Academia: No Lessons From History

Thursday's Child Has Far to Go

Over all my social media feeds, I see faculty crying out: “does no one read history?” (Historians are especially pained in their anguished pleas.)

It is, more than many of us think, a double-edged lament.

Or perhaps it is more like a Swiss army knife, bristling with edges and tools. For one, despite the many insults flung at some of Trump’s pet intellectuals, they’ve learned pretty well from the history of actually-existing authoritarian regimes in the 20th and 21st Century. Destroy civil society, especially academia, as a first priority. Tell some big lies about why you’re making those moves, but don’t get distracted by your own untruths: the goal is to reduce all civic institutions, universities, medical centers, churches to a humbled shadow of their former selves. Make them capitulate.

They also appear to have abstracted another lesson, which is to have a well-stocked line-up of scapegoats and be ready to move to a war footing in order to divide the population into patriots and enemies. The only lesson they don’t seem to have learned is that eventually authoritarians run out of distractions from their own contradictions and end up dangling from a rope or fleeing for their lives. Since at this point it doesn’t exactly appear like liberal democracy is a forever-and-ever proposition, I suppose they figure that their innings might last as long as anybody else’s. Hope for Papa Doc, and if you’re still on the merry-go-round when Baby Doc rolls around, start checking real estate prices in a country far away.

The two edges that matter more for academic institutions, the two lessons, are that on one hand we’re all understanding with new emotional and intellectual intensity why people can’t stop authoritarianism despite seeing it coming from a mile away. I’ve been re-reading my old blog all the way back to 2003 and there are a lot of columns that predict (and recommend preventing) the situation we’re in now. I can see that I was in good company because those columns frequently link to other academic bloggers, to scholarly work, to university leaders and administrators who showed some foresight about the gathering crisis.

All for naught, because to head it off would have taken thinking differently about the relationship between the university, the government, and the society. Universities stuck their own necks in any number of nooses. Harvard and Columbia could have built a more specifically focused top-flight research infrastructure rather than trying to excel at everything, and thereby reduced their dependency on federal funding. Universities could have resisted buying into a corporate mindset of growth and competition and embraced the non-profit ethos that they gladly claimed for its tax benefit. Universities could have build large-scale collaborative networks that tied them together and made them resistant to outside pressures, both corporate and governmental. Universities could have refused to become the alibi preferred by neoliberal political leaders to explain a labor market that did not meet the needs or aspirations of most Americans, universities could have stopped the metastatic spread of credentialization into the social and economic infrastructure of a globalized economy. Universities could have seen their trustees as a way to stay in touch with the whole of our society rather than as an exotic fundraising device and a spur to drive their endowments into the maw of financialization.

Enough. It does no one any good now to ask where Gondor was when the Westfold fell.

The lesson here from history, unfortunately, is that no one learns lessons from history because their circumstances seem (legitimately) so different until suddenly they seem all too similar. When things are different, you don’t really believe that you are vulnerable to some past danger. When they are suddenly the same, it’s too late to do anything about it. Believing in 2002 that routinized right-wing whining about political correctness was an early warning sign of a near-future fascistic assault on the university as an institution seemed like the essence of Chicken Littlehood. American academia was the envy of the world, it was riding high and feeling like a permanently indispensable component of the end of history.

The stunning thing is that for three generations after 1945, Americans were told from elementary school onward that fascism was a danger to us, that we had to remain eternally wary, that it could happen here. We were constantly reminded that it almost did, in regular seances that summoned the shades of Huey Long and Father Coughlin and then again in the 1960s onward with Joe McCarthy added to the poltergeists. These alarms were set even more intensely for the dangers of Communism, but the central message was always that the way things were now was always at risk, that nothing could be taken for granted, that democracy took constant mindful effort.

Those calls to mindfulness were not always or even often benevolent. They were frequently embedded inside mainstream attempts to suppress wholly democratic left-wing critique, and became a feature of the constant drumbeat of complaints against political correctness, “cancel culture” and “wokeism”—complaints which turn out to have been an important contribution to fascism rather than a bulwark against it. That might be the first and foremost reason that we stopped listening to the warnings, stopped being vigilant: the messages became banal, trivialized, shallow, and they became a way for people to burnish and celebrate their own probity and supposed rationality rather than a cause for self-examination and reflection. “It can happen here” always should have been a reason to look in the mirror, not an opportunity to point the finger at a fellow citizen you lacked the courage to engage thoughtfully and appreciatively.

We also stopped listening to the warning because the spirit of neoliberalism filled every corner of civil society like an invisible gas, suffocating us all. Leaders became managers, citizens became stakeholders, values became deliverables. Wealth stopped enabling change and reform and became a dragon’s hoard to be protected from liability. Justice became a mostly empty pitcher you filled one tiny increment at a time. Failure became not just an option but a pragmatically embraced inevitability. “It can happen here” required a visceral, emotionally profound connection to democracy rather than the referencing of “democracy” and “community” in chilly, remote recitations written by public-relations professionals.

Drills to prepare for the worst only work as long as “the worst” has a deeply felt immediacy, as long as it is easy to envision and imagine. They only work as long as people continue to believe that the danger of “the worst” is something that the people in charge are trying to stop with every fiber of their being and as long as they think the drill will save lives if and when the moment comes to pass.

We stopped believing that the worst could happen, we stopped believing that we could stop it from coming if it did. And we stopped believing—correctly, as it turns out—that the people who ran the drills were actually trying to prevent the catastrophe. When the people running the drills don’t really believe in the emergency they’re supposedly preparing for, the whole thing degenerates into an empty ritual.

Looking back, I am not sure it could have been otherwise. Or, to put it differently, the way to avoid fascism is to be a real democracy through and through. You cannot teach people “it can happen here” as a rote lesson in a civics education class and have that lesson mean anything if they’re not even sure what it is that we’re supposedly defending against “it”. Even people who escaped tyranny elsewhere to come to America often turned right around and embraced it right here in their new land. Yesterday’s refugee from Castro became tomorrow’s enthusiast for Trump. Some people live through a fire and decide that means their bodies are made of asbestos.

There is a reason that professional historians resist the idea that we provide “lessons”, a list of things to do and not do. Even when those exercises are convincing—look at Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny for a successful example of “lessons from history” that is now frequently quoted—they remain lessons, a kind of schoolbook dogma. “Don’t obey in advance” quickly degenerates into empty homily, a doggerel proverb, rather than something we profoundly feel. By the time we feel it, by the time it makes sense, it’s because we’ve done it and regret it. A fire drill might be meaningful to a person who has fought a fire or a person who has survived one, to a person who has a relative or friend who escaped a fire and told the harrowing tale. For everyone else, there’s a huge leap to take from an intellectual awareness that it’s a good thing to do to an urgent feeling that is enough to focus attention on the drill and do it right.

There isn’t a way to say to the people who lead Harvard or Columbia right now “don’t obey in advance” in a way that would change their actions because they are the wrong people to understand that lesson, because they are at the bottom of the poison-gas well where neoliberalism’s deadening suffocation has gathered longest, They are shambling across the doorstep to fascism like a sleepwalker, and there is no pinch or slap that can wake them in time. Forget the lessons we have been taught, have repeated, have broadcast: they failed. Now we can only hope that we will do something else besides repeat our end of this historical re-enactment. We have to be awake, if not woke, and walk some other path than across the threshold. The fire is lit. Forget finding the evacuation plan diagram on the wall, and get the fuck out of the house any way you can. Sling the insensate across your shoulders, grab the sleepwalkers by the hand, and go.

Image credit: “The Rescue of John Wesley From Fire”, n.d., Museum of American History, https://www.si.edu/object/rescue-john-wesley-fire-willam-smith:nmah_324800