

Clarence Thomas, of all people, gives us a clue that this may be the thinking among these elite sectors of the business class.

In his concurring/dissenting opinion in the 2003 case McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, which upheld the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law, Thomas writes:

The joint opinion [of the majority, authored by Justices Stevens and O’Connor] also places a substantial amount of weight on the fact that “in 1996 and 2000, more than half of the top 50 soft-money donors gave substantial sums to both major national parties,” and suggests that this fact “leav[es] room for no other conclusion but that these donors were seeking influence, or avoiding retaliation, rather than promoting any particular ideology.” Ante, at 38 (emphasis in original). But that is not necessarily the case. The two major parties are not perfect ideological opposites, and supporters or opponents of certain policies or ideas might find substantial overlap between the two parties. If donors feel that both major parties are in general agreement over an issue of importance to them, it is unremarkable that such donors show support for both parties. This commonsense explanation surely belies the joint opinion’s too-hasty conclusion drawn from a relatively innocent fact.

Thomas not only points out that there is “substantial [ideological] overlap between the two parties,” but notes that donors—and, remember, he’s talking about elite, wealthy donors here—have good reasons to give to both parties. Whichever party wins office, those donors can expect that their material interests will be fulfilled. Not because of bribery, simple quid-pro-quo’s, or access or influence, but simply because both parties are so ideologically amenable to meeting the needs and interests of wealthy donors.

Which leads to a second thought.

While GOP officeholders in Congress certainly want to be elected—and thus have an interest in the party remaining electorally competitive, at both the congressional and presidential level, and avoiding train wrecks like Trump—they have good reason to believe that they can rely upon state-level gerrymandering and dirty tricks to keep them in power. So if getting reelected is their main concern, they have little incentive to challenge the Trump-ist base. (This may change after November; we’ll see.)

And as long as the Democratic Party remains beholden to these elite donors that Thomas is talking about, those elements of big business that might otherwise want to make sure that the Republican Party remains electorally viable—if for no other reason than to have a reliable ally that will take care of their business interests in Congress—will have even less incentive to challenge the base.

Which leads to two conclusions:

First, for the foreseeable future, there will be no element within the Republican Party that will have either sufficient interest or power to challenge the base.

Second, not until the big business elements of the Democratic Party are purged or curbed—and thus forced to fall back on the GOP as their base of power—will there be any basis for a real challenge to Trump-ism within the GOP.

 

When Advertising is Action: Clarence Thomas Channels Hannah Arendt and Friedrich von Hayek

In Lorillard Tobacco Company v. Reilly, the Supreme Court struck down a Massachusetts ban on tobacco advertising on First Amendment grounds. In his concurring opinion, Clarence Thomas writes:

The State misunderstand the purpose of advertising. Promoting a product that is not yet pervasively used (or a cause that is not yet widely supported) is a primary purpose of advertising. Tobacco advertisements would be no more misleading for suggesting pervasive use of tobacco products than are any other advertisements that attempt to expand a market for a product, or to rally support for a political movement. Any inference from the advertisements that business would like for tobacco use to be pervasive is entirely reasonable, and advertising that gives rise to that inference is in now way deceptive. [Emphasis added.]

There’s so much—from the history of political thought, conservative thought, and free-market libertarianism—packed into these three sentences, one might be forgiven for missing the breadth and power of what Thomas is arguing.

First, notice the explicit comparison, the affinity, that Thomas draws between commercial advertising for a commodity or product and political advocacy and action for a cause.

Part of this comparison has to do with the ongoing effort by constitutional conservatives to draw ever wider First-Amendment boundaries around commercial speech: the more commercial speech can be elevated to the status of political speech, the stronger First Amendment protection it will have. In 44 Liquormart v. Rhode Island, Thomas had written:

I do not see a philosophical or historical basis for asserting that “commercial” speech is of “lower value” than “noncommercial” speech.

In Lorrilard, Thomas pursues that argument, insisting that commercial speech is of equal status with noncommercial speech and thus entitled to similar levels of First Amendment protection.

But there is something else going on with those clauses I’ve bolded above: “a cause that is not yet widely supported…or to rally support for a political movement.”

Thomas is here claiming that advertising is similar to political advocacy and action. Like the political activist or organizer who seeks to turn an unpopular, minority cause into a mass movement, the advertiser seeks to turn a niche product into a mass commodity.

In his Constitution of Liberty, Hayek makes a similar argument, claiming that throughout history, it has been the great men of money and property who have subsidized not only the development of mass commodities—turning previously expensive luxuries, which had been confined to the wealthy elite, into mass products and mass tastes—but also the cultivation of heterodox beliefs and minority persuasions.

Hayek identifies this process in the economic realm—

The important point is not merely that we gradually learn to make cheaply on a large scale what we already know how to make expensively in small quantities but that only from an advanced position does the next range of desires and possibilities become visible, so that the selection of new goals and the effort toward their achievement will begin long before the majority can strive for them. If what they will want after their present goals are realized is soon to be made available, it is necessary that the developments that will bear fruit for the masses in twenty or fifty years’ time should be guided by the views of people who are already in the position of enjoying them.

—as well as in the noncommercial realm of culture, ideas, morals and politics, where significant investments of money are required to support causes and beliefs that otherwise would have little material support:

The importance of the private owner of substantial property, however, does not rest simply on the fact that his existence is an essential condition for the preservation of the structure of competitive enterprise. The man of independent means is an even more important figure in a free society when he is not occupied with using his capital in the pursuit of material gain but uses it in the service of aims which bring no material return.

…

What little leadership can be expected from the majority is shown by their inadequate support of the arts wherever they have replaced the wealthy patron. And this is even more true of those philanthropic or idealistic movements by which the moral values of the majority are changed.

…

It is only natural that the development of the art of living and of the non-materialistic values should have profited most from the activities of those who had no material worries.

When I first proposed this line of argument about Hayek, it generated a considerable controversy. What perhaps got lost in that controversy was the notion that for theorists like Hayek, economic action can be understood as a transposition of—or at least bears a correspondence to—political action. This, I’ve argued more generally, is part of a larger move in modern thought, whereby the economy becomes the sublimated field of classic or heroic political action.

It’s interesting to see Clarence Thomas, who claims to have read Hayek (one of his biographers corroborates that claim, only he references Road to Serfdom rather than Constitution of Liberty), channeling a similar notion: that commercial action—in this case, advertising—should be understood in relationship to, or as a variant of, political action.

It puts his First Amendment commercial speech jurisprudence in a different light from how it is conventionally understood: not simply as an attempt to carve out more areas of the market for immunity from government control, but also as an effort to recreate, in the realm of the economy, a sphere for a particular kind of political action.

But there’s an additional element in Thomas’s argument here that bears noting.

The advertiser, for Thomas, is like the political actor insofar as she must use the instruments of persuasion and illusion to achieve her ends. What inspired Thomas’s claim, quoted above, was the State of Massachusetts’s argument that, according to Thomas, “the simple existence of tobacco advertisements misleads people into believing that tobacco use is more pervasive than it actually is.” It was this claim by Massachusetts—that advertising generates an illusory sense of tobacco’s popularity and widespread use—that led Thomas to make his comparison between advertising and political action.

Though Thomas does not explicitly spell this out, the comparison might go like this: Every organizer, activist, or political leader knows that she launches her political cause from a starting point of weakness. The very reason she must turn her issue into a cause is that not enough people support it and she needs that support if she is going to see that causes’s triumph. She has to generate that support. Part of the way she will generate that support is by claiming that in one way or another it’s already there: the masses are silently supportive of her position but are too afraid to act on its behalf; they will be supportive, once they see other people rallying around it. Inevitably, the political organizer or activist will try to nudge that support along, by telling their potential followers that all of their comrades are already out in the commons; they must merely join them to see.

When the First Amendment protects political speech—including, importantly, political speech that is false—it is precisely, Thomas seems to be suggesting, this dimension of speech that lies at the boundaries between fact and fiction that it is protecting.

At the heart of this kind of political action, then, is a straddling of that elusive space between what is, what is not, and what might be. Machiavelli understood that; Hobbes understood that (Leviathan’s massive power is generated in part, as I’ve argued, by healthy and alternating doses of illusion and reality); Nietzsche did, too.

In the modern era, however, no theorist explored that dimension of political action—in both its toxic and tamer variants—more than Hannah Arendt. The toxic variant was to be found in all manner of totalitarianism, as well as in the lies of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. The tamer variants, however, were found in that dimension of action that involved elements of novelty and initiation, in an appreciation that politics is not the realm of Platonic Truth, a deep structure of what is, beneath the surface or behind the scenes, but of multiple and dissonant perspectives on stage, which provide an occasion for persuasive speech and artfulness.

Though Arendt was not nearly as hostile to factual truth as some would have her be, she did offer, between the lines of some of her essays, an appreciation of the art of the liar, for she saw that art as related, in some ways, to the political arts more generally.

The liar is an actor, in the literal sense, and politics, as Arendt reminds us, is a theater of appearances.

But the liar is also an actor in the political sense: she seeks to change the world, turning what is into what isn’t and what isn’t into what is (this is the part that made Arendt so nervous, as it reminded her of the totalitarian ruler). By arraying herself against the world as it is given to us, the liar claims for herself the same freedom that the political actor claims when she brings something new into the world: the freedom to say no to the world as it is, the freedom to make the world into something other than it is.

It’s no accident that the most famous liar in literature is also an adviser to a man of power, for the adviser or counselor has often been thought of as the quintessential political actor. When Iago says to Roderigo, “I am not what I am,” he is affirming that the liar, the dramatic actor, and the political actor all subscribe to elements of the same creed.

The advertiser operates in a similar realm between truth and illusion. She, too, seeks to use the arts of illusion to create new realities. Thomas seems to be emphasizing that dimension of the advertiser’s art.

Whether and how he thinks it relates to these other political arts—Is it meant to be a substitution for those political arts, such that the First Amendment, in protecting commercial speech, finds or identifies a new realm of political action in the sphere of the economy?—remains to be seen.

Muhammad Ali, Thomas Hobbes, and the Politics of Fear

When Muhammad Ali famously said, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcong…they never called me nigger,” he wasn’t just refusing to serve in Vietnam. He was also challenging the ability of the state to define for its citizens whom they should fear and who were their enemies. As Ali said to a group of white college students, who had challenged his position on serving in Vietnam, “You my enemy. My enemy is the white people, not Viet Congs or Chinese or Japanese.”

From the time of Hobbes, one of the leading attributes of sovereignty has been the right of the state to define what threatens a people and how that threat will be responded to. In the state of nature, Hobbes wrote in Elements of the Law, “every man…is judge himself of the necessity of the means, and of the greatness of the danger” he faces. But once we submit to the state, we are forbidden “to be our own judges” of the threats we are facing and how to respond to them. Except in cases of immediate physical threat to ourselves, we must now accede to the sovereign’s assessment of and decision about these threats. The sovereign, as Hobbes says in Leviathan of the state’s control over matters theological, is he “to whom in all doubtfull cases, wee have submitted our private judgments.”

This is why Ali’s challenge to the Vietnam War was so formidable. He wasn’t merely claiming conscientious objector status, though he was. He wasn’t simply claiming the authority of a higher being, though he was. He was asserting the right of the citizen to be the final judge of what threatens or endangers him. In asserting that right, Ali was posing the deepest, most fundamental challenge to the power and authority of the state.

That he also claimed to be more threatened by his own fellow citizens and government than by an officially declared enemy of the state only added to the subversiveness of his challenge. Against the state’s axis of fear, which claims that one’s enemies invariably belong to another country and thus are part and parcel of the international state system, Ali sought to rotate that axis along a different dimension: away from the international state system to the domestic system of social domination and civil subjection.

8 Quick Thoughts on the Emmett Rensin Suspension

Some quick thoughts on Emmett Rensin, who was just suspended from Vox because of his tweets.

This is the second case in two weeks of a leftist being fired or punished by a liberal outfit because of the content of his tweets.


Political publications have the right to impose a line in order to maintain the political line of the publication. The American Conservative gets to conserve, Jacobin gets to Jacobin, and Dissent gets to dissent (or assent, as old joke goes).


Vox, however, claims not to be that kind of publication. As Ezra Klein says in his statement on Rensin’s suspension: “We at Vox do not take institutional positions on most questions, and we encourage our writers to debate and disagree.”


In disavowing the sort of political line that avowedly political magazines take, Vox doesn’t say “anything goes.” Instead, it defaults to a different kind of standard, one that is more familiar to the tradition of liberal political theory and jurisprudence:

But direct encouragement of riots crosses a line between expressing a contrary opinion and directly encouraging dangerous, illegal activity. We welcome a variety of viewpoints, but we do not condone writing that could put others in danger.

But here’s the thing: In tacking back and forth between its various iterations of the standard—”direct encouragement of riots,” “directly encouraging dangerous, illegal activity” and “writing that could put others in danger—Vox is reverting to a standard of speech restriction that is more draconian than that of the Supreme Court of 1968. In  Brandenburg v. Ohio , the Court finally articulated what we think of as the modern liberal doctrine of free speech when it held that it was only constitutional for the government to prohibit speech when that speech “is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.” Not mere incitement but incitement that “is likely” to incite or produce imminent lawless action. As  Gawker  said in its writeup of the Rensin situation, “Have you ever seen any riots started by media Twitter? How about riots started by Vox stories? Slate riots? Gawker riots? No.”


If there is a precedent for this type of standard, it is the Supreme Court’s terrible McCarthyism cases, where it was the “bad tendency” test that was upheld. That was a test that predated the famous Schenck case of 1919 (which established the “clear and present danger” test) and that was revived during the reactionary 1920s and 1950s. It basically allowed the government, in cases like  Dennis v. United States , to criminalize and prosecute all sorts of speech on the grounds that it might produce some terrible results in a far-off distant future.


Critics will respond, however, that we’re dealing here not with the government but with a magazine, which has no power to arrest, try, judge, or jail a citizen. Of course, the standard for a non-government institution should be looser. But that’s where the McCarthyism precedent becomes even more important: Remarkably little of the McCarthyite repression in the late 1940s and 1950s had anything to do with police, courts, judges, juries, or prisons. Or even with congressional inquisitions. The great bulk of McCarthyite repression was leveraged through workplace sanctions. During that era, fewer than 200 people were arrested or went to jail for their beliefs. Anywhere from 20 to 40% of the American workforce, by contrast, was subject to investigations, firing, and other modes of discipline for their beliefs. More generally, in the United States, it’s a longstanding political problem that employees can be fired for their political beliefs; it poses a genuine challenge to the notion that this is a free society. It is, as I argued in my first book, the essence of “Fear, American Style.”


As I said, this is the second case of a leftist being fired or disciplined by a liberal outfit in two weeks. The first was Matt Bruenig. If you think these firings are all of a nothing, that they have no bearing on questions of political repression or political expression, ask yourself this: Why have we not heard a peep from Matt Bruenig since his firing?

Update (6:30 pm)

It occurs to me that some might misconstrue what I’m saying here, so I want to be clear. I’m not claiming that these two cases of leftists being fired or disciplined constitute a full-blown McCarthyism. McCarthyism was a concerted, organized campaign, from the top down and the bottom up, to purge a both powerful and ascendant left from all sectors of the American life.

The American left may be provisionally, very provisionally, ascendant—and I’m not sure I’d even go that far—but we’re hardly powerful. I’m dubious we’re about to see a comprehensive purge of the sort we saw in the 1940s and 1950s for the simple reason that there aren’t so many of us to purge.

The reason I invoked the McCarthyism parallel is, consistent with a longstanding concern of mine, to highlight how potent employment sanctions and workplace coercion can be as a mode of engineering political consent.

That said, what really is going on with these cases of Bruenig and Rensin? Skeptics or outright defenders of Vox and Demos will say that these two violated basic norms and that their being fired and disciplined has nothing to do with their leftist politics or the liberal-ish politics of their employers.

I’m dubious of that theory. For starters, if Vox’s standard is that no one who encourages dangerous, illegal activity that could put others in danger is eligible for hire at Vox, it might want to start by purging its very own founder and editor-in-chief Ezra Klein, who advocated for the Iraq War.

What both Bruenig and Rensin have in common is that beyond being on the left, they are visible, vocal, and in-your-face advocates of a left that is willing to confront the complacencies of contemporary liberalism, as embodied by outfits like Vox and figures like Neera Tanden, whom Bruenig had targeted. Neither Rensin or Bruenig is willing to abide by the chummy and plummy rules of contemporary journalism and political commentary. They’ve marshaled an almost constitutional inability to rub elbows with their colleagues and peers to a political advocacy that is as bracing as it is uncompromising.

Where these types of writers—and the conflict between liberalism and the left—are as old as the hills, it’s hard to overlook the fact that these two writers are visible and vocal advocates of Bernie Sanders. While the Sanders-Clinton campaign is hardly the stuff of epic political conflict, it has bruised egos, and made personal conflicts political and political conflicts personal. Particularly on social media. Unlike previous electoral campaigns, it has pitted the semblance of a nascent left against the remnants of a regnant liberalism. Or neoliberalism. That these two cases involve neoliberal players with real access to the Obama administration and connections to a possible Clinton administration only raises the possibility they’re not just a personal much of a muchness. It’s not just personal, in other words, and it’s not just about social media.

And that is where the McCarthyism parallel again becomes relevant. Not, again, because this is McCarthyism, but because McCarthyism was also a battle between liberalism and the left. As much as the most powerful forces behind it were on the right and the Republican Party, there were strong elements of McCarthyism that were about liberals purging the left.

Again, we’re not there: the left isn’t powerful, and liberalism—or neoliberalism—is not in much of a position to be doing anything except holding on. But as we move forward with more Sanders-style challenges to the neoliberal orthodoxies of the day, as they get more and more powerful, expect to see more of these types of firings.

History’s Great Lowlifes: From McCarthyism to Twitter

Some day I want to write an essay about history’s great lowlifes. Harvey Matusow would be one. John Doggett would be another. (Doggett was the guy who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Anita Hill was an erotomaniac who made up fantasies that he was interested in her because she couldn’t handle being rejected by him.)

These are men, sometimes women, who crave escape from their anonymity, who want to be noticed, and will do anything, destroy anyone, to get that notice.

What fascinates me about these guys is how parasitic they are on one of the nobler aspects of democracy.

Democratic movements and moments have a way of churning up anonymous men and women from the lower ranks, giving them a much longed-for opportunity to demonstrate their heroism and greatness. That’s the conceit of the musical Hamilton, and it’s not entirely untrue. But even if you don’t want go to Broadway to get your history, you can’t read the history of the labor movement or the civil rights movement or the women’s movement without being awestruck by the individual talent and personal courage that breaches the storied pages of these sometimes impersonal struggles.

History’s lowlifes prey on a similar dynamic but for ends that are far more sordid and insidious. Their preferred venue is not the open contest for democratic rights but the staged assault on justice and dissent. Where the genuine democrat displays her mettle and achieves her greatness in a revolution or social movement, history’s lowlife finds his level in a more populist (or pseudo-populist) and poisonous setting: the inquisition.

Like other, more genuine democratic moments, inquisitions summon men and women from below. Unlike other, more genuine democratic moments, they summon men and women who are willing to play their toxic role in a ritual of degradation. So out of McCarthyism you get Matusow; out of the Anita Hill hearings, you get John Doggett.

On Twitter, you can see some potential candidates for History’s Great Lowlifes.

The Relentless Shabbiness of CUNY: What Is To Be Done?

The lead story in today’s New York Times is a devastating attack on CUNY, where I’ve been teaching for nearly two decades, and the state’s criminal under-funding of a once-great institution. An above-the-fold photograph of a library at one of CUNY’s senior colleges features students studying at tables, surrounded by buckets strategically placed to catch the gallons of water dripping down from the ceiling. It’s a near perfect tableau of what it’s like to teach at CUNY today: excellent, hard-working students, encircled by shabbiness, disrepair, and neglect.

Though you should read the entire piece, here are some of the highlights.

The infrastructure is collapsing

The piece begins thus—

On the City College of New York’s handsome Gothic campus, leaking ceilings have turned hallways into obstacle courses of buckets. The bathrooms sometimes run out of toilet paper. The lectures are becoming uncomfortably overcrowded, and course selections are dwindling, because of steep budget cuts….

—and it doesn’t let up, across 50 paragraphs and seven columns, relentlessly documenting an institution facing near collapse.

It reports on a college library with an entire annual book budget of $13,000—that’s less than the individual research budgets of many professors at elite universities—and books covered in tarps to protect them from rainstorms and leaky roofs. At another college, a biology professor is stalked across the stage of her genetics lecture by giant water bugs. There are computers that still use floppy disks, Wi-Fi that doesn’t work, elevators and copy machines out of commission, and more.

The piece makes a brief nod to my campus, Brooklyn College, whose “rapidly deteriorating campus” has earned it the moniker “Brokelyn College.”

I can personally attest to that. On Thursday, as I left campus, I stopped in the men’s room of our wing of James Hall. One of the two urinals was out of business, covered by a plastic sheet. I sighed, and thought back to the time, about a year ago, that that urinal was so covered for about six months. The clock in my office has been stopped for over a year. Our department administrator tried to get it fixed: it worked for two days, and broke again.

Last fall, our union launched a hashtag campaign #BroklynCollege. Go on Twitter, and you’ll see photographs like this:

Someone just scraped themselves on this in Whitehead. #BroklynCollege pic.twitter.com/cvLt1oZ55a

— Brooklyn College PSC (@psccunybc) September 10, 2015

And this:

High ceilings? Um… @BklynCollege411 #BroklynCollege #BrooklynCollege pic.twitter.com/y6EAZqkfpP — Brandon P. Martinez (@BrandonPM_) September 21, 2015

And this:

If yr wondering why ‘net access is a spotty thing in Whitehead Hall, this may help explain it. #broklyncollege pic.twitter.com/Q8QHJuCXUd — John Anderson (@diymediadotnet) September 24, 2015

And this:

Second floor mens room going on a year…#broklyncollege …and theres two of them…the broken college indeed pic.twitter.com/xR2Z2APEnG

— Unstable NY (@UnstableFanPage) October 15, 2015

And this:

33.33% is a failing grade • BC Library • 2nd Floor Restroom • #BroklynCollege #BrooklynCollege #CUNY pic.twitter.com/HMyFNI1RSa

— Brandon P. Martinez (@BrandonPM_) November 12, 2015

And this:

Entrance to James Hall #BroklynCollege #BrooklynCollege pic.twitter.com/21zaDo5BKu — Timothy Shortell (@brooklynsoc) November 11, 2015

That last one is a personal favorite: that’s the sight that greeted me for weeks on end as I walked into James Hall last fall.

Last year, the Washington Post ran an oped by a Columbia philosophy professor about her experiences teaching at a prison in upstate New York. While the piece was a thoughtful exploration of the relationship between incarceration and education, I was struck by these passages—

My incarcerated students differ radically from the ones at Columbia. When I walk into a tidy, well-equipped classroom on Morningside campus, I know my undergrads have spent years preparing for academic achievement, supported by family and teachers. Trained to ask hard questions, they consider diverse perspectives and then expect to get to the bottom of things.

When a correctional officer escorts me into a prison room equipped with rickety tables, tangled Venetian blinds, and no chalk, I know my incarcerated students have been locked away for years – sometimes for decades — with virtually no opportunity for intellectual stimulation.

…

My main goal as a teacher in prison has been to create a space comfortable enough for exploration and insight. The circumstance does not make that easy. With a heating system so loud we can barely hear ourselves think…

—and the explicit contrast they draw between this professor’s experience of her physical environment at Columbia and at this prison. As I wrote in a blog post at the time:

As any professor at CUNY will tell you, the telltale signs that the author of this piece attributes to prison—rickety tables, tangled blinds, no chalk, loud heating systems—are ubiquitous features on our campuses. I have a very strict no-gifts policy for my students: at the end of the semester, I only accept emails or cards of thanks. But one day a student gave me a gift, and as I protested to her that I don’t accept them, she gently pressed it into my hand and said, “Just open it.” It was a box of chalk: I gratefully accepted it. That’s how bad things can get at CUNY.

It’s difficult to explain to people who teach on tonier campuses how wearying and dispiriting this relentless shabbiness can be. While you’re striving to inculcate excellence in your students, to get them to focus on the lyrical beauty of a passage in Plato or the epigrammatic power of a line from Machiavelli, you have to literally shut your eyes to the space around you, lest its pervasive message of “What’s the point? Give up” get inside your head. Or the students’.

Which brings me to a second element in the article.

Scrimping on our students

While there are periodic articles in the media about the challenges of teaching at cash-starved campuses like CUNY, this is one of the very few that gets into the nitty gritty of what that means. For both students and teachers.

The bigger class sizes have made it harder to grade papers. Three-page papers are now more common, students and instructors said, versus the once-standard five or six pages. Classes, overstuffed, have become more impersonal.

Michael Batson, an adjunct lecturer who has taught history at the College of Staten Island since 2000, said that he traditionally gave his freshmen, many from immigrant families, “low-risk assignments” at first, in order to offer intensive instruction.

But his classes have steadily increased in size, while staying in the same cramped classrooms. Group projects — which he favors, as a way to get small clusters of students to work together — have also become impossible.

As both a professor and chair of my department, I can’t tell you how much this issue of class size speaks to me. In political science, we’ve been monomaniacal about keeping our class sizes small. I’ve written about the benefits of that class size, particularly this semester, when I am teaching our department’s capstone seminar. It has allowed me to focus on the writing of our students to an unparalleled degree. As I said earlier this month:

It’s an intense process for the students. We start with a one- to two-page précis. The students then write a detailed outline of the paper. Then they submit a rough draft (I just got the rough drafts yesterday and have begun reading them today). And then the final draft, which is due in a few weeks.

My goal is twofold: first, to get the students to really dig into a topic (I’ve written about that here); second, to teach the students that old truism that all writing is just rewriting. I think the fancy ed folks like to call that “iterative writing” (google that phrase and you get 16.2 million results). But to me, it’s just writing. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you snake oil.

This kind of teaching, that kind of intensive feedback, of going over sentence after sentence, is a lot of work. It can be grueling and challenging for the student.

And just this past week, as my students handed in their final papers, I got the following email from a student:

I would like to thank you for an excellent semester and for the critiques of my paper. I have never had a professor pay such close attention to a paper that I have written and give such thorough edits and suggestions. Although it was tough, I appreciate it because it helped a great deal.

There’s a reason this student has never gotten this kind of attention from a professor: she’s in classes that are too big taught by instructors (permanent and adjunct) who are teaching anywhere from three to five classes per term, responsible for anywhere from 100 to 200 students. At Brooklyn College, our teaching load is 4/3: four courses one term, three courses another. At the community colleges, it’s 5/4. And our adjuncts have even greater challenges of racing across the city’s five boroughs, hoping to catch one class at the College of Staten Island, another at City Tech, and a third at Lehman, just to make a paltry $9,000, if they’re lucky, a term. (Most adjuncts get paid roughly $3000 per class.)

Ever since I became chair, I’ve struggle to protect our department’s small class sizes from the administration, which wants us to pack more students into each classroom. It has made my relationship with the administration contentious, and I’ve often gotten into heated exchanges in person, on the phone, and over email. But as much as I push back against the administration, I recognize that they are only responding to financial constraints of their own. We’re not Harvard, they’ll tell us—even though there was a time, as the Times poignantly reports, when City College (Brooklyn College, too), was proudly known as the “the poor man’s Harvard”—and they’re just doing the math.

But doing the math has long-term corrosive effects on the students. As we see in those passages from the Times piece above. It also has long-term corrosive effects on the faculty and administration. As this passage from the same piece shows:

Last fall, with Albany’s budget uncertain, the CUNY administration asked its colleges to cut their budgets by at least 3 percent. City College, citing increased personnel costs and declining enrollment, particularly in graduate programs, imposed a 10 percent cut, or $14.6 million. Programs with the steepest enrollment declines suffered the most, with the humanities and education departments cut by more than 40 percent each.

“It is a good budget model, and it’s better than the way we used to do it for the past 40 years, which was arbitrary, very political and you had to go and beg for everything,” said Gordon A. Gebert, the interim dean of the architecture school.

When you operate in an environment of austerity, educational questions ineluctably become, wholly and entirely, financial questions. And suddenly educators talk like accountants. As this interim dean quoted by the Times inadvertently reveals. How do we decide where to devote scarce resources? Not by thinking about what we as educators deem to be of paramount educational value. No, just follow the students. If they’re registering for business classes because that’s where they think the money and career are to be found, long-term, then we should cut English, history, and philosophy. The Sixties were supposed to be the high-water mark of student-led education, but never have educators so slavishly followed the preferences (really, perceived preferences) of students as they do today. Not because these educators are trying to give students what they need but because they’re trying to maximize the administration’s returns, to get the greatest bang for their buck.

I’ll never forget a meeting I was in earlier this year between the department chairs and the college’s administrators. One administrator said, point blank, the money goes where the students go; we have to maximize each dollar we spend on teaching. Not a single person in the room objected, so unremarkable did that kind of talk seem. It’s as if we were the board of General Motors. But with no money.

Administrators run amok

I always say that at CUNY, 95% of our problems are structural: we’re getting screwed by the state; we don’t have enough money. But there’s that last 5% of shittiness that we do to ourselves.

The Times piece demonstrates this perfectly. Until 1976, CUNY was free. It provided an amazing education to generations of immigrants and working-class students. Then it began to retrench. Tuition began to creep up: it’s now $6600 a year for undergraduates, says the Times, “more than half of whom report family incomes below $30,000.” Student tuition has increased because it must now cover nearly half of CUNY’s operating budget. Thanks to New York’s decreases in funding: according to one estimate, while enrollment has jumped by more than 12% since 2008, New York’s funding has dropped by 17%.

The upshot of this disinvestment, and its effects on morale, is obvious:

“We have gone backwards,” said Frederick R. Brodzinski, a senior administrator and adjunct professor in computer science who plans to retire in September after 30 years at the university. “Morale is horrible on campus. There are too many highly paid administrators, and there’s a lack of clear leadership. We have stepped down on the ladder that we were climbing for about 10 years.”

It’s true: I’ve been at CUNY since 1999, and thanks to what the state has done, I don’t think there’s ever been a worse time to be a professor here.

But Brodzinski also points to that last 5% of shittiness that CUNY has inflicted on itself. Thanks to the upsurge in administration hiring. Now this is a complicated question, I know. Bashing administrative bloat is an easy thing to do, particularly for people like Governor Cuomo, and particularly at institutions like CUNY, where even if we dealt with that bloat, there’d be a vast budgetary shortfall that we’d still have to confront in order to make the place as excellent as its students.

As the Times reports, however, the problem of administrative bloat—even corruption—is real. At City College, where the administration instituted a 10% cut last year—we at Brooklyn College had to suffer a $5 million cut last year (roughly 2% of the operating budget, I believe, though my numbers could be off)—the administration has been binge-hiring and rewarding its own kind:

According to public data analyzed by The Times, the college paid administrators classified as “executives” a total of $7.25 million in the last year, up 45 percent from 2009. Eleven of the 18 biggest salary increases, by percentage, came in 2015, even as the college was slashing its budget. The provost’s office and government relations operations, in particular, have expanded.

When asked about the personnel moves, the college, in a statement, said it had “invested in hiring new faculty and staff as well as moving existing staff to the executive level consistent with increased responsibilities for these areas.”

The school’s use of foundation money has also been questioned. Documents obtained by The Times indicated that the college’s 21st Century Foundation paid for some of Ms. Coico’s personal expenses, such as fruit baskets, housekeeping services and rugs, when she took office in 2010. The foundation was then reimbursed for more than $150,000 from CUNY’s Research Foundation. That has raised eyebrows among governance experts, because such funds are typically earmarked for research.

The administrative bloat and corruption are horrifying enough. But that CUNY’s Research Foundation—which provides the tiny bit of research money faculty are eligible for (on a competitive and increasingly scarce basis)—bailed the City College administration out like this: well, that’s that last 5% of extra-special bullshit we heap on ourselves.

It’s not that we have incompetent, untalented administrators running CUNY, though we certainly have plenty of those. It’s that they’ve succumbed to what I was talking about above. In the same way that it’s hard to demand excellence from your students when you and they are surrounded by so much evidence of how little the state and society think of you, so it is hard, I suspect, for these administrators not to succumb to the shabbiness around them. This is not to excuse them: they are inexcusable and ought to face the consequences of their actions. It’s just that this low-grade corruption and everyday shabbiness thrive in a neoliberal environment of scarcity. That last 5% that we do to ourselves? It’s because of the 95% that’s done to us.

What is to be done?

I couldn’t help being reminded, as I read the piece, of a similar moment of crisis for CUNY, about 20 years ago. It was 1995, and James Traub, the veteran journalist, had just published his City on a Hill. Focused on City College, it was a devastating attack on CUNY, particularly the students who were not quite prepared for college but who had been accepted through Open Admissions.

The book both reflected and spawned a nasty campaign of racist innuendo and racially coded talk of standards. Because CUNY was now serving the needs of the city’s black and brown populations, Open Admissions was taken to be the cause of a massive decline in the institution’s greatness. What was once, well, a city on the hill, had slid down the precipice of race-conscious mediocrity.

This blurb from Publishers Weekly caught the ugly tenor of the discussion:

From 1847 through the 1960s, City College in Manhattan was renowned for the excellent education it provided free of charge (tuition was not imposed until 1976) to poor and middle-class urban students. Responding to student protests against the low number of African Americans and Puerto Ricans it enrolled, City College, in 1970, began a policy of open admissions. Traub (Too Good to Be True) recently spent a year on campus, interviewing students and faculty and attending classes. Although his detailed evaluation of the open-admissions experiment contains inspiring descriptions of idealistic teachers and hardworking students struggling to overcome poverty, racism and inadequate English-language skills, he concludes that open admissions shortchanges students. Because inner-city high school graduates often can barely read, City College has been forced, according to Traub, to provide remedial classes at the expense of academic excellence. A lively and compelling report.

What got lost in that discussion was that Open Admissions also dovetailed with New York City’s 1975 Fiscal Crisis, which as Josh Freeman has argued, launched a decades-long experiment in neoliberalism, with New York City (previously the closest thing to social democracy that the United States had had, Gotham’s version of Red Vienna) providing a terrible demonstration effect—much like Pinochet’s Chile—of what neoliberalism could do. The state took over the city’s budget and institutions like CUNY went from being a paragon of free, excellent public education to the increasingly tuition-dependent institution of public shabbiness that it is today.

The culmination of these two developments—neoliberalism and attacks on Open Admissions—came in the late 1990s when, at the behest of a task force appointed by Rudy Guiliani, CUNY ended open admissions and remedial education, while doing little to reverse the decades-long decline in public disinvestment.

It’s amazing to me, as I look back on the time, to compare the moral panic of the 1990s—the sense that something had to be done about this institution—with the criminal indifference that we at CUNY are faced with today. When the issue was allegedly uneducated and uneducable black and brown students, the state jumped to act. When the issue is chronic disinvestment, leaky ceilings, clogged toilets, stagnant salaries, and ballooning class sizes, the state yawns.

I remember that moment all too well because my grad school roommate at the time, the prize-winning historian Greg Grandin, who graduated from Brooklyn College, made the trip to New York City to testify against CUNY’s proposed changes at a public hearing. Greg was the product of Open Admissions. In his first year at Brooklyn College, he took the remedial writing courses that helped get students prepared to do college-level work. Greg is Exhibit A of Open Admission’s success: a working-class kid from Brooklyn, he got radicalized in college and interested in Latin American history (thanks to excellent teachers like Hoby Spaulding), went onto Yale to do graduate work, and is now, at NYU, one of the preeminent historians of Latin America, with multiple literary and academic prizes under his belt, including the history’s profession top prize, the Bancroft Prize.

That’s the kind of thing CUNY used to do for students. It still does, often against the odds. Zujaja Tauqeer, the child of Ahmadi refugees from Pakistan, was a student in my modern political thought class in the spring of 2010. She was an excellent student, determined to go to SUNY Downstate College of Medicine after she graduated. Brooklyn College’s history faculty were so inspiring, she decided to major in history rather than biology. At the end of her semester with me, I urged her to apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. She took a lot of convincing: like a lot of CUNY students, Zujaja didn’t know how good she was. But she applied, and got the Rhodes. Having gotten her doctorate at Oxford, she’s now at Harvard Medical School.

Zujaja’s class with me was small: I think we had 21 students in all. Students had to write rough drafts of the class’s three papers. Zujaja was a great student, but she had to work hard. And it was out of that and similar experiences at Brooklyn College that she wound up a Rhodes Scholar.

I want to be clear: Stories like this aren’t magic. It’s not Dead Poets Society. It’s not Goodbye, Mr. Chips. It’s not To Sir, With Love. It’s about hard work—and hard cash. Successes like Greg’s or Zujaja’s—and there are thousands more, every year, at CUNY—require public investment. Excellence doesn’t come cheap. Just ask Harvard.

But excellence also doesn’t come without a fight. The generations that built CUNY came out of the struggles of the New Deal (Brooklyn College was established in 1935). It was working class people, black people, immigrants, Latinos and Latinas, men, women: through collective action, through strikes and demands, as Freeman documents in his book, an institution of both excellence and equity was created.

Earlier this month, I voted to authorize my union to call a strike if CUNY doesn’t come to a reasonable settlement with us about our teaching conditions. Uppermost on my list is our teaching load, which is too damn high, but we also have salaries that are too damn low. And a host of other problems that have made it difficult for us to recruit and retain faculty, as Kevin Foster, the chair of the economics department at City College, recently noted:

In my department, of the 11 untenured faculty hired in the last ten years, seven left before a tenure vote, driven off by low pay, poor working conditions, crumbling buildings, heavy teaching loads, and lack of support for research.

Striking in New York is illegal for public employees like me. If we have to strike, I could be facing fines, and our leadership could be facing jail time. But it should tell you something that so many of my colleagues who voted for the authorization—92% in total, nearly 10,000 men and women—have chosen to send this signal to CUNY and the State of New York. Despite the real consequences we could be facing if we strike, we feel like we have no other choice.

It’s my hope that Governor Cuomo, the State Legislature, and the CUNY administration take this Times piece as an opportunity: to reverse decades of defunding, to make CUNY once again a city on a hill. But if they don’t, we’re going to make them.

What Bernie Sanders’s choices for the DNC platform committee tell us about the Israel/Palestine debate in the US

According to the Washington Post:

Sen. Bernie Sanders was given unprecedented say over the Democratic Party platform Monday in a move party leaders hope will soothe a bitter split with backers of the longshot challenger to Hillary Clinton — and Sanders immediately used his new power to name a well-known advocate for Palestinian rights to help draft Democratic policy.

The senator from Vermont was allowed to choose nearly as many members of the Democratic Party platform-writing body as Clinton, who is expected to clinch the nomination next month. That influence resulted from an agreement worked out this month between the two candidates and party officials, the party announced Monday.

Clinton has picked six members of the 15-member committee that writes the platform, and Sanders has named five, the Democrats said Monday ahead of an expected announcement by the Democratic National Committee.

Even more amazing were Sanders’s choices for the committee: Cornel West; Keith Ellison, who is both the first Muslim elected to Congress and the first African American elected to Congress from Minnesota; Jim Zogby, a longtime voice on behalf of Palestinian rights; Native American activist Deborah Parker; and environmental writer and climate-change activist Bill McKibben.

However insignificant, power-wise, Sanders’s choices may be—his people will constitute about a 1/3 of the total committee—they are highly significant in terms of the discussion in this country around Israel/Palestine, as Haaretz rightly pointed out.

Because so much of Israel/Palestine politics in this country depends upon keeping certain voices and arguments out of the mainstream, the very fact that Sanders has chosen Cornel West—who in addition to self-identifying as a socialist, is also a long-standing critic of Israel and firm supporter of BDS—as well as Zogby and even Ellison, as his representative on the platform committee, is a big deal. West, Zogby, and Ellison are now the voices of not only Sanders but also of the not insignificant sector of Sanders voters within the Democratic Party.

Israel/Palestine has always been a curious issue in American politics: on the one hand, it’s one tiny piece of the world; on the other hand, it plays an outsized role in US foreign policy and political culture, for all sides of the debate. That Sanders has chosen to make that one issue a kind of line in the sand of his particular brand of politics—when so many of us had thought he’d simply the ignore the issue altogether—suggests to me that it will play a large role in the coming realignment of American politics.

Not only will this be a marker for a younger generation of Jews—of how they can be Jewish and left without supporting Israel (and that non-support can run the gamut of outright anti-Zionism, for someone like me, or simply being more critical of Israel than is the norm in the US or in the Democratic establishment)—but it will also be a marker for a new generation of socialist-inclined leftists and liberals.

As this other Washington Post article from 2012 suggests, platform committees and party platforms aren’t so important in terms of whether and how they constrain a president; they don’t. They are important in terms of laying down markers of where a party is or may be going. Let’s keep a close eye on this one.

On a related/unrelated note, I was reading this essay by Lionel Trilling over the weekend. And was struck by this throwaway line about the attitude of a subset of highly Jewish-identified intellectuals toward Zionism and the Arabs in the 1920s.

Race Talk and the New Deal

Hillary Clinton, in her 2003 memoir, on the Clintons’ decision to push for welfare reform:

The sixty-year-old welfare system…helped to create generations of welfare-dependent Americans.

Clinton is talking there about AFDC, a New Deal social program.

It’s fascinating—given the recent fights on Twitter, social media, and elsewhere, about the racism of the New Deal—to recall this language of Clinton.

Back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, that kind of talk—”generations of welfare-dependent Americans”—was code for black people, who were thought to be languishing on the welfare rolls for decades, addicted to the drug of free money, living off the hard work of hard-working white Americans. That’s the kind of language that was used to attack the New Deal. Not only by Republicans but also by the Clintons and their neoliberal allies.

Fast forward 20 years, and Clinton’s supporters in the media are once again using the language of race to attack the New Deal.

Only this time, it’s to say that the New Deal was racist.

Update (11 am)

I should have made something clearer in the post. I didn’t because I assumed people were familiar with a position I articulated last weekend. I’m not critiquing the historiography of the New Deal, which shows that it was built on a series of racist compromises with the South. That position is inarguable and well established in the scholarship. I’m critiquing the weaponization of that argument by a series of liberal, pro-Clinton, anti-Sanders journalists and commentators, mostly on Twitter, who wind up taking a stand against contemporary attempts to push for social democratic-type programs and politics on the grounds that they, too, are somehow racist or fail to do much about racism or mimic the worst parts of the New Deal. The weaponized argument is ever changing and elusive, but the function, as Doug Henwood shows in the piece I linked to above, is generally to delegitimate redistributive politics.

Here’s what I said five days ago about this issue:

I’m about to say something deliberately provocative.

A few months ago, I tenatively advanced the idea in a talk I gave at Brown that Clarence Thomas, far from being an avatar of right-wing conservatism, was in fact a kind of liberal everyman. What I meant by that was that, as many of you have heard me say: a) he was no theorist of color-blindness; b) that he in fact was advancing a notion of the inherently white supremacist character of the American state; c) that he thought racism was intractable; and d) that he did not think racism was reducible OR EVEN RELATED to other features of the American system (i.e., capitalism).

His line of racial pessimism, I thought, seemed to echo some tenets of contemporary racial liberalism. And, in a cheeky moment, I wrote that one of the reasons why liberals are so insistent that Clarence Thomas never speaks — even though he speaks all the time, and if you wanted to know what he had to say, you could merely read his opinions or his speeches; he’s not exactly shy about his views — is that they don’t want to hear what he has to say b/c they’ll find out that some of his views are not that different from theirs.

But in recent weeks, I’ve begun to think that my argument may have even more unsettling ramifications. While many academics have long criticized and historicized the New Deal for its racial exclusions, and some of our best and most important recent scholarship has helped us understand the connections between those racial exclusions and the New Deal as a whole, I’ve noticed that in this presidential primary campaign season, that this scholarship, which is so careful and subtle in its formulations, has migrated into the political/media realm, where it has hardened into a kind of liberal orthodoxy. What is an undeniable historical fact and important dimension of contemporary scholarship, with all of its careful attention to political contigencies and institutional/structural realities of the American state and political economy, has morphed into a vaguer sensibility — not always advanced explicitly, but often expressed in offhand comments on social media threads and whatnot — that any type of state effort at economic redistribution or remediation is by its very nature racially exclusive. So that the exclusion of, say, farmworkers and domestic workers (which was a lot of the Southern black workforce) from the original Social Security program, suddenly appears as a proleptic warning against any and all of Bernie Sanders’s programs today.

That that racial pessimism is so often attached to state projects — while racial capitalism is often given a pass — and that it dovetails so well with the kind of critiques Thomas routinely makes of the regulatory/welfare state, makes me think that my notion that Clarence Thomas is a liberal everyman, originally advanced as a kind of tentative provocation, may in fact have far more truth to it than I ever realized.

I should add a caveat here: these are obviously complicated questions, and there are strong arguments to be had on multiple sides. What I’m talking about is a kind of common sense that gets expressed — not formal scholarship or extensive analysis, but the kinds of things you see in tweets and such. To some extent tweets and such are not that important, but to the extent that they reflect deeper assumptions, particularly in the media, I think they’re something we ought to pay more attention to. This, for me, far transcends whether you supported Clinton or Sanders: it goes to the heart of whether you can imagine any kind of way past the kinds of deep-seated social and economic realities that I’ve been pointing to in my ongoing series‪#‎LiberalismIsWorking‬.

 

 

Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I’m a Leninist

Now that they’ve discovered the notion that a political party, faced with a dangerous political enemy, should suppress all internal criticism of its putative leader lest she be “harmed” by that criticism, and that the party should refrain from fractious internal debates lest it be ill-equipped to defeat the enemy, I wonder if liberals are rethinking their views on Lenin.

The principle of democratic centralism and autonomy for local Party organisations implies universal and full freedom to criticise, so long as this does not disturb the unity of a definite action; it rules out all criticism which disrupts or makes difficult the unity of an action decided on by the Party.

Actually, by the standards of today’s liberal, Lenin’s strictures come off as relatively benign. He at least called for “universal and full freedom to criticise” the party unless and until that criticism threatened “the unity of an action decided on by the Party.” Whereas the Democrats haven’t even yet decided on Clinton, and we’re already being told that any criticism of her in anticipation of that decision will threaten the party’s ability to act upon that decision once it is made.

Speaking of that language of harm—the New York Times headline reads, “Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch,” and the article repeats the charge—I’m reminded of the language Justice Scalia used in the Bush v. Gore case in order to grant a stay to the Florida recount.

The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner [Bush].

Despite all the obvious differences in the two situations, I’m struck by the similarity: in both cases, it’s being argued that democratic rules and norms should give way to—indeed, might harm—the personal needs and concerns of the candidate.

During the early republic, the UCLA political scientist Karen Orren has argued, the prerogatives of political office were thought to be a kind of personal property right, something that belonged to the officeholder. In the 19th century, those “officers’ rights” slowly began to give way—under pressure from democratic movements from below—to a notion of citizens’ rights. Matters of state, in other words, weren’t to be viewed through the prism of their effects upon the officeholder; they were to be understood from the vantage of the democratic citizen and the needs of a democratic polity.

Now, apparently, we’re returning to the earlier view of politics. Now we’re expected to view matters of state through the eye of the officeholder. Now we’re expected to consider how an insistence that we count all votes in Florida—or see a primary campaign through its end—helps or harms the fate, the personal fate, of the officeholder. Or would be officeholder.

There are many words for that type of political system. Democracy is not one of them.