The News: Reign of Error

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

Henry Farrell is right that if institutions and communities would only coordinate their resistance to Trump, they would present an obstacle that the current government has neither the capacity nor ability to overcome. As Farrell points out, not only can broad popular coalitions hit back successfully with boycotts, legal challenges, and mass action, the Trump Administration doesn’t have the discipline or integrity to succeed in bringing reluctant partners into its own coalition, given their propensity for almost instantly betraying anybody dumb enough to bend the knee. Whatever it is you value or want in American life—science, global leadership, the rule of law, free markets, the rebuilding of a domestic manufacturing base, viewpoint diversity—taking up an offer from Trump in favor of those goals is pure folly. I came across a poster on Reddit who argued that the “compact” with higher education was good because at last someone was ready to do something about grade inflation. Even if the compact was sincere, some of its provisions would actually intensify grade inflation and none of them would speak to it, but believing in the first place that this is actually an intentional goal that the administration will stick to is a sign of painful naivete at best.

Farrell is also right that such coordination, despite its obvious advantages, seems beyond what civic institutions and corporations can achieve. Even in narrower contexts, like academia, where it would seem like shared interests and aligned institutional cultures ought to provide fertile ground for collective action, there are a host of reasons why such a response is unlikely.

Many of those reasons are long-standing and have prevented cooperation in other instances where the potential benefits were obvious. Civic organizations, professional firms and corporations both operate in competitive contexts, trying secure their niches in markets and communities against all rivals. All these organizations fight for more than their fair share of resources and revenues. They hold their histories and missions as sources of distinction and pre-eminence. The closer that institutions get to one another in character and mission, and the less necessary it is to be competitive, the more that they are overwhelmed by the narcissism of small differences. (This goes for people who work within these organizations and institutions, as anyone who has spend time in faculty meetings is all too aware.) Presidents, leaders and CEOs are surrounded by boards, advisors, vice-presidents and other associates who often prize being big fish in small ponds over the reduction in stature that might come by working in larger cooperatives or alliances. In an environment that seems full of existential threats, moreover, there’s a profound prisoner’s dilemma problem. Nobody wants to act first, nobody wants to act alone, and even being the first to talk of coordination risks being the first nail to get hammered down.

Nor is this just about self-interestedness: the energy and vitality of civil society and the formal economy stems from difference and divergence. Coordination runs opposite to what sustains so many institutions and businesses in their day-to-day existence. So it often seems as if the possibility of real coordination only becomes tangible and persuasive after the moment where it might have staved off the worst, where it might have pointed the way to some other future. Existing forms of coordination—chambers of commerce, professional associations, industry councils, and so on—often turn out to be performative vessels of weak and vague goodwill that have been effectively turned over to professional staff who have the same instincts to protect the organization they work for rather than sublimate themselves to a fierce new need for aligned action.

There’s one more thing at play that is outside the framework that Farrell lays out in his NY Times piece and on his Substack. All through 2024 and even more intensely since January, one of the greatest sources of anguish for many Americans (and sympathetic outsiders) has been organizations that seemingly ought to have leapt into some form of principled and highly coordinated opposition have either receded into silence or worse yet, given themselves over to enabling Trumpism in some fashion or another. You can be angry at big research universities for bending the knee in various ways, but the fact is that they had a massive hole ripped in their budgets in the middle of an existing budget cycle. You can ask why on earth the CEO of Intel agreed to pay a corporate tax just because Trump attacked him, but Intel’s market position is shaky. You can shake your head at law firms coughing up money, but the firms that did have business models that make them vulnerable. You can despair

But why is the New York Times, riding high economically, so visibly favoring Trumpism in its headlines and framing devices? Why are television networks and media companies paying off lawsuits they’d undoubtedly win in a way that exposes them to enormous future liabilities, or in the case of Disney, taking hasty actions which undoubtedly cost them a lot of subscription revenue? Why are some companies moving into sympathetic alignment with Trumpism’s “culture war” positions despite the fact that other previous commitments have been economically positive for them, while their new loyalties are costing them business? And of course, most infuriatingly of all, why have most national elected officials of the Democratic Party retreated into silence, evasion or failed reprisals of politics-as-usual in an environment where their careers and even lives are at risk if they can’t forcibly resist Trumpist power?

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The answer, unfortunately, is that there are a fair number of older people higher up in the hierarchies of older civic and corporate organizations who privately feel that Trumpism is harsh but necessary correction, who are reasoning from an “enemy of my enemy” sort of logic. They’re not seeing Trumpism for what it is nor what it is set to become, but instead as a kind of brief, evanescent opportunity for settling scores and putting themselves back in charge as they were meant to be.

Marc Andreessen justifiably comes in for a lot of criticism for his full-throated embrace of Trumpism, but I think it’s interesting to highlight one sentiment attributed to him in multiple sources. Andreessen has been reported to have been radicalized towards Trumpism by alarm and disdain for the new employees he’d hired, that they seemed driven by a critical disdain for the world as it was, including for capitalism. I understand why a venture capitalist—especially one who came by his initial stake essentially by being at the right place and the right time, like a fair number of the Big Tech leaders—would find it baffling to have young employees who demanded greater diversity, who were skeptical about both the existence of and wisdom of meritocratic, and viewed capitalism as a destructive and dangerous system that was fueling widening inequality and climate change. His reaction is very visible in his Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which includes a section called “The Enemy” that offers forgiveness to people who have been indoctrinated into an ideology he disdains, but also pledges to help them out of that mindset.

It seems to me that there is an influential fraction of a generation of people in many key civic organizations and companies who held privately negative views of early 21st Century demands for society-wide transformations like a reduction in inequality, comprehensive reform of policing and incarceration, greater commitment to inclusion and diversity in hiring and promotion, reversal of climate change, changes in how we talk about and represent the experiences and lives of marginalized or oppressed groups and identities, and so on. These are the people who stepped aside or held back their reservations as some of these demands or programs gained momentum, whether out of some sympathy for some of these goals or out of not wanting to become the main character for speaking up about their objections.

I have a modest reservoir of sympathy for people who felt that way then and have been stewing in some sense in all the years between the first time they stifled an objection and now. Yes, there were times when the fervor and intensity of younger people who wanted to fix a world that was in fact very obviously broken turned with unfair intensity on minor objections or critiques meant to be helpful. Or in some cases, turned on people who were just as committed to changing the world for the better but whose own orthodoxies clashed with the overly certain dogmatism of younger social critics. I get why some older people in these situations felt afraid, annoyed, disaffected or worried.

This is not a new thing for the modern left, speaking generally. It’s often been that an older generation ensconced in their situations, attached to their sources of financial and social support, bruised by battles both successful and otherwise, tells the next generation to go slow, to be cautious, to understand why some problems are hard problems, and for the next generation to say as James Baldwin said to William Faulkner, “You don’t mean go slow, you mean don’t go”. Often with some justice.

What that means right now is that at least some people who’ve been nurturing their resentments and holding their powder dry are standing aside from Trumpism, if not actively joining it, thinking that it will give their younger tormentors a taste of their own medicine. Now you’ll see, they are thinking—and sometimes saying—what it feels like to be cancelled, to have your jobs threatened, to play the game of culture war for keeps. And you’ll shut up about all that shit: you aren’t going to twist our arms to make us publish the 1619 Project, you aren’t going to mouth off to senior faculty before you’re tenured, you aren’t going to demand an organization-wide requirement for new pronouns, you aren’t going to make us sit through a workshop run by a facilitator who treats us all like idiot babies, you aren’t going to tie up an all-staff meeting with complaints about a single tweet written by a vice-president, you aren’t going to publish a paper that criticizes the company’s major new business plan, you aren’t going to say that a white editor simply can’t touch books by authors of color, you aren’t going to demand that a gay character has to be played by a gay actor.

That way of feeling and thinking is at a minimum a demonstration that the people who feel that way never really did understand what was being said to them about how life used to be like, about the reasons why there needed to be a change. For decades, Black men and women told the rest of America how they were treated by police, but because those were only stories that rarely generated criminal cases (for obvious reasons: the people committing the crimes were also the people in charge of investigating crime) many Americans chose to regard those stories as unproven, as vague in their extent and import. With the advent of ubiquitous video, however, the confirmations poured in. George Floyd’s murder was only the last of many such cases that the rest of America had to look at.

The people who are thinking “Now you’ll see what it was like to get a lot of emails threatening me for speaking up” are forgetting that two turns of the wheel back, the death threats and anonymous attacks were coming at the people now demanding change. Trumpism is not a new experience for some of its targets, it’s just a dramatic intensification and extension of familiar pressures and threats.

So if another of the forces preventing coordination against Trumpism is the thought of leveraging it as a corrective force, of pushing back on younger people making demands and creating threats? I wouldn’t try to correct a physicist about the validity of string theory or a biologist about the nature of homochirality, so I’m desperate to be understood here as a historian who specializes in 19th and 20th Century history telling anybody who is reading this a fact. The fact is that trying to leverage revolutionary, authoritarian or fascist power temporarily to push back forcibly on pre-existing enemies is a big mistake if you don’t want the revolutionary or fascist state to win out. Like, “never go up against a Sicilian when death is on the line” mistake especially if you don’t have an immunity to iocaine powder.

Never think that you can just push a few heads through the guillotine to get your unruly opponents and over-reaching juniors back in line. You are next. Never think you can dump your annoying humanists and get back to doing good science. Your science is going to get its head lopped off in turn. (Just ask Lavoisier.) Never think that you’ll get back to the few people of color and women being meekly grateful and compliantly quiet for you generously hiring them, because you’re the next person who is going to be told to shut up, sit down and be obedient. You’re going to go from feeling compelled to publish the 1619 Project to being ordered to clear out a big chunk of the front page for a glorious celebration of Emperor Trump.

There is no compact or understanding that will be kept with you. You will not regain power and authority where you feel you lost it. You will not get back to a world where people stay in place and in line, where you are once again the commonly understood benchmark for reasonableness and normality. The people you’re trying to strike a deal with, the people you think you can use to your advantage, are going to devour you in turn.

Don’t make the same mistake that people made repeatedly in the last two centuries.

The old adage that you don’t have to be the fastest person running away from a monster, just faster than the slowest person? It doesn’t apply if what is chasing you is a tsunami. It doesn’t stop when it drowns its first victims. The only safety lies in climbing up together. Think like Kino Loy in Andor:

Wherever you are right now, get up, stop the work. Get out of your cells, take charge and start climbing. They don’t have enough guards and they know it. If we wait until they figure that out, it’ll be too late. We will never have a better chance than this.

You may think you have some scores to settle, some balances to even, some resentments to unload. But coordinate now to resist or you’ll end up another head in another basket, with your only source of satisfaction as the blade comes down that at least somebody else got it first. Revolutions swallow their own loyalists, fascists get out the long knives for each other any time somebody feels a bit twitchy. Nobody sleeps safely in autocracy, not even the autocrat. There is still time to save ourselves from an all-encompassing nightmare, so shake off memories of yesterday’s uneasy sleep, which is nothing by comparison.

Image credit: W. Whitley, 1795, “Tin medal with a string of severed heads surrounds a standing corpse whose head is falling to the ground. The devil can be seen in the distance. There are two inscriptions one inside the string of severed heads and one outside,” British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/C_SSB-243-11