Howl, Trump barks, ‘Woke’ academics growl.
In Donald Trump’s State of the Union address, the president interrupted his usual litany of self-aggrandizement and phantasmagoric threats (mostly leveled at a southern border that has, mysteriously, disappeared) to assail “the radicalization of the American left” and an unspecified “rise in anger and violence,” pointing to “the danger of the distant, angry mob.”
What exactly constitutes such “danger”? It might include students and academics who draw together all those extreme threats, as identified by White House project manager and former Breitbart writer senior counsel to President Trump: The radical left is inciting Americans to violence.
The radical left is inciting Americans to violence.
This sort of breast-beating about social unrest led by nefarious academics is a recurring theme in American political discourse. “Radicalism and incivility now infect our schools,” candidate George W. Bush declared in 2000; they were “handicapping us in business, national security and lives,” according to President Barack Obama, speaking in the aftermath of the U.C. Santa Barbara shootings in 2014.
Both found the source of this academic incivility in the kissing cousins of anarchism and radicalism. (The radicalism of the civil rights movement doesn’t seem to count as a threat. Or maybe it does, but the Obama White House was reluctant to say.) The Republican National Convention in 2012 endlessly harped on a liberal “culture of violence.”
Accusations of criminality come easy. Harvard professor Cass Sunstein, once a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was deemed so dangerous in 2009 that Sarah Palin tweeted that his ideas were “close to complete insanity.” A few months later, James Pethokoukis, The American Enterprise Institute’s assistant editor for policy, called for the arrests of “a number of prominent libertarian and left-leaning economics professors (including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman) on criminal charges related to financial fraud.” Coming from the right, those aimed at solons perceived as progressive are naturally even worse: Conservatives’ supposedly dire moment in 2012 forced them to campaign on claims of impending gang terror, Aquarian Stone Age depravity and decades of utter political defeatism, even hinting at calls for social genocide.
The supposed academic menaces of 2000 and 2012 —acquaintances of anarchism and radicalism— have found their missing link. He has occupied the White House for nearly three years.
At the 1968 Republican National Convention, police beat anti-Vietnam War protesters in the streets of the Windy City. In the aftermath, the president was soon indicted on federal charges. This was a true, old-school American fear of rising academic radicalism, and it was followed by a sweeping FBI investigation into these political threats. But this was special. Aren’t we all overdone political hysterias like that?
Chicago in 1968 and America in 2019 have much in common. The Federal Bureau of Investigation now stands at the ready, all safety procedures hopefully duly observed, ready to take on masses of masked lefty enragers no one has yet identified. One can only regret the absence of the heroes of the past, who managed to conduct comparable policing without atomization, device, plastic long-barrelled cybersurveillance, counterfeit morality plays or economic Oscar ceremonies hosted by angry Meryl Streeps.
Fancy being a teacher or professor these days, what with all the circumstances conspiring to create perhaps the dullest of professional lives ever. What distinguishes the faculty from the private sector here is the same differentiation that’s taken place throughout America. In business, union supports of the type professors need are awash in money, even as the cost of service maintenance costs sink lower and lower. Once upon a time, the American worker submitted to the harsh dictates of real bosses. Today there is no one there, except the drive to develop artisanal flavorings concocted from volcanic rivers and the approval button. On the shop floor, those increasingly unfathomable Soviet horrors deployed away from view are replaced by the harsher wonder of job training programs. What does a real employee have left but the annual Party memo featured in Tom Wolfe’s “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,” which reissued the once familiar theme that services are profane, material goods are divine and by implication, those who produced the latter worthy of social esteem?
Crudely sliced and diced as “radical leftists,” students and faculty at American colleges and universities have become a folk enemy alongside a great many other folk enemies: white nationalists, drug cartels, organized crime, jealous succubus spouses, deep-state, CIA and FBI civil servants, and an unseen army of foreign terrorists. Yet none of these beasts are or are ever likely to be nearly as powerful as an electorate migrating to the Hillary Clinton political position of the point previous to the Trump moment. Americans don’t really know how to do that anymore — vote — because at some point we stopped teaching its members to do it. On the university campus, the people who are good at giving out grades — decent, amiable folks who understand antiques and social history — don’t get sent to Albany or Tallahassee or Springfield or Harrisburg. They’ve become prison guards, alarm salesmen or land calculators — professional victims in their own right. Selection for these posts gives rise to its own sort of specialized nationalism.
All of that may explain why the only rejoinder coming back from the great, coventured colleges and universities of Upstate Medical Center-Military Language Institute-State University of Many Acres is a collective yawn. Some of this might be due to the times; indeed, some might even be justified. Lord knows, there are enough jackanapes about to make that sort of argument. But the Obama White House was reluctant to say. The Republican National Convention in 2012 endlessly harped on a liberal “culture of violence.”
Accusations of criminality come easy. Harvard professor Cass Sunstein, once a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was deemed so dangerous in 2009 that Sarah Palin tweeted that his ideas were “close to complete insanity.” A few months later, James Pethokoukis, The American Enterprise Institute’s assistant editor for policy, called for the arrests of “a number of prominent libertarian and left-leaning economics professors (including New York Times columnist Paul Krugman) on criminal charges related to financial fraud.” Coming from the right, those aimed at solons perceived as progressive are naturally even worse: Conservatives’ supposedly dire moment in 2012 forced them to campaign on claims of impending gang terror, Aquarian Stone Age depravity and decades of utter political defeatism, even hinting at calls for social genocide.
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