Austin, Texas MLA Convention on January 8, 2016

Chris here with the Story Thus Far.  

A  group of members of the Modern Language Association (MLA) submitted a "Resolution to Endorse the 2005 Palestinian BDS Call" to the Association.  The normal process would be for the MLA's Delegate Assembly (DA), which represents the membership, to debate the Resolution at the annual convention in January 2025 and vote it up or down.  The Association's Executive Council (EC), an elected governing body, is charged with reviewing resolutions for legal, financial and related problems before forwarding it to the DA. 

Upon advice from MLA counsel and after debate, the EC decided not to forward the Resolution to the DA for debate and vote, citing likely damage to the Association and its partners resulting from anti-BDS legislation in a number of states.

Blocking the debate on the resolution generated some strong responses.  The resolution's authors wrote "A Call to the Modern Language Association to Let Members Decide About BDS" (posted at LitHub).  The EC elaborated on its thinking in "Report to the MLA Delegate Assembly from the Executive Council on Resolution 2025-1."  Jewish Voices for Peace wrote a declaration that states, "The MLA stands apart from  peer organizations and sets a dangerous and shameful precedent for censorship."  

I am part of a group of MLA ex-presidents who objected to blocking the resolution debate. Our letter to the MLA president and Executive Council is also posted at Lit Hub.

Two members of the Executive Council resigned over the decision.  Rebecca Colesworthy and Esther Allen have allowed me to post their resignation letters below. 

***

December 6, 2024

Dear Officers and Members of the MLA Executive Council,

Yesterday, I submitted the co-authored introduction to the special issue of Profession born of Emergency Motion 2024-1. The essays we selected are at once informed and impassioned. That we had so many submissions from which to choose is indicative of how much MLA members are struggling under—and mobilizing their skills as humanists to work against—current threats to academic freedom and the spread of hatred and hostility on campus and off.

On Wednesday, in my role as the EC adviser to the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Humanities, I participated in a pre-convention Zoom meeting for graduate students along with Paula and staff. The meeting was a welcome reminder of how much the organization and “the profession” have changed since I first attended the convention nearly 20 years ago while serving as the grad student representative on a search committee. While the endless withering of the tenure-track job market is decidedly bad, the organization’s efforts to further engage and support scholars at all  stages and to focus more intently on labor issues are undoubtedly good.

The special issue and the warm, welcoming Zoom are exemplary of the many, many things MLA does spectacularly well. I am genuinely honored to have been a part of them, as I have so many committees, activities, and actions during my time on the EC.

I write now, regrettably but necessarily, to resign from my role as a member of the Executive Council. I hasten to add: I remain as committed as ever to the organization and to members.

Nevertheless, I cannot remain on the Executive Council.

Needless to say, I, along with the rest of the voting members present at October’s meeting, voted not to advance Resolution 2025-1 to the Delegate Assembly for debate and a vote. I do not stand by my vote in the meeting and remain troubled by the—indeed, by our—lack of communication and transparency with the proposers and members, as if the supporters of the resolution were not fellow humanities workers with precisely the kind of commitment, conviction, and coordination our fields desperately need right now. These should be our partners—not people we shun.

I try to be proactive. I thought about looking for a procedural path forward. But the problem is that I don’t stand by my vote and cannot defend our decision. It may be the “right” decision based on a narrow construal of the EC’s fiduciary duty. But members are also right to ask: What does this say or, indeed, not say about the organization’s values and principles? Where will the organization draw the line? It’s a slippery slope. I wonder: Will we aim to carry on business as usual in states that, in the near future, may adopt anti-DEI or anti-gender laws that allow institutions not to do business with vendors such as the MLA that are openly committed to equity and inclusion? Will we sign contracts that say, “We do not support DEI”? What happens if MLA’s own publications on social justice become a target?

If I had one, two, or three years left on the EC, I would stay on to try to push and work within established channels. I resign now knowing it’s essentially a symbolic gesture. I don’t think I’m special or unique in feeling torn about this or having “personal” views that deviate from the EC’s decision. I worry that all of you will think I’m a coward if not traitorous for not standing by my initial vote. As I said to Dana [Williams, MLA President] under separate cover recently: relationships—and I really mean relationships, not  “connections”—are everything to me. I remain committed to the organization. But I cannot defend our decision.

Above all, this is my way of standing in solidarity with members who have been working with admirable devotion and diligence to mobilize the MLA’s not insubstantial machinery to take collective stands. I cannot bracket my horror at the scholasticide and genocide in Gaza. And I think members committed not only to this particular cause but also to the broader principles of academic freedom and democracy deserve better representation, more open engagement and communication, and more transparency than we’ve given them.

The penultimate sentence of the introduction to the special issue of Profession reads: “it has never been more important for all of us, as MLA members, to come together, support each other, and draw strength from our solidarity.” I can’t take full credit for the words, but I stand by every one of them.

Respectfully,

Rebecca Colesworthy

***

December 6 2024

Dear Executive Council colleagues,

Many people, and many MLA members, see democracy under attack right now, along with academic freedom and campus free speech, and want to work towards a future where genocide ends, democracy, justice, free speech, & academic freedom are powerfully defended, and strong communities and institutions act with collective moral authority to reject and defeat authoritarianism.

As part of that work, some scholarly organizations in the humanities afford their members ways of taking collective action—with regard to US complicity in the annihilation of academic institutions, fellow scholars, students, historic monuments and so much else in Gaza, and with regard to the ongoing attacks on academic, intellectual and personal freedom in this country: the book bannings, anti-LGBTQ, anti-CRT, anti-BDS, anti-trans, anti-abortion and other kinds of harmful laws, abuses, and outrages that are only going to intensify under the incoming administration.

The decision not to allow the Delegate Assembly to vote on 2025-1 risks being perceived by MLA members and others as a declaration that the MLA is not the place for such collective action. Indeed, the decision may seem intended to effect a permanent, definitive squelching of any activism members might think of engaging in via the MLA. 

If the fiduciary responsibility of the Executive Council consists exclusively in protecting the MLA’s corporate revenue—the only rationale the EC has offered for this decision—then the MLA is a for-profit corporation, like any other. 

The decision not to allow the DA to vote on this may, I fear, do more damage to the MLA than any drop-off in revenue could. I can’t defend it, and hereby resign from the Executive Council. 

Sincerely,

Esther Allen

 

Kings Cross, London on December 18, 2017

ANTICIPATORY OBEDIENCE IN AMERICA

‘Since Trump won re-election — this time with the popular vote — many of the most influential people in America seem to have lost any will to stand up to him as he goes about transforming America into the sort of authoritarian oligarchy he admires. Call it the Great Capitulation.

 

‘Following Jan. 6, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, suspended Trump’s account. But last month at Mar-a-Lago, The Wall Street Journal reported, Zuckerberg stood, hand on heart, as “the club played a rendition of the national anthem sung by imprisoned” Jan. 6 defendants. (It’s not clear if Zuckerberg knew what he was listening to.) He’s pledged a million-dollar donation to Trump’s inauguration, as did the OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos’ company Amazon, which will also stream the inauguration on its video platform.

 

‘After Time magazine declared Trump “Person of the Year,” the publication’s owner, the Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff, wrote on X, “This marks a time of great promise for our nation.” The owner of The L.A. Times, the billionaire pharmaceutical and biomedical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, killed an editorial criticizing Trump’s cabinet picks and urging the Senate not to allow recess appointments.

 

‘Most shocking of all, last week ABC News, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company, made the craven decision to settle a flimsy defamation case brought by Trump.

 

‘As you may remember, a jury last year found Trump civilly liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll. In a memorandum, the judge in the case explained that while a jury didn’t find that Trump had raped Carroll, it was operating under New York criminal law, which defines rape solely as “vaginal penetration by a penis.” It did find that he’d forcibly penetrated her with his fingers.

 

‘“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” wrote the judge. “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

 

‘The ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos appeared to be using this broader definition when, in March, he said on-air that a jury had found Trump “liable for rape.” Trump, who regularly threatens, and sometimes files, defamation cases against his perceived enemies in the press, sued. And though his case seemed absurdly weak, ABC News decided to settle in exchange for a $15 million donation to Trump’s future presidential library or museum, $1 million in legal fees and a public statement of regret from Stephanopoulos and the network.’

…

 

'Different people have different reasons for falling in line. Some may simply lack the stomach for a fight or feel, not unreasonably, that it’s futile. Our tech overlords, however liberal they once appeared, seem to welcome the new order. Many hated wokeness, resented the demands of newly uppity employees and chafed at attempts by Joe Biden’s administration to regulate crypto and A.I., two industries with the potential to cause deep and lasting social harm. There are C.E.O.s who got where they are by riding the zeitgeist; they can pivot easily from mouthing platitudes about racial equity to slapping on a red MAGA hat.'

 

SOURCE: Michelle Goldberg, New York Times

 

ORGY OF CONFLICTS

 

‘Progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren challenged Donald Trump to set ethics guardrails to control a “massive conflict of interest” posed by Elon Musk’s unofficial role in the president-elect’s transition and incoming administration.

 

‘“Currently, the American public has no way of knowing whether the advice that he is whispering to you in secret is good for the country — or merely good for his own bottom line,” Warren said in a letter to Trump her office released Tuesday.

 

‘She pointed to contracts the US government has with Musk’s SpaceX and Tesla Inc. and said his companies have been subject to “at least 20 recent investigations or reviews” by federal regulatory agencies. She cited in the past week reports of developments in investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission of his company Neuralink Corp. and his purchase of Twitter Inc.

 

‘The Massachusetts Democrat said Musk has “already accrued” financial benefits from his relationship with the Trump transition, citing a CNBC calculation that the market capitalization of Tesla surged $70 billion in five days after Trump’s election. Expectations that Trump will streamline the rollout of self-driving cars and eliminate tax credits for electric vehicles that help the company’s competitors has helped buoy Tesla’s stock.

 

‘Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Warren’s letter. The letter is unlikely to have much impact given that Republicans will control the Senate next year.’

 

...

 

‘Trump transition spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt dismissed the letter and mocked Warren as “Pocahontas,” a racist reference to Warren’s previous assertion of distant Native American heritage.

 

‘“Pocahontas can play political games and send toothless letters, but the Trump-Vance transition will continue to be held to the highest ethical and legal standards possible,” Leavitt said.’

 

SOURCE: Mike Dorning, Bloomberg

 

 INVESTORS BETTING ON FOSSIL REVIVAL

 

 

SOURCE: Isabella M. Weber, Twitter

 

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN REGENT INTERVENES TO GET DEI ADMINISTRATOR FIRED

 

‘The administrator, Rachel Dawson, was director of the university’s office of academic multicultural initiatives. She was accused of saying in a conversation at a conference in March that the university was “controlled by wealthy Jews,’” was investigated by the University, which recommended a reprimand and retraining.  After intervention by a UM regent, Mark Bernstein, who said he was “disgusted” with the University’s response and said she should be “terminated,” Dawson was fired.

 

‘I see three separate but related questions here:

 

‘(1) The evidentiary question of what the DEI administrator Rachel Dawson actually said.

 

‘(2) The substantive question of what the appropriate sanction should have been, given various assumptions about the content of (1).

 

‘(3) The meta-issue of UM regent Mark Bernstein intervening in the case after the fact, and convincing UM President Santa Ono to fire Dawson, after the the normal disciplinary process had run its course, and concluded that a formal reprimand and mandatory re-education/training were the warranted sanctions.

 

‘As to (1), I think we should be somewhat wary of drawing strong conclusions about what was actually said in this kind of situation, where there’s no recording or transcript, and just two witnesses other than the accused, both of whom are far from disinterested observers. . . .   It’s simply a fact that, all other things being equal, a black woman’s purported statements are going to be interpreted and treated more harshly than a white person’s statements would be under similar circumstances (This is Racism 101). That, of course, doesn’t mean Dawson didn’t make what could be correctly interpreted as anti-Semitic statements; it merely means some extra caution is in order from an evidentiary standpoint.

 

‘As to (2), depending on what conclusions one reaches about the substance of (1), it’s certainly arguable that strong sanctions, up to and including firing, might be warranted. That’s what the university’s investigative process is supposed to decide.

 

‘Which brings us to (3). Here, I don’t think there’s any room for reasonable debate. It was a grotesque abuse of economic, social, and institutional privilege for Mark Bernstein to intervene in this case in the way he did, and it’s a grim commentary on the money mania that has taken over our leading universities that the donor class can corrupt university decision making in this way.’

 

SOURCE, Paul Campos, Lawyers, Guns and Money

KNOWLEDGE CRISIS INTERNATIONAL

 

‘Does it often feel as if the world is getting stupider? Data released on December 10th by the oecd, a club of mostly rich countries, suggest this may not be all in your head. Roughly every ten years the organisation asks adults in dozens of places to sit tests in numeracy and literacy. The questions it poses are not abstract brainteasers, spelling tests or mental arithmetic. They aim to mimic problems people aged 16-65 face in daily life, whether they are working in a factory or an office, or simply trying to make sense of the news.

 

‘The latest tests were carried out in 31 rich countries, and their findings are unnerving. They suggest that a fifth of adults do no better in maths and reading than might be expected of a primary-school child. The direction of travel is even less encouraging. In maths, average scores have risen in a few places over the past ten years, but fallen in almost as many. In literacy, a lot more countries have seen scores decline than advance, despite the fact that adults hold more and higher educational qualifications than ever before.’

 

SOURCE: The Economist

 

DOWNGRADING HIGHER ED FOR 2025

 

‘The [Fitch] report noted that rising pressures, including “uneven” enrollment trends, growing costs and flat state funding, are likely to financially hurt U.S. higher ed institutions—especially those with already tight budgets that heavily depend on tuition dollars. Fitch predicted modest net tuition growth, between 2 percent and 4 percent, for most colleges and universities.

 

‘The report highlighted that while undergraduate enrollment over all has rebounded since the pandemic, freshman enrollment has significantly declined, particularly at four-year colleges and universities. International student enrollment has been flat for the past two years, and the report predicted that it will continue to be “fragile,” given that the group is “highly susceptible to unfavorable shifts in both geopolitical sentiment and policy.”’

 

...

‘“Variable enrollment, rising capital needs and continued operating pressures will continue to chip away at more vulnerable higher education institutions in 2025, even if inflationary pressures ease and interest rates fall,” Wadhwani said in the report. “A widening credit gap continues to prompt an elevated level of consolidation, thus far concentrated among smaller, less selective and more tuition-dependent institutions.”’

 

SOURCE: Sara Weissman, Inside Higher Ed

 

CRYPTOCURRENCY IN THE WHITE HOUSE

 

'In July, Howard Lutnick, the pugnacious boss of broker Cantor Fitzgerald, regaled an audience of crypto devotees in Nashville with tales of his early days exploring the world of digital currencies.

 

'“I met every criminal who’s now in prison,” the 63-year-old joked, referring to his encounters with various youthful crypto executives now serving lengthy jail sentences for fraud. “And then,” he said, “I met the people who owned Tether.”

 

'In contrast to other industry players, Lutnick said, Tether’s co-founder Giancarlo Devasini, an Italian-born former plastic surgeon, was able to prove he was running a legitimate business.

 

'Since then the business has boomed. Profits at Tether, which now administers the most traded cryptocurrency in the world, surged to $5.2bn in the first half of this year.

 

'Despite only having around 100 employees, those earnings put Tether on a similar scale to some of the world’s largest banks — a billion more than Barclays and a billion less than Morgan Stanley — largely derived from interest on its reserves accumulated by taking in dollars in exchange for tokens.

 

'But at the same time, according to enforcement officials, prosecutors and information from multiple current and recent indictments, Tether has cemented its place as the go-to cryptocurrency for international criminals.

 

'The eye-popping constellation of gangsters and sanctions evaders using Tether includes cocaine cartels, North Korean hackers, Iranian and Russian spies, and fentanyl smugglers.

 

'Lutnick, meanwhile, who over three decades built Cantor Fitzgerald into one of the biggest dealers of US government debt, is about to join the US government as one of Donald Trump’s top lieutenants.'

 

SOURCE: Joe Miller, et al., Financial Times

WHEN YOU VOTE TO DEPORT YOUR BEST FRIEND

 

‘“There’s nothing to stop them from rounding me up once he takes office,” Jaime said.

 

[His best friend] ‘Sky had spent much of his adulthood preparing to protect his family in a crisis. He’d learned survival tactics in the Army and had trained in hand-to-hand combat as a Georgia corrections officer. In the last few years, as he sensed the country becoming more polarized and volatile, he’d built up a small collection of firearms and a cache of emergency supplies. He’d been anticipating a moment when the government might rise up against his family, but this particular crisis was one he’d helped to create.

 

‘“I’m going to be straight with you,” he told Jaime. “I voted for Trump. I believe in a lot of what he says.”

 

‘“I figured as much,” Jaime said. “You and just about everyone else around here.”

 

‘“It’s about protecting our rights as a sovereign country,” Sky said. “We need to shut down the infiltration on the border. It’s not about you.”

 

‘“It is about me,” Jaime said. “That’s the thing I don’t understand.”

 

‘More than anger or even fear, what Jaime had experienced most in the last several weeks was a rising sense of disorientation about the people he loved and the place he considered home. ‘He’d lived all but the first year of his life in Rome, a riverside town of 40,000 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. He was a customer service specialist at the local car dealership, a worship team volunteer at church and the host of family barbecues in his neighborhood cul-de-sac. But lately the trucks at his dealership were festooned with Trump flags, his church group was discussing the “sanctity of borders,” and his neighborhood was lined with political signs, including one that read: “Start shipping off illegals NOW!” More than 70 percent of voters in surrounding Floyd County had chosen Trump and his mass deportations, including many of Jaime’s friends and family members.

 

‘Jaime and Jennifer had considered moving their family to Canada, or Spain, or even Mexico, but Jaime didn’t know anyone there, and his rusty Spanish came out in a thick southern drawl.

 

‘“I’ve never felt like a foreigner until now,” he told Sky.

 

‘“I’m not going to let anything happen that puts your family at risk,” Sky said.

 

‘“It already did,” Jaime said.

 

‘“All those criminals that Trump’s been talking about — the rapists, the gang members — that’s not you,” Sky said. He had heard Trump say that he would deport “the bad guys” first and possibly show leniency to immigrants who had been brought to the country as children.

 

‘“You deserve to be here,” Sky said. “To me, you’re basically American.”

 

‘“But I’m not,” Jaime said.’

 

SOURCE: Eli Saslow and Erin Schaff, New York Times

 

TRUMP FOR DEMMIES

 

‘Hello and welcome to the Donald J. Trump School of Politics and Public Policy! As you may know, we are the only graduate school accredited to teach the Trump Method (TM™) . . .’

 

‘Here we go:

 

‘Step 1: Identify a real problem.

 

‘Step 2: Hyperbolise the problem. It is not enough to spotlight a surge of illegal migration. Claim thousands of murderers and rapists are on the loose, foreign dungeons and insane asylums are spewing their contents across the border, dogs and cats are broiling together. Claim millions more migrants have crossed than the government has counted. How can anyone prove you wrong?

 

‘Step 3: Promise extreme measures. But do not be specific! For example, you might threaten the “largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America”, but do not say what you mean by “criminals”. Say you will deploy the military but do not say how.

 

‘Step 4: Count on Steps 2 and 3 to derange your opponents, including the left-leaning press. If you are for something, they will be against it—and they will be against it to the same degree you are for it. This is why your oratory must be extreme. Always bear in mind the key insight of Mr Trump’s mentor, the red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn: “I bring out the worst in my enemies, and that’s how I get them to defeat themselves.” Mr Trump’s opponents forgot or ignored that the previous “largest deportation program of criminals” was carried out by President Barack Obama . . .’

...

‘This nursery-school dialectic accounts for Mr Trump’s greatest triumph with the Method: President Biden’s shocking neglect of illegal immigration until, politically, it was too late. Images of chaos at the border from his first two years in office let Mr Trump do what he couldn’t in 2020—run his 2016 campaign again. Sure, as the press did with Mr Trump, it will trumpet your strongest statements and publish “fact”-checks insisting migrants do not cause crime or lower wages. This will help you. If they are trying to explain the problem away, you are winning, because you got Step 1 right—the problem is real—and Americans know it.

 

‘Step 5: Scatter breadcrumbs. Hint that you favour more legal immigration; that as you crack down, you will “have the heart”, as Mr Trump put it. The press will downplay this talk, since it complicates the storyline, but centrists will be reassured, and such signals will preserve an asset Mr Trump prized: wriggle room.

 

‘Step 6: This is the fun part. Shortly after you win, claim you have solved much of the problem. Step 2 makes this easy, because the problem was never as bad as you said.”

...

 

‘Step 7: Set common-sense priorities. As Mr Obama did, focus first on deporting migrants who commit crimes, then on those who arrived most recently. Avoid dividing families or deporting the staff of farmers or Silicon-Valley plutocrats.

 

‘Step 8: Cherish your allies, and [co-opt] your opponents. . . .’

 

‘Step 9: Control your zealots. This is a hazard created by Steps 2 and 3, and Mr Trump struggled with it, along with his own instinct to divide Americans. The most scandalous treatment of migrants resulted from aides taking him literally. Even poor J.D. Vance, with his yen for building intellectual castles atop Mr Trump’s ever-shifting politics, had to revise his claims about immigration being responsible for everything that was wrong with America . . .’

 

‘Step 10: Pursue bipartisan immigration reform [in 2026].’

 

SOURCE: Lexington, The Economist

Santa Barbara, CA on December 10, 2016

THE KNOWLEDGE CRISIS I WAS TALKING ABOUT: TRANS EDITION

 

‘“I'm one of the only people that watched that MSNBC town hall, which is horrible. But there was one of the sit down interviews [Harris] did in sort of like the final quarter of the campaign, where she gave that infamous answer [about medical care for trans people],  I will follow the law on this, which is like, it just seems like [the Democratic] strategy for like the past year is like, just don't move, don't do anything, just bury your head in the sand until you can ascertain public opinion one way or the other, and just go with that. . . . ."’

 

‘"I've had a lot of conversations with staffers, with pollsters, et cetera, on this particular topic, of . . .  should Democrats respond to anti-trans rhetoric? And there's two issues. The first one is you're playing whack-a-mole with conspiracy theories.

 

‘Nine times out of 10, any argument that comes out about trans people is misconstruing science  “or the way the world just works, basic numbers, right? And so you're arguing with people who are the statistic equivalent of climate denialists, right? So like rebutting that is a bit of a challenge, but that being said, right, Democrats have a message on climate.

 

‘It's follow the science. What does the science tell us? The science is X.

 

‘The issue [with trans rights] is that Democrats don't really have a message to coalesce around. . . .’

 

‘The first bathroom ban was in North Carolina almost a decade ago, and people were boycotting.

 

‘It was a huge deal. Governor lost his re-election, Republican governor, right? Democrats never crafted a message.

 

‘It's been 10 years . . .  [and] they don't know how to talk about it. And where that becomes a problem is, you know, polls, the trans people did not decide this election, but polls do show that the advertising got average Americans to start associating a focus on trans people and other marginalized people as anathema to their economic concerns, as not focusing on their economic concerns. That's where the ad did work.

 

‘It didn't win the election, but it did get people to associate helping trans people with their own negative economic situation, which is bad, I think, generally for acceptance. If you can do that to anyone, you can pick apart Democratic Coalition forever. The issue is that people on the Hill, people in DC, don't see it that way.’

 

SOURCE: Jael Holzman, Chapo Trap House

 

THE FULL-TIME NON-STOP RIGHT-WING INFORMATION ECOSYSTEM AND ITS POWERS

 

 

 

SOURCE: @mattsheffield via The Editorial Board

 

TRUMP FANS ARE SUFFERING FROM TONY SOPRANO SYNDROME

 

'As Trump reshapes the nation in his image, some of his supporters seem inclined to turn cautionary tales on their head, empathizing with villains or antiheroes to such a degree that they miss the point of these stories entirely, even when the writers make the message as clear as possible. We might call this problem Tony Soprano Syndrome, after the patron saint of flawed antihero protagonists. One undecided voter told a New York Times focus group earlier this year that Trump is “the antihero, the Soprano, the ‘Breaking Bad,’ the guy who does bad things, who is a bad guy but does them on behalf of the people he represents.”

 

'Almost every single thing here is wrong, but it’s wrong in a way that illustrates the illiteracy that I am talking about. The Sopranos is by any measure one of the greatest television series of all time, focusing on the daily travails of a mob boss who tries to balance his mental health with keeping his marriage together and raising his children. But Tony is a murderer whose greed and ambition harm the people he claims to love. He is not a moral exemplar, nor is he intended to be; his selfishness helps no one else and is destructive to all around him. The same is true of Walter White, the protagonist of Breaking Bad, who at one point in the show literally looks at the camera and says of his crimes, “I did it for me.”

'Tony and Walter are also aspirational figures for a certain type of man experiencing a certain type of midlife crisis because, despite their body aging and their looks fading, they can still shape the world around them with a seemingly infinite capacity to endure or inflict violence. They want to tell themselves they’re protecting something—home and hearth perhaps—but actually want to validate themselves with a justification for hurting someone else, even if they have to invent one.

 

'Walter represents the emotional state of a particular type of viewer—someone who wants to enjoy his ability to make himself feel good through violence and suffering, and doesn’t want his good time spoiled by a mouthy woman reminding him that the things he is doing are actually bad. This type of reactionary masculinity is itself emblematic of the Trump era, as if conservatives listened to feminist critiques of “toxic masculinity” and decided to shear all virtue from their conception of traditional manhood and retain only those parts that involve dominance and exploitation of others.'

 

SOURCE: Adam Serwer, Portside via The Atlantic

 

THE GOVERNING MODEL WILL BE FULL-TIME HARASSMENT 

 

‘On Nov. 19, two weeks after Election Day, Elon Musk demonstrated perhaps the most brutal, if not sadistic, technique for making life in the federal civil service intolerable.’

 

‘A Wall Street Journal headline from Nov. 22 captured the situation well: “Musk Unleashes Online Army on Federal Workers.”’

 

‘What happened? Musk had reposted a tweet declaring, “I don’t think the U.S. Taxpayer should pay for the employment of a ‘Director of Climate Diversification’ at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.” Musk added a comment, echoing the language of the president-elect: “So many fake jobs.”’

 

‘Musk’s tweet, which was viewed by 33.2 million people, described Ashley Thomas, a 37-year-old who, The Journal reported, holds “engineering, business and water science degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Oxford” and works as the “little-known director of climate diversification” at the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which advises “private companies to fund ways to improve living standards in developing countries.” A Finance Corporation official told The Journal that Thomas’s work “is highly technical and is focused on identifying innovations that serve U.S. strategic interests, including bolstering agriculture and infrastructure against extreme weather events.”

As evidence mounted that Thomas’s job was under threat, she sought to pull herself out of the spotlight, taking down all of her social media accounts.’

 

‘The social media excoriation of public sector employees is just one way that President-elect Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists are using to destroy what they see as strongholds of the left in government and academia.’

 

SOURCE: Thomas Edsall, New York Times

 

THE CEO PAY IS TOO DAMN LOW!

‘“We don’t mind paying our footballers, top-rate footballers, extraordinary amounts of money,” Spencer, a former Treasurer of the UK Conservative party, told the Financial Times. “Somehow that’s considered perfectly acceptable. But if the CEO of BP or HSBC earns £20mn a year, materially less than their peer group in America, everyone jumps up and down saying this is an outrage.” Spencer said pay was one of the reasons why the UK was lagging behind other markets such as the US. . . .’

‘The median FTSE 100 chief executive pay amounted to £4.1mn last year, while bosses of S&P 500 companies in the US were paid a median of $16mn. AstraZeneca’s Pascal Soriot, who stands to earn as much as £18.7mn this financial year, is the best paid CEO on the FTSE 100. However, 36 per cent of shareholders voted against his pay award. Meanwhile, the average annual salary of Premier League football players is about £2.1mn, according to FT research. The best-paid — including Manchester City’s Kevin De Bruyne and Erling Haaland — are estimated by football data agency Capology to earn about £20mn a year in on-field salary. This does not take into account their ability to earn more through lucrative sponsorship deals. . . .’

 

‘“The US celebrates the fact that great chief executives earn large amounts of money. They want their chief executives to be paid like football stars,” said Spencer.’

 

SOURCE: Emma Dunkley, Financial Times

 

THE GREEN TRANSITION WILL NOT BE LED BY THE UNITED STATES OR EUROPE

 

‘The inescapable conclusion of the past 35 years is that it is foolish to treat the US as a reliable partner in global climate policy.

 

‘During Biden’s honeymoon, the hope was that the US and Europe would act together. In Europe, outright climate scepticism is rare and the EU has built an impressive suite of subsidies and carbon pricing. The end of coal-fired power generation in the UK this year was historic. But in Europe too the cost of living crisis is swinging the political mood against tough climate action. The looming crisis in the European car industry, brought on by Chinese success in EVs, exposes the hypocrisy of a continent that promised a Green Deal while clinging to diesel. 

 

‘To varying degrees, both Europe and the US have failed to grasp the decarbonisation challenge identified by their own scientists decades ago. Insofar as there is to be a global climate leader it can now only be China, which is responsible for more than 30 per cent of global emissions and has mastered the green energy supply chain. Given mounting tension with the US, Beijing has every incentive to minimise oil imports. The key question is whether the Chinese Communist party can muster the political will to override its fossil fuel interests. If it can, it will not single-handedly solve the climate crisis but it will assert a claim to leadership that the west will find hard to answer.’

 

SOURCE: Adam Tooze, Financial Times

 

AS U.S. THINKS TECH IS ITS FINANCIAL FUTURE, CHINA WEANS ITSELF FROM U.S. TECH

 

‘China has finally said aloud what was once only discussed behind closed doors: the country must rid itself of US chips.

 

‘Four government-backed industry associations, representing the bulk of China’s semiconductor demand, issued co-ordinated statements this week urging member companies to rethink purchases of American silicon that three of them deemed as “no longer safe or reliable”.

 

‘“Be cautious when purchasing US chips,” the four associations said, urging their members to look for Chinese or other foreign suppliers instead.

 

‘The directives came amid the latest tit-for-tat salvo between Beijing and Washington over the foundational technology, an exchange that has laid bare their intensifying competition and added momentum to the development of increasingly separate international supply chains.

 

‘In an unusually swift response on Tuesday, Beijing banned the shipment of key minerals and metals to the US, just hours after American officials unveiled new export controls designed to “degrade” China’s ability to make the most advanced chips.

 

‘The latest US controls include tougher restrictions on shipping semiconductor manufacturing tools to China and a ban on exports of advanced memory chips needed in artificial intelligence hardware.

 

‘In response, China prohibited the export to the US of gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials, and imposed stricter controls on graphite.

 

‘Its action signalled a new willingness on Beijing’s part to confront directly US efforts to cut the country off from advanced technology. In talks with President Joe Biden last month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping linked Washington’s tech controls to stymying China’s right to development, calling it a red line for the first time.’

 

SOURCE: Ryan McMorrow and Eleanor Olcott,  Financial Times

 

IT’S THE MONOPOLY POWER, STUPID

 

‘For decades, local grocery stores thrived. Then in the 1980s, the government stopped enforcing a key antitrust law. Rapid consolidation followed, giving rise to food deserts & a price spike. Our new graph shows the dramatic impact of this policy shift.’

 

SOURCE: Stacy Mitchell, Twitter

 

WHEN STUDENT HOUSING BECOMES A PROFIT CENTER FOR UNIVERSITIES

 

‘The numbers in this report are shocking. The average purpose-built student room in London now costs more than the maximum maintenance loan, leaving students with a shortfall even before they’ve bought any food, paid for their travel or covered other living costs. The current London Plan is not helping by making the provision of more new beds unviable.’

 

 

SOURCE: Sarah Jones and Martin Rushall, Priced Out? The Accommodation Costs Survey 2024

London Bridge on November 25, 2017

The Trump administration will escalate attacks on universities in particular and on expertise in general. Trump is setting up an autocratic executive branch, and as Masha Gessen observes, “Rejection of genuine expertise is both a precondition and a function of autocracy.”  Trump continuously imposes the problem not simply of arranging a mutual recognition of expertise and democracy but of avoiding the destruction of both.

How are the targets of Trump’s autocracy campaign supposed to respond?  Reactive self-defense won’t work. Another paradigm has to be constructed piece by piece. 

 

This post continues my effort to think through the relation between U.S. politics and knowledge.  Politics seems to me to have become a knowledge sink. In the U.S., a good way to win in politics is to glorify the refusal of knowledge.  Trump is especially good at glorifying knowledge’s destruction as a triumph of the will.

 

Democrats tend to hate this, whether they went to college or not. But they haven’t figured out how to expose or weaken it.  They are also haunted by one famous reference to the issue.

 

During her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton made a snotty remark about half of Trump’s voters that allowed the Republicans to move the clock back to George Wallace time. 

 

Clinton was speaking at a fundraiser on September 9^th when this happened:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” Clinton said. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

 

She said the other half of Trump’s supporters “feel that the government has let them down” and are “desperate for change.”

 

Republicans turned the deplorables line into a permanent symbol of the reverse bigotry of educated elites.  Hillary Clinton became the icon of the professional-managerial elite that looks down on ordinary Americans and feels entitled to force puberty blockers on their children and make them say Latinx.

 

The twinned idea is that billionaires, private equity kings, and tech lords are not elites but powerful defenders of regular people. They prove this with their hostility to transgender people and civil service employees. The deplorables narrative equates right-wing positions with triumphant wealth and heartland Main Street.

 

I felt no love for Clinton’s policy positions.  However, when you put both halves of her statement together, was Clinton actually wrong about MAGA? 

 

She was saying that MAGA voters were a mix of the desperate who wanted a change candidate and the bigoted who after eight years of a Black First Family wanted a white candidate to ride to the rescue.  These days, there’s widespread agreement that Trump voters are a mix of the two positions. 

 

Many have pointed out that Trump voters weren’t getting dogwhistle racism but the explicit kind.  This was even more true in 2024.  At his big final rally at Madison Square Garden, the comedian Tony Hutchcliffe famously said, “there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson remarked that Kamala Harris is “just so impressive as the first Samoan, Malaysian, low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president.” He was echoing Trump’s own refrain of calling her “slow,” and a “low IQ person.”

 

As far as I know, the media never found a Trump voter who said, “I just love his tariff policy, but I can’t vote for him now because he keeps calling the Black woman ‘low-IQ.’ It takes a special kind of pocketbook voter to support a racist oligarch for his supposed economic populism.  Trump has tens of millions of them. Hillary Clinton was making this same point.

 

In his 2024 election debrief, Keith Boykin said, “Let’s be real. Trump doesn’t represent policy. He represents cultural resentment against the changing America.”  Boykin doesn’t call MAGA voters deplorables, but he’s making this same point. 

 

There’s social psychological research that backs this up. The book Authoritarian Nightmare appeared during Trump’s 2020 campaign.  Former Nixon counsel John Dean partnered with social psychologist Bob Altemeyer to tie Trump partisans to high scores on an instrument that generates a Right-Wing Authoritarian (RWA) scale.  It has been in use since the 1970s. 

 

Dean and Altemeyer were able to combine this scale with a Monmouth University Polling Institute survey of Trump voters. Their conclusion is memorable. 

The verdicts are in. (1) Donald Trump’s supporters are, as a group, highly authoritarian compared to most Americans. (2) They are also highly prejudiced compared to most Americans. (3) You can explain the prejudice in Trump’s supporters almost entirely by their authoritarianism. (4) Authoritarianism is a strongly organized set of attitudes in America that will prove very difficult to reduce and control. . . . The pillars of Trump’s base, white evangelicals and white undereducated males are highly authoritarian and prejudiced. . . . The connections among prejudice, authoritarianism and support for Donald Trump are so strong that no other independent factor can be as important in supporting his re-election. There just is not much left to be explained, which is a highly unusual situation in the social sciences, but that is where the data have taken us. Ask a very complicated question: Who are Trump’s staunch supporters? Get a very simple answer: Prejudiced authoritarians, and a few others.( Dean and Altemeyer 2020, 224–25).

 

My point is not so much that Hillary was right, or that MAGA voters are deplorable, or that tens of millions of Trump voters willingly jumped into Trump’s basket of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and Islamophobia.  

 

My points are, first, that some large percentage of Trump voters vote on the basis of bias, fake knowledge, destroyed knowledge, persecution mania, or epistemic violence. 

Second, authoritarianism validates false knowledge as true knowledge simply because its source is the leader. It prevents learning, both individually and collectively.

 

And third, most of the media –and the left—treat their positions as authentic working-class consciousness rather than as what they are, bullshit that undermines of the possibility of political knowledge. 

 

I find this free pass massively patronizing of Trump voters. Most are legitimately angry about housing costs, food prices, et al., and are statistically almost as likely as Democrats to think corporate America has too much power. Yet they have perverse, backward ideas about how to fix real problems, nearly all of which will make the problems worse while enabling the persecution of millions of people. And yet most pundits, policy wonks, and Democratic politicians do not hold them to the same standards of political thinking that the rest of us have to live by at work, at home, in public meetings, or on the bus ride every single day.

 

This inhibition is an artifact of the right’s teplorables Taboo. “If you think my racist or sexist or stupid economic position is wrong, that’s the same as saying I’m a deplorable, which makes you elitist and wrong and out of touch with regular people.”  Instead of being mercilessly critiqued--not for who they are but for what they think, Trump voters are often granted carte blanche authenticity and legitimacy.  A lot of commentators are scared not to.  The deplorable taboo immunizes the Trump voter from criticism and from ordinary self-reflection.

 

I’m not saying the left should match Trump’s insult politics and call Trumpers too dumb to live, to name the URL of my first blog 20 years ago. These are some of my relatives we’re talking about.

 

But I am saying we should use the teacher’s approach to the knowledge gulf teachers face every day. Respect for and dialogue with the person, relentless dispute of their bad or lacking information and their bad and destructive ideas. And the building of a public ethos that expects this. 

 

It’s the age-old “love the sinner, hate the sin.” Clinton may have sounded more like “hate the sinner”—and the sinner is often subject to overt coercion.  But Democrats have paid enough for the condescension in her remark. The left now has to be fully in the business of contesting terrible Trumper thought. 

 

If we don’t do this full-scale attack on Trumpian epistemology starting with the most popular parts, the left will fail in its renewed post-election efforts to speak directly to the real concerns of the American working class.  

I particularly like Hasan Piker’s version, blocked quoted here, and Faiz Shakir’s version. But all this getting real won’t change anything unless we address the underlying knowledge crisis. Their fake knowledge needs to be engaged, attacked, replaced and its foundations exposed. 

If we don't do this, we will also fail in the ongoing effort to replace oligarchic governance with complex systems to deal with our polycrises.  

 

Trump revives the Republican's ancient roots as the party of the small businessman who might soon become a platform mogul—Joe the plumber, the mattress store owner who builds a national franchise, Elon Musk. The key feature of this type is direct and absolute rule over their company, then generalized to the entire society. You don’t need Hitler for this kind of authoritarian sovereignty as a way of managing systems. This is standard practice for  the American CEO.

 

Democrats have become the party of the well-educated and also of public spending on knowledge economy infrastructure.  The Democrats are wrong about many things—their entire foreign policy needs to be burned to the ground—but they are right about the fact that only complex systems and distributed authority have any chance of dealing with climate change, monopoly, inequality, racism, public health, housing, and the other scourges that are unraveling U.S. society.  

To get any of this, a new paradigm for collective action needs to be built, and it’s going to require the replacement of Trumpian (anti) knowledge structures.

 

Academia will also need to enter the fight. In an upcoming post, I’ll talk about universities, (bad) democratic higher ed policy and MAGA voters.