Nov 5, 2008, UC Students in Grenoble

In 2016, I was one of the Democrats who was pretty sure that Trump could win.  Then in 2020 I was pretty sure he would lose.  Now I’m back to pretty sure that he will lose in 2024. I have a few reasons, including education, as I’ll explain. 

 

I’m not celebrating the Democrats here. I omit the Biden administration's failures (nicely recapped by Patrick Healy here). I do agree with whoever said, in this good discussion of relations between the anti-war left and the Biden war party, that defeating Trump is not a step that can be skipped.  These are reasons for this defeat.

 

First, there’s the technical issue of the limits of the numerical, meaning the limits of polls, or really the limits of the interpretative tweaking of polls.  The media is too positivist by half, and underplays the importance of the assumptions behind the weighing of the results.  The main thing I’ve heard is that the pollsters are obsessed with not undercounting Trump voters because they have in the past.  So they are likely overcounting Trump voters. Everyone in the media “knows” about weighting, and pollwatchers offer learned discussions, but they still talk as though polls are empirical snapshots. They are not.  The performance of the campaigns isn’t even close. I think the voting will be less close than the polls.

 

Second, Harris-Walz are as good as Trump at the showbusiness of campaigning.  His act is in serious decline: it’s bleak, rancid, and desperate. His escalation into the full Nazi is a sign that he knows he is slipping behind.  Harris and Walz are hugely successful in the arena I don’t really care about but know is important—money, ad buys, sound bites, celebrity endorsements, glamour connections, and other things that may sway many people, including those who don’t see politics as distinct from other forms of entertainment in the unending flow of processed images and sound. Harris and Walz are both very pro, and I think that’s the main cause of Trump’s rising fear.

 

Third, Trump’s dogmatic, irrational hatred may seem like a superpower, but it’s not.  We are supposed to be in the age of post-reason, where everyone is driven by emotion, affect, and image-created impulse and is also fine with that.  It’s true that Trump seems to command an Orc army in which not one foot soldier has been alienated by his firehose of provably false claims and civil-war inducing curdled vows, like deporting millions of US residents with the military.  But peak outrage is not the state in which people actually live, even the Trump faithful who are carried away at a rally as they might be at a football game.  Trump is certainly the choice of the reactionary millions—say the one-third of Americans and the three-fifths of Republicans who agree that immigrants poison the blood of America. This is a very high number: I’m not minimizing the problem and to the contrary am studying it. But it’s not a spectacle of mass mind-control that cannot be stopped by ordinary politics.

 

Fourth is a contingent semi-harmony among Democrats.  Some people have argued that Harris-Walz have built a majority centrist coalition around women’s rights to safety and respect, post-Dobbs abortion, meaningful environmental policies, supportive government, non-racism (if not active anti-racism), pro union workplace and wage policies, reduced inequality, and the rule of law. Since I think that’s where the majority of US voters are, I think this will work to build a majority.  The left will need to work hard to fix Harris-Walz’s timid economic plans and acceptance of Biden’s catastrophically bad foreign policy, with a focus on shutting down Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza.  After they win the election.

 

Everything I read says that Harris-Walz have a great ground game and that Trump-Vance don’t have one at all.  They have liars’ circuses, which encourage the media to mistake part for whole and overstate the attending faithful—100 in Austin, 25,000 in New York—as a mass movement.  But on the ground, the education is happening, from house to house. Oliver Laughland reports:

 

I am out with two women, Leslie Hughes and Luwaunna Adams, whom I met two years ago when we were making a video in western Pennsylvania – a perennial battleground region in the US’s closest-fought swing state. . . . As we trudge the streets, knocking doors in the crisp autumn air, we meet a number of apathetic voters who tell the women they are not planning to cast their ballot this time around. One young man named Rashad says he cannot understand how Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote in 2016 and yet lose the election. “If ‘we the people’ chose someone, but the electoral [system] chooses someone else, what’s the point of my vote?” he asks Adams. Another woman says she finds it impossible to discern “which one is good and which one is bad” – and so has decided to sit it out. …

 

But Hughes and Adams do not give up. They stand for 10 minutes with each voter, running through many of the ways Trump failed during his first four years and why, they say, he should not be given another chance. They talk about how their rights as unionised cleaners are on the line. Adams engages in a frank lesson about the power of voting in her home state. “Your vote does count,” she says to Rashad. “You know what time it is.”

 

Both [voters, Rashad and an unnamed woman], are eventually won over and decide to cast their vote for Harris. Adams lets out a cheer of joy. “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you,” she tells Rashad. He agrees: “Especially in this era of brainwash. Everything is just brainwashing you to think a certain way.” He thinks about taking a break from social media.

 

It is a moment of clarification and a reminder of just how distorted reality has become in this election. Conversations like these may well be the only way to bring Pennsylvania, and by default the whole country, back from the brink.

 

Every activist, organizer, psychologist, or educator knows about the mental shift.  A second ago you thought this. Now you think that, which may be the opposite.  Your feelings change too. The shift is very different from reacting to words or images. It takes root. It has been interacting with you, your identity, and your life, and isn’t just something you’re skimming through. 

 

It’s hard to talk about this difference. we’ve demystified our binary oppositions between thought and feeling, active engagement and passive reception. We’ve also damaged our understanding of learning vs. watching things, or learning vs. viewing, as part of a tech barrage that ramped up with MOOCs in the early 2010s and has reached a new peak with “AI.” 

 

And yet these things are different.  Active thinking is what we try to achieve in class. It involves internalization, learning that “sticks.” It is recognizably different from rote response—there’s a large established literature on this.  It also happens here on the campaign doorstep.  

 

Luwaunna Adams has the best phrase for it.  “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you.”

 

Basically, I think “thinking for yourself” is going to win.   And therefore so will Harris-Walz. 

 

Then Trump’s ground game will begin, which will involve massive disputation of the election results.  But he will try that because he will have lost the election.

July 19, 2024, Three Cliffs Bay, Wales

Michael Meranze and I stopped this blog not long after I left UC Santa Barbara to take up my current job as Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) in London, England--it’s great!--and Michael became divisional chair of the UCLA Academic Senate and then co-chair of that campus’s Covid task force.  

 

We had a few relapses. I wrote a late-pandemic post on the UC budget in October 2021 and another in January 2022. Michael fell off the wagon in Spring 2024 to critique the New McCarthyism and the authoritarianism of administrators’ handling of student anti-war protests.  

 

But generally this has been my cooling-off period from the dominant focus on higher ed.  I have now been out of my professor job for four years. I moved from Santa Barbara to London, and am now a resident of the UK.  I’m also nearly two years past my period on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and my year as MLA president (2022).  My focus there was the political economy of the academic humanities and the need to build research infrastructure (my columns are here).  The break from higher ed blogging helped my research and writing to expand into other areas.  

 

And yet none of the issues we worked on here have been resolved or ameliorated.  Many have gotten worse, like academic freedom.  Understanding their interconnections with other topics, forces, and sectors has become more pressing. 

 

I’m going to restart the blog to cover an expanded range of issues confronting the creation and use of knowledge. It will cover the culture industries as well as education.  It will continue Remaking the University’s linking of teaching, research, academic content, consciousness, et al. to political economy.  Political economy blogs don’t tie their topics to culture: Adam Tooze’s excellent Chartbook is a case in point: no cultural or educational drivers there, though he has great art.  Here I’ll study these factors together.  I’ll emphasize social and cultural knowledge in our era of tech determinism  

 

Remaking II will also cover protest knowledge of the kind that Israel’s war in Gaza has provoked on campuses across the country and that has changed public framework for discussions of Israeli policy and the Middle East.

 

The blog will continue my version of critical university studies, with its focus on higher ed’s material conditions and its effects on learning and research. Thanks to Michael (and other, occasional contributors), we analysed a wide range of university matters from 2008 through early 2022.  Now the blog will cover related institutions as well. 

 

In addition to US higher ed coverage, I will be linking UC and US higher ed to university systems elsewhere in the world. I have a front-row seat at UK higher ed crisis—now openly recognized as such—and it’s an important parallel to the US situation. 

 

I used that baggage-laden term, culture industries. The three I follow diligently are journalism, publishing, and theatre, and will be writing about these. By virtue of longstanding local friendship circles I have a good sense of the working lives of many London artists, and will link to commentary on the current art system.  

 

My foundation, ISRF, funds annual grant competitions on open topics as well as focused internal research.  Our current research topics include “Alternatives to Green Finance,” “Political Affect,” “Political Economy and Race,” “AI, Learning, and Attention,” and “Future Universities.” I’m a kind of P.I. on these, and will discuss work in these areas as it becomes relevant here.  I continue to study the nature and social effects of literary and cultural knowledge, so that will turn up as well.

 

Given my job now, I also follow Greater Academia: foundations, think-tanks, museums, libraries, public engagement councils, and research-oriented community-based organizations. They will turn up from time to time.

 

Since public knowledge emerges as much from social movements as from universities, we’ll cover their work in relation to higher ed, media industries, and tech, especially their efforts to improve working conditions. 

 

This sounds like we’ll be spread very thin. We will be.  I can’t actually cover these terrains of cultural knowledge and activity without the shift from “I” to “we” that just happened. But we’ll figure out how to do this as we go. 

 

Part of the solution is that we’ll cover much of this material through citations and excerpts of other people’s writing rather than writing all the posts ourselves. We’ll have three kinds of posts:

            Liner Notes: regular posts, likely one from me per week.            

 Highlights: links and excerpts from pieces about the topics named above.

            Archives: institutional material, which will help correct the misleading histories of academia created by university PR operations and the media.

            

In the process, the blog will set a few themes on a collision course: the varying states of organized knowledge in the world today, knowledge labor, knowledge management, society’s knowledge needs and demands, propaganda and disinformation. And of course money.

 

I’m going to focus somewhat less on the knowledge refusers that on the knowledge producers.  What is happening to knowledge work, broadly conceived?  What has happened to the working conditions especially for cultural work—humanities professors of course but also graphic designers, local musicians, set dressers, and other trades and crafts? Working conditions was my MLA presidential theme in 2022. I will continue that theme here. 

 

The same goes for persistent funding problems. I’ll carry on with Remaking’s political economy of the university and its professional workers, and expand it to non-academic workers.  

 

Culture work is grossly underfunded everywhere. This is happening at a time in world history when none of our major problems can be solved without bringing cultural knowledge to collaborate with the technological dimensions. Problems like climate crisis, inequality, oligarchy, racism, xenophobia, and nonstop warfare all require STEM and non-STEM disciplines to work together. The polycrisis has been entrenched by the continuing acceptance of C.P. Snow’s 1950s model of a divergence between “two cultures” (for him, physics v. literature).

 

At the same time, culture should exist for culture’s sake. It is an intrinsic good. It is a human right. Its sidelining, its funding neglect, creates cognitive shortfalls for addressing both personal and world issues and a rights problem as well.  

Underfunding is a root cause of epistemic injustice, suffered by non-normative standpoint knowledge of every kind.  Epistemic justice depends on budget justice. We’ll cover it.

 

What about the new title: Long Revolution?   I was thinking of doing Remaking Knowledge Work, to reflect my preoccupation with knowledge labor and its institutional conditions. 

 

My colleague Stuart said, why not Knowledge Strikes Back.  That’s pretty close actually.  

 

The current title, Remaking II: Long Revolution, is meant to reference not only the knowledge wars in which my entire career has taken place, but pathways out of them.

 

I spent part of last summer on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, where I go to swim and read. I  wrote a chapter there for a volume on Raymond Williams’ concept of structure of feeling. The chapter is called “Raymond Williams’ Subtheory of Cultural Revolution,” and begins like this:

 

New politics, new economics, new societies: where do they come from? How do they eventually emerge?  How do cultural changes come to affect political and economic systems that seem hopelessly entrenched, if not determined to restore a vanquished past?

 

Raymond Williams called the process of emergence the long revolution. It was slow, and bogged down in its own hesitations and backsliding. It often stalled out for decades at a time. The general direction of the long revolution was democratization. This was democratization of politics but for Williams it was more particularly democratization of culture.

 

Within culture, the long revolution meant a democratization of intelligence, in which the entirety of a given society gradually gets full access to the infrastructures of learning and communication that eventually allows everyone to enact their creative agency in the society overall.   

 

I do believe we’re slouching towards world democratization in spite of our new dark age. But there’s no arc of the universe tending toward it. It takes continuous work amidst the constant backsliding.

I would like the blog to be a place for that work, where we can think these issues through collaboratively, and generate better ideas about how we can overcome our knowledge troubles and their kindred crises.  I hope you enjoy the new version of Remaking.