HA Journal, Volume V

The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College hac.bard.edu Copyright Š 2017 Bard College Published by The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College Roger Berkowitz, Editor Wyatt Mason, Associate Editor Joshua Abraham Kopin, Associate Editor Editorial Board Jerome Kohn Patchen Markell Thomas Wild Produced by the Bard College Publications Office Mary Smith, Director Barbara Ross, Copy Editor Karen Walker Spencer, Designer All rights reserved. Except in reviews and critical articles, no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the Hannah Arendt Center.

Cover: ŠEstate of Fred Stein, fredstein.com ISSN: 2168-6572 ISBN: 978-1-936192-52-6 Bard College PO Box 5000 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504-5000 bard.edu

Foreword Earlier this year I was asked by Carla Goldstein, cofounder of the Women’s Leadership Center at the Omega Institute, to help organize a panel discussion on the question of how, in the wake of the election of President Donald Trump, we can cross the partisan divide and speak with those of our neighbors and fellow citizens with whom we fundamentally disagree. We chose as a model the “living room conversation” structure, in which six people from opposing political worlds would each explain who they were, what they understood their core values to be, and what they thought about speaking with and listening to people who were political opposites, if not political enemies. At a time when the demonization of political opponents has fractured our society, such conversations are simple ways to explore what might unite us amidst our differences.

While searching for potential participants for such a panel, two Bard colleagues recommended Lucian Wintrich. Wintrich was a Bard graduate from 2012 and had recently been made a White House correspondent for an altright blog called Gateway Pundit. He had little journalistic experience—almost none. He did not even call himself a journalist, but rather presented himself as a “political artist.” He had become known politically for his art project “Twinks for Trump” and was a sarcastic and cynical critic of liberal orthodoxy.

As a flamboyant and provocative Trump supporter who celebrated offending liberals, Wintrich was hard to take too seriously. And yet, he was now a White House correspondent. He was exactly the kind of person that most Bard students might not think worth speaking or listening to, which is why we decided to invite Wintrich to join the discussion.

Naively, I didn’t think inviting Wintrich to participate on a panel discussing partisanship would be highly controversial. Given the current climate on college campuses across the country, however, his visit became a lightning rod for anger and dissent. I received dozens upon dozens of requests and demands to rescind the invitation, from students, alumni, and faculty. Goldstein decided that she could no longer be on the panel and withdrew. We received threats that the panel would be disrupted. All of this raised two questions: why was having Wintrich speak at Bard so awful? Why was it important to have Wintrich appear at Bard?

I heard numerous reasons for excluding Wintrich from campus. The first involved rumors of his being a sexual predator, which I investigated; the rumors were false. Then came claims that he was racist, anti-Semitic, a white supremacist, and transphobic. Very few of these complaints were accompanied by evidence. I was struck by the ease with which such epithets were bandied about. Few critics felt the need to argue that Wintrich was any of the things they accused him of being. The accusations were meant simply to discredit

him, to show him unworthy of being heard, unworthy of arguing with. Such dehumanizing dismissals are ad hominem attacks in their purest form.

In this context, it is especially important to ask why his increasingly mainstream approach to journalism is so dangerous. The problem with Wintrich and political trolls like him is more complicated than saying he is not a real journalist. I agree with this claim, as does Wintrich. Part of his performance is to argue that journalism itself is indistinguishable from advertising and propaganda; by performing as a propagandist doing journalism, he seeks to undermine the latter. He says that journalism, understood as a professional activity with norms of impartiality and limits on fabrication, is simply a myth.

He insists, as he did at the panel itself, that all journalism is simply advertising, that all journalists are selling something: an idea, a movement, a party. In such a world, journalism is fully politicized.

In her essay “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt argues that politics cannot exist without certain nonpolitical realms that are dedicated not to politics, but to truth. Science, law, and journalism are three particular nonpolitical spheres she mentions that are dedicated to the pursuit of truth. She recognizes, of course, that truth is always contingent and constructed, but she also sees that any political world cannot exist without some basic agreement on common truths. Journalism is one particularly fraught profession when it comes to the claim to truth; it is hardly objective and it can be opinionated.

But journalism must at least strive to uphold a professional commitment to facts and factuality.

This threat to the idea of journalism is to me the real danger Wintrich and many others like him present. The factual world is fragile and facts can easily be discredited. This is especially true when we are talking about the political world, a world composed largely of opinions. We can build a common and true world only when we listen to one another and embrace the plurality of being in the world. We have to listen to one another even if we see the world differently from one another, because we must share and make the world together. And yet there are basic facts that hold us together only insofar as we commit ourselves to admitting those facts, to learning to disagree without rejecting those facts that challenge our opinions or worldviews. Wintrich is hardly alone in making up or twisting facts. He is correct that the defactualization of our political world is a widespread and bipartisan activity. The fact that he is a White House correspondent shows that in the present political world his cynical antijournalism has become accepted into the mainstream.

However, in throwing off the mask of hypocrisy that at least pays a compliment to the virtue of factuality, Wintrich and those like him strike a blow against the possibility of a common world.

To ask whether we should listen to someone like Wintrich is legitimate.

Some argue that it is enough to simply read the writings of the Steve Bannons, the Betsy DeVoses, the Charles Murrays, and the Lucian Wintrichs—that offensive opinions can be experienced at arm’s length and kept out of the

campus community. But it is not enough to simply read these views (or more frequently, to read dismissals of them). A view we disagree with on the Internet rarely argues back when we dismiss it. Arguing with someone who will respond to our arguments is the only way to truly test our arguments. The practice of arguing with those with whom one disagrees is the best way, in the political life of a citizen, to learn how to engage actively and effectively. It is the only way to learn our weaknesses and our opponents’ strengths. And, at the very least, it is the only way to discover whether, despite our real differences, we share a common commitment to reason and decency; after a life of watching politics and writing about it, it has been the only way that I have seen that ends up being productive.

Volume 5 of HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center publishes a collection of essays designed to help us think provocatively about the question of how to speak about the most difficult questions that divide us and why it is important we do so. These essays were originally given as talks at the Arendt Center’s October 2016 conference “Real Talk: Difficult Questions about Race, Sex, and Religion.” Some are more formal and others free-form; all of them ask how we can begin the process of speaking about those most difficult questions that divide us, in ways that make possible the building of a common world. Essays by Göran Adamson, William Deresiewicz, Mary Gaitskill, Janet Halley, Erica Hunt, Greg Lukianoff, Uday Mehta, Deroy Murdock, and Judith Shulevitz, when taken together, work to begin the project of speaking about issues that are too often passed over in awkward silence.

We also publish three essays on Donald Trump’s election as president. In the wake of Trump’s election, we asked leading thinkers to think through his victory in light of Arendt’s writings. These essays—by myself, Leon Botstein, and Marianne Constable—are attempts to do just that.

In addition, we republish “Useless Freedom,” an essay by Mary McCarthy adapted from a speech originally given at Bard College in 1987. McCarthy makes her case for a courageous freedom of thought and speech and against the case for censorship. Written in another time, McCarthy’s essay offers another voice to the discussion about the meaning and import of free, provocative, and uncomfortable speaking. Her essay, along with the essays from the Arendt Center conference, begins the collective activity of finding, together, a language through which a new and more just conversation on race, sex, and religion might spring forth.

—Roger Berkowitz

About the Hannah Arendt Center The Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is an expansive home for thinking in the spirit of Hannah Arendt. The Arendt Center’s double mission is first, to sponsor and support the highest quality scholarship on Hannah Arendt and her work, and second, to be an intellectual incubator for engaged humanities thinking at Bard College and beyond, thinking that elevates and deepens the public argument that is the bedrock of our democracy. The Arendt Center cares for and makes available the Hannah Arendt Library, with nearly 5,000 books from Hannah Arendt’s personal library, many with marginalia and notes.

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HA Green Shoots Roger Berkowitz

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Class, Power, and the Liberal Religion William Deresiewicz

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The Trouble with Following the Rules Mary Gaitskill

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Toward Fairness for All Students Janet Halley

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Feeling Safe Uday Mehta

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The Learning Edge Erica Hunt

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Let’s Take a Break from the National Conversation on Race Deroy Murdock

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Free Speech on Campus: A Battle of Narratives Greg Lukianoff

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The Idea of “Roots” and the Similarities between Multiculturalism and Right-Wing Populism Göran Adamson

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Shadowboxing with Identity Politics Judith Shulevitz

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Green Shoots Roger Berkowitz Robert Gaudino was a professor at Williams College who developed an educational course in “uncomfortable learning.” Inspired by his experience in the Peace Corps, Gaudino would ship Williams students to live in villages and cities in India, where they pursued independent projects with local communities. Above all, the students were encouraged to reflect on their work as an experience that unsettled their worldviews. College, Gaudino argued, should “actively promote a range of experiences that have the creative potential to unsettle and disturb.”

Gaudino died in 1974, but his legacy lives on. In 2014 a group of students founded the Club for Uncomfortable Learning in Gaudino’s spirit. On a liberal campus, the club has a lecture series that aspires to host speakers who challenge left-wing verities. Greg Lukianoff, who calls himself a liberal defender of free speech, was one of the inaugural speakers in Williams’s Uncomfortable Learning series. Inspired by the Uncomfortable Learning lectures, the Arendt Center has started a new lecture series at Bard, Tough Talks, which picks up the challenge of inviting speakers whose views are bold, challenging, and uncomfortable. Essayist and critic Bill Deresiewicz inaugurated Bard’s Tough Talks Lecture Series in November 2016. Both Lukianoff and Deresiewicz spoke at the Bard conference and have essays in this volume.

Paradoxically, in 2015 the Williams club dedicated to uncomfortable learning disinvited two speakers. First, the club uninvited Suzanne Venker, the author of many books, including “The War on Men” and “The Two-Income Trap.” Just months later, the Club for Uncomfortable Learning uninvited John Derbyshire, a mathematician and part-time columnist for the National Review. Derbyshire calls himself a “race realist,” which means he thinks statistics show the average black American to be more dangerous and less intelligent than whites. Students protested. This time, the club held firm against protest.

But when they refused to disinvite Derbyshire, Williams president Adam Falk stepped in and banned Derbyshire from campus. Falk wrote in a letter to the campus, “Today I am taking the extraordinary step of canceling a speech.”

“Free speech,” he wrote, “is a value I hold in extremely high regard.” But, he added, there is a line that cannot be crossed, and Derbyshire had crossed it.

Responding to Falk, Zachary Wood, the head of the Uncomfortable Learning series, wrote this: “I disagree with John Derbyshire on just about everything, but I think he should be allowed to speak at Williams College. We should hear what he has to say, and take him to task for it. I wanted to understand his positions and refute them.” Wood is an African American student at Williams.

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The disinvitations at Williams are not isolated instances. Last year, the University of California, Berkeley, disinvited the gay and libertarian Internet entrepreneur Peter Thiel, lately a major donor to Donald Trump; UC Berkeley’s former chancellor, Robert Birgeneau, had his speech at Haverford College canceled because during his tenure police used batons to disperse protesters. At Oxford, a scheduled debate with invited pro-life guest speakers was canceled following pressure from activists. Smith College disinvited Christine Lagarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund.

At the University of Chicago, students shouted down and prevented a talk

by Anita Alvarez, the first Hispanic state’s attorney in Cook County, because she had waited 13 months before releasing the video of the police shooting of Laquan McDonald. Also at the University of Chicago, Bassem Eid, a leading Palestinian voice against the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, was shouted down, threatened with death, and prevented from speaking. Dustin Lance Black—the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Milk—was disinvited from Pasadena City College. The University of Pennsylvania disinvited CIA director John Brennan. Scripps College disinvited the columnist George Will. Brandeis University uninvited the Muslim critic of Islam Ayaan Hirsi Ali. And, famously, Rutgers disinvited former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who has been disinvited four times. Former president George W. Bush has been disinvited seven times. John McCain and Ben Carson have each been disinvited three times. This list could go on.

It is true that disinvitations of commencement speakers are less problematic than disinvitations or the shutting down of an academic speech by heckling. But many of these examples are academic addresses. And the trend of disinvitations is growing. In April 2017 alone, UC Berkeley canceled talks by Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter; at Middlebury, students prevented Charles Murray from speaking; and protesters at Claremont McKenna College and UCLA shut down and interrupted talks by Heather MacDonald. According to FIRE, there are currently over 25 disinvitations each year, up from about five per year in the opening years of this century.

Having recently experienced a painful and angry campus backlash for inviting a conservative Bard graduate to speak on campus, I have to imagine that many other speakers are simply not invited to present their ideas because of a fear of controversy.

How has this happened? Why is the act of listening to somebody with an opinion foreign to one’s own now seen as dangerous? Is this groupthink?

Political correctness? Neototalitarianism? Or something new?

To learn what is going on, we must listen carefully to the disinviters. For example, in agonizing over whether Venker should be allowed to speak at Williams, the editorial board of the Williams Record penned an editorial, “Uncomfortable or Damaging? Debating the Merits and Detriments of Harmful

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Speech on Campus,” that provided three reasons for why it made sense not to allow Venker to speak at Williams.

First, the students write that Venker should be prohibited because she devalues women: In general, the College should not allow speech that challenges fundamental human rights and devalues people based on identity markers, like being a woman. Much of what Venker has said online, in her books and in interviews falls into this category.1 Does Venker devalue women? I think that is an unfair way of putting it. Venker argues, among other things, that feminism has been better for men than for women. In one of her books, she picks an example: marriage.

Feminism, she writes, has led to a situation where “modern women want to get married. Trouble is, men don’t.” Men feel marriage is less valuable to them because they don’t get a loving and obedient wife who supports them.

So men take what feminist women offer them—sex without commitment— without in turn offering what many women really want, a loving marriage.

She concludes, “Feminism serves men very well: they can have sex at hello and even live with their girlfriends with no responsibilities whatsoever. It’s the women who lose.”2 Venker’s opinion is an attack on my worldview. And yet, I find something worth confronting in her argument. We need to hear from different women, including women for whom feminism has been foreign, even counterproductive. Only then can we learn how feminism might better reflect the needs of greater numbers of women. Her opinion is not wrong so much as it is limited, and reading her, I better understand the limits of my own opinion. I also am better able to understand what kinds of arguments I would have to make to convince those who find Venker more convincing than they find me. Those are good enough reasons to want to hear her speak.

A number of years ago I was approached and asked if the Hannah Arendt Center and Bard College would house a burgeoning institute dedicated to studying anti-Semitism. Since Hannah Arendt thought so deeply about anti-Semitism, I was intrigued. But the potential collaboration fell apart when I insisted that the institute would be expected to cosponsor speakers on related topics, even speakers that its director viewed to be anti-Semitic.

My reasoning was simple: how can you study anti-Semitism without listening to and arguing with anti-Semites? We need to listen to those whom we find wrong and even offensive.

For that same reason, Arendt read and cited anti-Semites in her writing about anti-Semitism, for which she is heavily criticized. But her willingness to read what anti-Semites wrote distinguished her approach and led her to insights that those who ignored the anti-Semites could never see. She

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understood that anti-Semitism is an ideology, that it is distinct from the hatred of Jews, and that it is imperialist rather than nationalist. Arendt knew that even when we disagree, it is imperative to listen to others, even those who are racist. We may find we are wrong, in whole or in part. At the very least, we will be forced to hone our own arguments.

Of course, speech that targets individuals or groups in ways that are threatening or harassing is afforded neither the legal nor the academic protections of free speech. Such speech is not at issue here. But encountering offensive arguments is a necessary part of understanding and responding to the world.

Second, the editors at the Williams Record write that Venker should be prevented from speaking because her presence might lead to “emotional injury”: While free speech is important and there are problems with deeming speech unacceptable, students must not be unduly exposed to harmful stereotypes in order to live and learn here without suffering emotional injury.

It is true that stereotypes can be harmful. And if the speech reaches the level of repeated harassment or hate speech, it should be punished, as the law requires. Repeated harassment that follows one around a campus or workplace physically and emotionally invades a person’s personal space. Harassment is an imposition. But a public speech that one can protest, boycott, or attend is a far cry from harassment. How is it dangerous and harmful to have Suzanne Venker bring her stereotypes about women to a campus forum?

The argument turns on the words emotional injury. The claim of “emotional injury” invokes a medical discourse of trauma, that Venker’s speech would trigger trauma. I take the claim of trauma seriously. There are people who, having suffered in war, having been persecuted for their religion, having seen their families murdered, or having been raped, are seriously traumatized by their experiences. I’ve had students inform me of such instances, and I have tried to work with them and encourage them to get qualified medical help.

The claim by the Williams students, however, is different. It is that by having Venker speak on campus, they will be emotionally injured. This is apparently true whether or not they attend the talk, protest the talk, or ignore the talk. In short, the simple presence of Venker on campus would induce trauma in students.

The language of trauma used here assumes that since some students suffer from some trauma, all should be treated as if they were traumatized, which risks infantilizing the student body. Moreover, the editors seek to shut down speech by medicalizing dissent. If they had said that Venker’s ideas were offensive, they would have been told that the ideas are protected by the value of uncomfortable leaning. By invoking trauma, the students strategically make speech a question of health that mobilizes an administrative

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bureaucracy designed to ensure the safety of young people. Claims of trauma shut down debate by invoking a medical discourse that is immune to rational argument.

Third, the Williams editors argue that college should be a “safe space” for students. They write: It is possible that some speech is too harmful to invite to campus.

The College should be a safe space for students, a place where people respect others’ identities. Venker’s appearance would have been an invasion of that space.

The idea of a safe space is meaningful. It has its origins in the 1960s, when sodomy laws and homophobia still made it unsafe for gays and lesbians to congregate in bars. Later, feminist groups adopted the term safe space to name a space where women could gather as a community. In this sense, we all need spaces in which we can remove our tough public masks and be ourselves.

There is nothing wrong with the idea of a safe space.

But the rhetoric of safe spaces has mutated, divided, and expanded, amoeba-like, in the last decade. “Safe space” now means cleansing an entire institution of offensive ideas. Speakers can be disinvited or shut down with heckling if their views strike some as unsafe. And books are censored. At Duke University, Christian students demanded to be excused from reading Fun Home, a graphic novel about a loving gay relationship—which violated their feeling of safety. White nationalists demand safe spaces. In expanding the rhetoric of safe spaces to classrooms and lecture halls where learning is uncomfortable, we trivialize the real need for safe spaces.

When the idea of safe spaces is used (as at Williams) as an excuse to shut down debate, we have a problem. We live in a country that has elected a president who insults and harasses women. He challenges the legitimacy of the first black president. He insults the Muslim parents of a war hero. He gives voice to a long-pent-up racial, sexual, and religious resentment. And he demands loyalty and punishes those who act independently. One reaction to such a public world is to go ostrich, to put our heads in the sand and refuse to listen, to barricade ourselves in safe rooms, homogenous Facebook threads, and ideologically slanted news. But safety is not working. The time for avoiding conflict is over.

There is, I think, a fourth argument that underlies the overarching claim by the Williams editors that uncomfortable speakers should not be allowed to speak at college campuses. As Ulrich Baer writes in “What Snowflakes Get Right about Free Speech,” published in the New York Times, there has a been a cultural shift in America that began in the 1980s and 1990s. According to this shift, “personal experience and testimony, especially of suffering and oppression, began to challenge the primacy of argument.”3 Where many

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are understandably “wary of the privileging of personal experience, with its powerful emotional impact, over reason and argument,” Baer argues that the elevated importance of personal experience is founded upon good philosophical arguments.

Citing Jean-François Lyotard, Baer writes that we can no longer expect that freedom of speech will lead to truth. The old idea that in a marketplace of ideas the truth will win out is, Lyotard shows us, disproved by the “asymmetry of different positions when personal experience is challenged by abstract arguments.” In other words, vulnerable populations who speak their personal experiences may find that others deny the truth or even the worldly relevance of their experiences. In such an unequal situation, in which some speech is privileged over other speech, free speech can be seen to reenforce hierarchies.

Baer follows Lyotard in offering the example of Holocaust denial. When “invidious but often well-publicized cranks” confront survivors of the Holocaust, they place the burden on survivors to produce incontrovertible eyewitnesses and to argue over the Holocaust. For Baer, this challenges the “Jewish survivors to produce evidence of their own legitimacy in a discourse that has systematically denied their humanity.” Similar arguments are made today to justify the claim that colleges and universities should refuse to hear from speakers whose views are, according to some, racist, sexist, transphobic, xenophobic, or otherwise offensive.

Baer’s essay articulates the argument for not allowing offensive speakers to speak on a college campus. When we allow views that “invalidate the humanity of some people,” we create asymmetrical speech situations and thus “restrict speech as a public good.” In such instances, Baer writes, “there is no inherent value to be gained from debating them in public.” It is enough, he argues, to read those offensive views on the Internet or in newspapers.

Let me give Baer as full a hearing as I can. Baer’s argument draws its force from an empathetic and well-meaning response to the undeniable reality of inequality and discrimination in our society. Given those realities, there is no such thing as truly free speech. Thus, faced with a choice between the values of safety and security on the one hand and the unreachable values of freedom and plurality on the other, we should sacrifice freedom and plurality in the name of safety and security. To ensure the emotional safety of their students, academic institutions should censor those whose speech offends.

The privileging of security over freedom is made easier by Baer’s claims that it is simply untrue that hearing dissenting ideas does aid the cause of truth. This argument addresses the claim that truth will eventually win out in the so-called marketplace of ideas. The classic statement of this idea is by John Milton, who wrote: Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and

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prohibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?4 A second version of the claim that truth is the product of a free contest of ideas is by John Stuart Mill: The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.5 Baer dissents, first, because the “asymmetry of different positions when personal experience is challenged by abstract arguments” means that there is no free and equal marketplace of ideas. The marketplace is always structured and regulated in ways that privilege some and disempower others. And second, following in part from this first point, Baer argues that free debate — undermined by asymmetry and inequality — will not lead to the victory of truth. Thus, given that truth is a naive dream, we should privilege the safety and security of vulnerable community members above the apparent search for truth.

Baer’s argument is meaningful, and it deserves a response. He is undoubtedly right that there is never a level playing field, whether in politics or in science. There is, therefore, no guarantee that truth will win out in a free contest. In that context, we need to think about the role of the university in the post-truth world Baer imagines.

There is no need to contest the claim that there is no objective truth. But to end the matter there is to operate from a tragically misguided and neutered idea of truth. Objective truth is hardly the only meaningful idea of truth. The inquiry into truth, justice, and beauty need not assume that there is some verifiably certain answer to the questions we ask. That justice and beauty are not objects to be known with absolute certainty does not invalidate the search for truth, the quest for justice, and the allure of beauty.

The aspiration of a liberal arts education is not to attain some incontestable truth; it is, however, to become practiced in the humanist, scientific, and artistic ways of asking after truth and reaching for both justice and beauty.

The path to such a practice passes through argumentation. Feelings and testimony are, of course, relevant and meaningful in the human experience. But whether one is a scientist, an artist, or a poet, one first needs to learn to distinguish good arguments from bad and fact from fiction. To say that an objective truth does not exist and that truth is stymied by asymmetries of power does

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not invalidate the collective pursuit of truth that happens at a college or a university. It simply makes the quest for truth more challenging.

Hannah Arendt defended free speech on the grounds of plurality. “We know from experience,” Arendt argued, “that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it.”6 For Arendt, freedom of speech means that we will always hear other opinions, other perspectives, and other arguments than our own. Free speech is the foundation of all expansive and right thinking: “Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.”7 For Arendt, free speech is about seeing the world as it is, in all its plurality and uniqueness: If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another.8 The freedom to speak one’s opinion is the root of politics and right thinking.

This is true not because free speech leads to truth, but because it expands our understanding and forces us to confront the real plurality of the world. What Arendt understood is that free speech is not simply about a right to express oneself. And it is not to be defended on the basis of the “marketplace of ideas” metaphor. Free speech doesn’t necessarily weed out false ideas and confirm true ideas. Rather, free speech is important because only in listening to others with whom one disagrees does one come to expand one’s own understanding and love for the world.

Whatever one may think of Baer’s claim that it is simply untrue that hearing dissenting ideas aids the cause of truth, there are at least two problems with his argument. First, intellectually, we all have a limited perception of the world. The only way to further knowledge as members of an intellectual community is to hear from those who disagree with us. Disagreement is vital for two reasons: it can persuade us we were either wrong or that our opinions, though right, overlooked some points; and disagreement can convince us we were and remain right, knowing that we have tested our knowledge against dissenters. In both cases, bringing dissenting viewpoints to our intellectual community strengthens our individual and collective efforts to think and learn together.

Second, politically, we live in a world in which there are no truths. Politics is not a science. It is an effort for a plural and diverse group of people to

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build a common life together. Politics is predicated on shared opinions, not on truths. When there are divergent opinions in a political community, the two primary ways of overcoming those disputes are violence and persuasion.

In a constitutional republican democracy, we prefer persuasion to violence, but persuasion is only possible when people talk to each other and treat each other as respectable persons worthy of respect in the public sphere. The Tough Talks Lecture Series is designed to bring to campus speakers whose views are often ignored or contemptuously derided on campus. Students and faculty should have the opportunity to hear and argue with these dissenting views. That is the only way we will be able to learn to argue with them persuasively as citizens. It is not enough to simply read these views or read dismissals of them. The practice of arguing with those with whom one disagrees is the best way to learn how to engage actively and effectively in the political life of a citizen. It is also the only way to discover whether, despite our real differences, we share a common commitment to reason and decency.

••• Erica Hunt, who is a contributor to this volume, tells us in her essay “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” in the Boston Review, that we need to cheer the “troubled waters, shifting pronouns, and blurred lines between lines, between genres and disciplines. In the muck, green shoots.”9 I agree.

We need to jump into the muck and hope for the green shoots. We need to risk wading into dangerous waters.

In September 2016, Randall Stephenson, the CEO of AT&T, gave a speech on race. He spoke of his friend Chris, an African American doctor. Chris was asked to talk to his church about his reaction to the police shootings of unarmed black men. He told how he was the first black child to integrate his elementary school, how he saw his house attacked with bricks and his father fire his shotgun to scare away intruders. He told how he was called names and was asked to serve people in restaurants while dining. He told about being refused service, being pulled over at routine traffic stops, and having to carry his license when jogging to show the police he lives in his neighborhood.

Hearing his friend tell his story, Stephenson was ashamed. When Chris’s son was dying, Stephenson and Chris had gotten on their knees and prayed.

They had stayed at each other’s houses. And yet Stephenson had known none of Chris’s history of racial discrimination and humiliation. Stephenson said: I wondered how two very close friends, one black and one white, could never have discussed the matter of race. I thought, if two very close friends of different races don’t talk openly about this issue that’s tearing our communities apart how do we expect to find common ground and solutions to what is a serious, serious problem.10

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From this story Stephenson concludes that we in America need to begin the painful and uncomfortable task of talking honestly about race.

Let’s talk about race. . . . I’m not asking you to be tolerant of each other. Tolerance is for cowards. Being tolerant requires nothing from you but to be quiet and not make waves, holding tightly to your views and judgments without being challenged. Do not tolerate each other. Work hard. Move into uncomfortable territory and understand each other.

So let’s talk about race. We start talking. Me, a secular white Jewish man.

You, a veiled Muslim woman. Or you, an African American from Baltimore.

Or you, a white working-class student from Troy. Or you, a student with dark skin from Burkina Faso. Or you, a transgender woman. Or you. . . . I say, for example, let’s talk about racial discrimination by the police. Of course, we all agree. Who can deny that black lives matter at a moment when unarmed black men are being shot and killed by police with unnerving regularity? It seems ours might be an easy conversation.

But maybe someone says we should also be talking about profiling Muslims as terrorists. Another responds, don’t the police have to do their job? Others wonder whether we should equate religious and racial discrimination. Someone asks, what about rape culture and the fact that rapes are never prosecuted by the police? Someone else adds that in rare instances when rapists are convicted, they get a mere six months in jail. Another says the groups most discriminated against are transgender and gay persons. One of us wonders if white male police officers are more guilty than black officers. A chorus insists that whites must own their white privilege. Someone points out that even ethical white people, good people, suffer from a racist imaginary that allows them to see unarmed black men as demons—officer Darren Wilson said of Michael Brown, who he shot in Ferguson, Missouri, “The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that’s how angry he looked.” Can we hold people responsible for their imaginations, one of us wonders? And someone points out that many of the police officers are lower class and underprivileged. Should we not worry about the violence done to lower-class whites who risk their lives as public servants? Is it the fault of the police, another wonders, that they are asked to solve violent social problems that the rest of the country willfully ignores? Someone asks what it means when the police operate like occupying armies in the cities they serve. And then one of us says let’s also talk about the gang problems in the cities where black youth are killing each other at a much more alarming rate than police officers are killing them. Don’t those black lives matter as well? Should we also include social dysfunction and black-on-black violence in our discussion of police violence? Or is doing so a racist diversion?

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We speak tentatively, and ask: “Is it racist to say . . . ?” Others say, “That is racist.” More than one of us says, “I’m not racist, but. . . .” There are long, uncomfortable silences as we stare fixedly at nothing. We ask if there is a hierarchy of oppression. Some roll their eyes. We wonder, does a history of oppression make present oppression more impactful? Is one form of discrimination more important because it is older? Suddenly, this may be a long and difficult conversation.

Is talking about such questions worth the risk? Freud may have shown that the talking cure works for psychosomatic pain, but how is talking about race anything more than touching an open wound? Is progress happening? What would progress look like? Is talking about such questions worth the discomfort, anger, and risk? Are we making a difference? Is progress happening?

What would progress look like?

Around the time of the Arendt Center conference I saw The Underground Railroad Game—a hit off-Broadway play by Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Sheppard. In the play, an interracial couple jumps headfirst into the muck of race. The white man sees their interracial relationship as a sign of progress.

The black woman sees it differently, as a reliving of history. And over and over again the play shows how the relationship, an apparently strong one, trades in the most vile racial clichés and misunderstandings. The white man wonders about the greasiness of her skin and hair. The black woman wonders if the white man will shine in the dark. He wants to dive into her darkness.

She fantasizes about whipping him. Then, the white man with a black lover is called—well, he’s called a word we don’t say in public. He’s called a word he won’t say. He protests—how could anyone use such a vile word! Then, finally, he blurts out the word. His black girlfriend is shocked. And suddenly he can’t stop saying the word. Should I say the word? I’ve agonized over this. Why should this word have such power? Does it offend?

In The Underground Railroad Game, the white man who is called a “nigger lover” strips fully naked. His black girlfriend whips his white body and forces him to say that word again and again. She whips him. He says the word. She whips him. He says the word. Then, she is stunned when he grabs the whip from her hand and takes to whipping himself while calling himself the word, and brings himself to an extraordinary orgasm.

The Underground Railroad Game brings us to see the erotic power of our racial imaginaries. Even this hyperliberal interracial couple must confront the deep racial prejudices that seem ineradicable. It suggests, I think with good reason, that everyone has such imaginaries. We have visceral and deep reactions to all sorts of people and groups, to black Americans, to veiled Muslims, to Hasidic Jews, to white men in pink chinos, to poor people sweeping streets, to beggars in rags, to rich people in Bentleys, and to college professors in bow ties. All of us, in our private thoughts, have shameful thoughts that are stops on our own underground railroad that travels amidst cultural imaginaries

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Photo by Roger Berkowitz

and subconscious fantasies about race. Talking about difficult questions is not going to cleanse our souls. And yet, it is only by verbalizing our racial imaginaries that we can begin to ride the train of our critical and conscious thinking to a place of freedom.

So what, if anything, comes from such an honest and no doubt intentionally offensive and provocative performance? Do we condemn such a stance or welcome an effort to at least begin an honest discussion? Somehow, and this to me is the most interesting lesson of the play, this couple rebuilds their collective trust that has been shattered by violent and disgusting racial truths. Even as their deep and private feelings burst forth in embarrassing and offensive ways, they maintain a public commitment to being together. The Underground Railroad Game asks what holds us together even amidst our differences, even differences that are offensive and injurious.

As an exercise in thinking about how we can explore what unites us amidst our differences, I cotaught a theater class last semester called Performing Difficult Questions. We read essays by many of the people who have contributed to this volume. The students had to create performances exploring how we can talk about difficult questions of race, sex, and religion. In one performance, the student creative team connected us, the audience, by a rope that we had to hold above our heads (see photo). We were told to close our eyes and given commands or asked questions. One command was to step forward if we were proud to be American. I was the only one who did, and I felt deeply

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self-conscious. One of the performers then walked up behind me and read a quote from Shelby Steele about the progress of American race relations.

Next, we were asked to speak aloud a word that offends us personally. I was struck dumb. Is there a word that offends me? Does kike or Jewboy? Does white privilege? Does the N-word? Does the C-word? I’m not sure any word really offends me. I remained silent. The person next to me said, “Racist.” I thought, “Does that offend me? It certainly makes me uncomfortable.”

What I loved about this performance was that as we were enacting our differences, announcing our personal and private opinions, experiencing ourselves divided from the group in deeply personal expressions of vulnerability, we were also holding on to a rope and gradually bumping into each other.

Holding the rope above our heads gives us a common task. It binds us. By choosing to keep holding the rope and not throwing it down, we choose to join the group even as we are radically individualized. Why do we hold on? Is it habit? Because we are good at following directions? Out of idealism? Or is it simply in the hope that somehow we will all get through this together? The rope connects us to a collective endeavor even as we divide ourselves.

This student presentation offers a meditation on public bonds that can exist even amidst private difference, even differences that are offensive. And this brings to mind a thought of Hannah Arendt that I would like to end with.

Arendt writes in her essay “Introduction to Politics,” Politics is based on the fact of human plurality. . . . Politics deals with the coexistence and association of different men. Men organize themselves politically according to certain essential commonalities found within or abstracted from an absolute chaos of differences.11 Plurality means we accept and value the true and profound differences that separate us, the “absolute chaos of differences” that make up the human race. Politics for Arendt is not the effort to normalize and neutralize our differences, to homogenize a citizenry into a civilized unity. She rejects Rousseau’s idea of a general will according to which we shall all be forced to be free.

Freedom, for Arendt, is not the freedom of will, even a good will. Arendt understands freedom to be the freedom to act, to engage in politics, to appear in the world in meaningful ways.

Against Rousseau’s vision of a strong national state in which the people are sovereign, Arendt elevates the decentralized and federalist idea in which multiple governing and nongovernmental bodies—the country, Congress, the president, the courts, states, counties, cities, towns, nonprofits, civic organizations, and more—all vie for power and control. Politics preserves and respects plurality only when politics rejects the idea of a unified sovereign.

For Arendt, as for Alexis de Tocqueville, freedom is only possible in a political system that denies sovereignty and allows different people, different

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groups, and different societies to thrive in accord with their own plural visions of the good life. She writes in On Revolution: In this respect, the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.12 Arendt embraces America’s federalist tradition because in abolishing sovereignty, federalism makes room for plurality.

Perhaps the most controversial argument in Arendt’s writing is her defense of discrimination. Discrimination has no place in the political or public sphere, but it is the lifeblood of society and social life. What is wrong, Arendt asks, with Jews having Jewish-only clubs? Or with gentiles excluding Jews from their clubs? If Mormons want to pray with Mormons, why can’t they exclude non-Mormons from their temples? If Greeks want their children to go to school with other Greeks, okay. Arendt insists that such segregation not be legalized—we must not prevent Greeks from studying with Macedonians or whites from blacks. But she doesn’t believe it’s a problem to let people who want to discriminate and segregate do so.

But won’t people who socialize separately come to be at home with discrimination? And won’t this lead them to become prejudiced and transform their social prejudices into public discrimination? Arendt doesn’t think so.

What prevents public discrimination and guarantees public equality— something Arendt believes is absolutely necessary for justice—is not the absence of prejudice. Prejudice is eternal, part of the human psyche. None of us, Arendt writes, could live without prejudice. If we count on eliminating prejudice in order to live a public life of equality, we will fail every time.

The key to public equality is not eradicating prejudice but building and nurturing a commonly held public world that people of all different beliefs respect and value. One of my favorite metaphors in Arendt’s work is her imagination of a table around which we sit. So long as the table is there, it connects us. We may be wildly different, but, sitting around the table, we are united by our recognition of the table and the common world of manners and recognition we create. But if some magical force were to come along and make the table disappear, those of us sitting around it would lose our connection. We would, in Arendt’s words, suddenly become “entirely unrelated to each other by anything tangible.”13 Talking about difficult questions matters because as we talk we form bonds that unite and connect us across our differences. Arendt does not argue that free speech will lead to truth. Indeed, politics is not about truth. It is about opinion. The work of politics is not to find the truth but to find and preserve the common bonds that connect us within and to a shared world in spite of

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our differences. Speaking freely about difficult questions only matters when others hear us and listen to us. Free speech is an important abstract right, but it is politically potent only when there is a public willing to hear what we say.

There are many reasons for the loss of our common world today. There is continuing racial, economic, and sexual oppression and injustice. But a big part of the loss of a shared world is our inability and unwillingness to speak with and hear one another, to see more of the world as it really is, in all its richness and plurality. Such “real talk” is painful for many of us. It is always hard to learn that our views are partial, one-sided. And many of the opinions we hear strike us as wrong and even offensive. Some of you will no doubt be offended by something I have said. We will find the words sexist, racist, antiSemitic, Islamophobic, politically correct, and totalitarian forming on our lips.

You may get angry. You may feel resentment. But before responding with anger or resentment, I hope we will all make the effort to listen and to look, to hear and see the world we share emerging in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. I hope, in other words, that in talking, in annoying, in offending we will also come to find ourselves engaged in a common project of understanding the beautiful multiplicity of this crazy and difficult world that we share.

That is what is meant by Arendt’s motto, amor mundi: to love the world.

1. “ Uncomfortable or Damaging? Debating the Merits and Detriments of Harmful Speech on Campus,” editorial, Williams Record, October 21, 2015.

2. Suzanne Venker, “The War on Men,” Fox News, November 26, 2012.

3. U lrich Baer, “What Snowflakes Get Right about Free Speech,” The New York Times, April 24, 2017.

4. J ohn Milton, “Areopagitica” (1644), in Areopagitica, ed. John W. Hales (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1886), 51.

5. J ohn Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859), ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978), 16.

6. H annah Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 128.

7. Ibid., 128–29.

8. Ibid., 128.

9. Erica Hunt, “Response to Race and the Poetic Avant-Garde,” Boston Review, March 10, 2015.

10. Randall Stephenson, remarks delivered at the AT&T National Employee Resource Groups Conference, Dallas, Texas, September 23, 2016.

11. Arendt, “Introduction into Politics,” 93–94.

12. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Faber & Faber: London: 1963), 152.

13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 53.

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Class, Power, and the Liberal Religion William Deresiewicz An expanded version of this talk was published in The American Scholar as “On Political Correctness.”

Context, it is said, is everything. When we talk about trigger warnings, safe spaces, microaggressions, the disinvitation of campus speakers, and so forth, we tend to do so in the context either of the racial situation in America, if we are on one side of the question, or of the coddling of today’s college students, if we are on the other. There are a lot of insights to be gained from framing these issues within those contexts. A good deal of what is happening on campuses today is driven by endemic racial injustice and other forms of systemic oppression, and a good deal of it is also driven by how we raise our children.

I do not, however, think that those are the only relevant contexts or even necessarily the most important ones. What I have to say here will represent an attempt to place these issues within a different set of contexts: meritocracy, the liberal elite, and contemporary higher education—which, in many ways, amount to a single context.

Let me start by talking about some things that I witnessed when I taught last year at Scripps, a women’s college that is one of the members of the Claremont Consortium of elite liberal arts institutions in Southern California.

From the first day I set foot on campus, the issue of political correctness, which I am going to use as an umbrella term for any attempt to limit speech on grounds of offensiveness or unacceptability, hit me in the face, and it did not stop until I left a few months later.

I had one student, from a Chinese American family, who told me that the first thing she learned when she got to Scripps was to keep quiet about her Christian faith and her nonfeminist views about marriage. I had another student who described herself as a strong feminist but who told me that she tends to keep quiet about everything, because she never knows when she might inadvertently say something that she was not supposed to. I had a third student, a junior, who wrote about a friend of hers, someone she had known since the start of college, and how she had just discovered that this friend went to church every Sunday. She had not even known that her friend was religious.

When she asked her friend why she had concealed her faith, the friend said, “Because I don’t feel comfortable being out as a religious person here.”

I also heard that the director of the writing center, a specialist in disability studies, was informing people that they could not use expressions like “that’s a crazy idea,” because they stigmatize the mentally ill. A young woman told me that she was criticized by a fellow student for wearing moccasins one day, because doing so, it was explained, is an act of cultural appropriation. I heard Class, Power, and the Liberal Religion

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an adjunct instructor tell me about what should have been a routine pedagogical conflict with a student the previous semester that had turned, as he put it, into “a Dumpster fire,” and how he was careful now to avoid saying anything, or teaching anything, that might conceivably lead to trouble.

I heard students, people who consider themselves strong feminists, tell me that they were afraid to speak freely among their peers, and how grateful they were for Yik Yak, the social media app where every post is anonymous, because it allowed them to say anonymously what they could not say in their own name. Above all, I heard my students tell me that, while they generally identify with the sentiments and norms that travel under the name of political correctness, they feel it has gone too far—way too far. Everybody seemed to feel oppressed by what they called “the PC police,” except the people whom everybody else considered to be members of the PC police.

I saw all this, and a good bit more, while teaching one class, for 12 students, during one semester, at one school, although I was doing my best to talk to as many people about these issues as I could. Based on conversations that I have had with people at many different schools, my broader experience within higher education, and much of what I have read not only in the mainstream media but also in the higher-education press, I have no reason to believe, and plenty of reasons not to believe, that things are substantially different at other selective private institutions. Undoubtedly, the situation is better at some places than others, undoubtedly worse at liberal arts colleges as a whole than at universities as a whole, but substantially the same across the board.

This is how I understand the situation: elite private colleges have become religious schools. The religion in question is not Methodism or Catholicism, but the belief system of the liberal classes; that is, the liberal elite and communities of color, which together make up the overwhelming majority of students who attend such schools and the overwhelming majority of faculty and administrators who work at them. To attend those institutions is to be socialized and, not infrequently, indoctrinated into that religion.

When I was speaking with a group of students last month at Whitman College, a selective institution in Washington State, about these same issues, the idea that selective private colleges are religious institutions is the one that resonated with them most. I should also mention that I got an e-mail a few months ago from a student who had transferred from Oral Roberts, the evangelical Christian university in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to Columbia. The latter, he found to his surprise, was also a religious school, only there the religion, he said, is the religion of success. Success is not the same as political correctness, but they are part of the same belief system and, indeed, the same social system.

What does it mean to say that these colleges are religious schools? It means, first of all, that they possess a dogma, a set of “correct” opinions and beliefs, unwritten but understood by all. There is a right way to think and a right way to talk, and a right set of things to think and talk about, mainly race, gender,

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and sexuality. The fundamental questions that a college education ought to raise—questions of individual and social virtue, of values and public policies, of what it means to be a good person and a good community—are understood to have been settled. The assumption, on elite college campuses, is that we are already in full possession of the truth. This is a religious attitude. It certainly is not a scholarly or intellectual attitude.

Indeed, a number of liberal arts college presidents have talked to me about the dogmatism that prevails among their faculty. One, who runs a school that is famous for having very few required courses, mentioned that her faculty wants to institute a “social justice” requirement, which, she said, a lot of them seem to think would mean teaching their students to believe what they believe. That is already essentially what happens in the first semester of the core sequence at Scripps. Other administrators have said to me that people who want to institute ethnic studies requirements always think of them as things that other people need; that it is other people who need to be educated or reeducated. The same, I would add, appears to be true of requirements, or proposed requirements, for sensitivity training.

Dogma, and the enforcement of dogma, creates ideological consensus. One of the students at Whitman said that people there do not disagree with each other mainly because they really don’t have any disagreements. Another said that when they talk about an issue in class, they do not say “Let’s talk about issue X” but rather “Let’s talk about why such-and-such position is the correct one to have on issue X.” When my student wrote about her religious friend last year, she ended by saying that she could not understand why someone would feel uncomfortable being out as religious at a place as diverse as Scripps. But, of course, Scripps and places like it are diverse only in racial terms. In terms of ideology, they are homogenous. You do not have “different voices,” as those institutions like to say; you have different bodies speaking with the same voice.

This fact, by the way, is why liberal students, and liberals in general, are so bad at defending their own positions. They never have to, so they never learn to. It is also why it tends to be so easy for conservatives to goad them into incoherent anger. Nothing enrages you more than an argument you cannot answer. But the purpose of letting more disparate voices be heard on campus is not so that liberal students can learn to refute them. Even the webpage of the Free Speech Program here at the Arendt Center, I was disappointed to see, takes essentially that position. The reason to listen to people who disagree with you is that you may be wrong. In fact, you are wrong, about some things and probably many things. There is zero percent chance that any one of us is 100 percent correct. That is why free expression includes the right to hear as well as speak, and why disinviting campus speakers abridges the speech rights of students as well as those of the speakers themselves.

Elite private colleges are ideologically homogenous because they are socially homogenous, or close to it. Their student populations largely come

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from the liberal upper middle class, with an admixture of students from communities of color. These two demographics have broadly similar views and beliefs, as evidenced by the fact that they together constitute a large percentage of the Democratic Party base. Faculty and managerial staff are even more homogenous than are their students, in terms both of their social origins and of their social milieu, which tends to be largely composed of other liberal professionals, if not, indeed, other liberal academics. Unlike the campus activists of the 1960s, today’s student protesters are not expressing countercultural views. They are expressing the exact views of the culture in which they find themselves, which is one of the reasons that administrations are so ready to accommodate their demands. If you want to find the counterculture on today’s elite college campuses, you need to look for the conservative students.

Here we find another thing that comes with dogma: heresy. Heresy means beliefs that disrupt the orthodox consensus, and heresy, in a religious community, must be eradicated: by education, by reeducation, if necessary, and by censorship. That is why it makes a perfect, depressing sense that there are speech codes, or the desire for speech codes, at selective private colleges.

That is why, as recently reported by the American Association of University Professors, Title IX is increasingly used to police classroom content.

But the most effective form of censorship is self-censorship, which, in the intimate environment of college, students are quick to learn. That is the reason that it is not enough to consider things like trigger warnings, microaggressions, the disinvitation of speakers, and so forth as individual questions, and why the most important thing about them is not that they smack of infantilization but that they collectively create a climate of fear. One of the students at Whitman told me that he is careful, when voicing a challenge to consensus beliefs, to phrase his opinion as “explain to me why I’m wrong.” Campus protesters, their rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding, are not the ones being silenced; they are, after all, not being silent. They are in the middle of the quad, speaking their minds. The ones being silenced are the ones who, like my students at Scripps, like the students at Whitman, like many students, no doubt, at many places, are keeping their mouths shut. “The religion of humanity,” David Bromwich recently remarked in an article about these questions, “may turn out to be as dangerous as all other religions.”1 The assumption on elite college campuses is that we are not only in full possession of the truth but that we are also in full possession of virtue. Regimes of virtue tend to eat their children. They tend to turn on themselves, because everybody wants to prove that they are the holiest. You can think of Salem.

You can think of the French Revolution. The ante is perpetually being upped.

There is always something new, as my students understood, that you are not supposed to say, but you often do not find out about it until after you have said it, and by then it is too late. The term political correctness, which originated

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in the 1970s as a form of self-mockery among progressive college students, was a deliberately ironic invocation of Stalinism. We have lost the irony and kept the Stalinism; one important feature of Stalinism was that you could be charged with something that was not a crime when you did it. You were always already guilty, or could be made to be guilty at a moment’s notice, and were therefore always controllable.

You were also always under surveillance by a cadre of what Jane Austen called, in a very different context, “voluntary spies,” and what my students called the PC police. Regimes of virtue produce informants. They also produce authorities, often self-appointed authorities, like the writing director at Scripps who decreed that you are not supposed to use the word crazy.

Whenever I hear that you are not “supposed” to say this or that, I want to know, according to whom? Who decided, and who awarded them the right to decide? And whenever I hear that students of color, or any group, demand this or say that, I want to know, whom exactly are we talking about: all of them, or just a few of them? Did the group choose its leaders, or did the leaders choose themselves?

So much of political correctness is not about justice or creating a safe environment; it is about power. So much of what is happening on campuses today reflects the way that relations of power have been reconfigured in contemporary higher education. Student activists are taking advantage of the fact—and I suspect that a lot of them understand this intuitively, if not explicitly—that students already have a lot more power than they like to pretend, certainly than they used to, and more than I think they ought to. This is the outcome not only of the customer service mentality in academia but also of the proletarianization of the faculty. Students have risen; professors have fallen.

Where once administrations worked in alliance with faculty, were indeed largely composed of faculty, they now work against the faculty in alliance with students as a separate managerial stratum more interested in the satisfaction of its customers than the well-being of its workers.

In the inevitable power struggle between students and teachers, students have gained the whip hand. The large majority of instructors today are adjuncts working term to term, on a per course basis, for often scarcely more than minimum wage; or they are contract employees with no long-term job security; or untenured professors whose careers can still be derailed. Even tenured faculty now have the sword of Title IX above their heads. Thanks not only to the longterm move to contingent employment but also to the chronic oversupply of Ph.D.s—the academic reserve army, to adapt a phrase from Marx—academic labor is cheap and academic workers are vulnerable and frightened. In a conflict between a student and a faculty member, almost nothing is at stake for the student. The faculty member could lose their job. That is why so many faculty, like that adjunct instructor at Scripps, are teaching with their tails between

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their legs. They, too, are being silenced. Whether they know it or not, student activists and students in general are exploiting the precarity of an increasingly immiserated workforce. So much for social justice.

The power of political correctness is wielded not only against the faculty but also against other groups within the student body, ones that do not belong to the ideologically privileged demographics or espouse the approved points of view: conservative students; religious students; students who identify as Zionists, which means a lot of Jewish students; athletes, which in the appropriate context is understood to indicate white male athletes; white students from red states, or really, from red zip codes in any state; heterosexual cisgendered white men from anywhere at all, who represent between a fifth and a third of all students. I have never heard anybody talk about creating safe spaces for Christians, or preventing microaggressions against white men, or banning hate speech against Zionists, or disinviting socialists.

What I have heard, frequently, for as long as I have been involved in academia, are open expressions of contempt or prejudice or hostility against those groups or members of those groups. If you are a white man, you are regularly treated as guilty until proven innocent, the worst-possible construction is put upon your words, and anything you have to say on a sensitive issue is received with suspicion, at best. I attended a workshop on microaggressions at the University of Missouri earlier this year. The problem with microaggressions, the leader said, is that they “create a space of hostility,” that they say “You don’t belong; you are different in a way that’s not okay.” That description precisely characterizes the environment that the groups I just enumerated often encounter at elite private colleges, except that, unlike in the case of the typical microaggression, it is not inadvertent. It is quite deliberate.

Once, I was talking about trigger warnings with the writing director at Scripps. The only time that I have experienced a student who was so uncomfortable with course material that they had to leave the room, I said, was a Christian young man, an Asian American, who excused himself before a class discussion of the sexually explicit novelist Jeanette Winterson. I was naive enough, when I told the story, to think that the director would be sympathetic to the student’s situation. Instead, she snorted with contempt. Progressive faculty and students at selective private colleges will often say that they want, as they put it, “to dismantle hierarchies of power.” They do not; they want to invert them. All groups are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Political correctness engenders a mindset of us versus them. “Them” is whites, or white men, or straight cisgendered white men; “us” is everybody else, the party of inherent virtue. Which means that political correctness treats “them” as a monolith—erasing the differences among white people, like those between Jews and Mormons or Irish and English, thus effacing the specificity of their historical and sometimes also their present experiences, the specificity of everyone’s experience.

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The religion of the liberal elite expects us to plot our experience on the grid of identity, to interpret it in terms of our location at the intersection of a limited number of recognized categories. I am a lesbian Latina, therefore I feel X. I am a white transman, therefore I think Y. But identity should not precede experience; it should proceed from it. Experience is much more granular, and composed of a vastly larger number of variables than is dreamt of in the PC philosophy. I’m a youngest child; I was raised in the suburbs; I grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family; but, more to the point, my consciousness and way of being in the world have been shaped by an infinite series of experiential particulars, a large proportion of which are not reducible to any category. This, by the way, is one of the reasons to read literature, because it captures the complexity of lived experience, and of enacted identity, in a way that the categories of a politicized social science can never hope to match.

There is one category of identity that the religion of the liberal elite does not recognize, that its purpose, one might almost conclude, is to conceal. That is the category of class. Class, at fancy colleges as throughout American society, is the unspeakable word, the great forbidden truth. The exclusion of class on selective college campuses enables the exclusion of a class. It has long struck me in leftist or PC rhetoric how often “white” is conflated with “wealthy,” as if all white people were wealthy and all wealthy people were white. In fact, about half of poor Americans are white. More than half of working-class Americans are white. More than a third of white Americans are poor or working-class.

Altogether, lower-income whites make up at least a third of the country, yet they are almost entirely absent on elite college campuses, where they represent at most a few percent and constitute the single most underrepresented group.

We do not acknowledge class, so there are no affirmative-action programs based on class. Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, religious people, people from red states. In the psychic economy of the liberal classes, the white working class functions in the role of the repressed. What we are witnessing in the presidential campaign is the return of the repressed. And the repressed, when it returns, is monstrous.

The exclusion of class also enables the concealment of the role that elite colleges play in reproducing class, in exacerbating inequality and retarding social mobility. They do it through a system that pretends to do the opposite, the system that we call “meritocracy.” Meritocracy means that rewards are distributed on the basis of merit, which is in turn supposed to mean achievement and ability, but the production of merit in prospective college students is heavily skewed by the class system. Students have as much merit, to a first approximation, as their parents can buy them, which is why SAT scores, for example, correlate so well with family income. The college admissions process, as it has been said, is a way of laundering privilege.

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It is not just the admissions process. Elite campus culture, the religion of the private colleges, provides the affluent white students who make up the preponderant majority of their student bodies, and the affluent white professionals who make up the preponderant majority of their tenured faculty and managerial staffs, with the ideological resources to alibi or erase their privilege. It tells them—or rather, enables them to tell themselves—that they are virtuous people, morally correct people, children of the light. The presence on campus of students of color assists them in maintaining that belief. Part of what the current wave of campus protests is accomplishing, it seems to me, is to make that self-conception harder to sustain. Students of color are saying to their white peers and teachers and deans, you do not get to let yourself so easily off the hook.

For students of color, there is another kind of self-delusion at work, one that is also related to class. To attend a selective private college is to position oneself for entry into the elite. That is not a byproduct of going to a fancy school; it is the reason people go to them. If you do not already come from the elite, the movement from the place you started to the place you will probably end up creates a powerful cognitive dissonance. One of the ways to palliate that dissonance is to pretend that the movement is not happening. I was at Columbia in 1992, when African American students were protesting the planned demolition of the Audubon Ballroom, the site of Malcolm X’s assassination. One of their most prominent rhetorical gestures was to refer to the university as a plantation. Now, Columbia had some problems, including its behavior as a landlord in Upper Manhattan, but it was not a plantation, and its African American students were not slaves. They were young people, it seemed to me, who were having trouble coming to terms with their position, their rapidly changing position, in the American class system.

I would say something similar about the demands to remove the names and images of slaveholders or segregationists from college campuses today.

These demands may be valid in themselves, but to go to a selective private college is to benefit, to have the intention of benefiting, from its wealth and the prestige that comes from its wealth. To go to a selective private college is therefore to benefit, and to have the intention of benefiting, from the way it has created its wealth. You can protest the symbol, you can erase the memory, but the wealth will still be there—as, indeed, you would like it to be. All you are doing is imaginatively separating yourself from your own actions. You are, in effect, protesting against yourself, against a part of yourself that you would rather not acknowledge. It would be like marrying into a family whose wealth had been founded on the slave trade and then complaining about the portrait of Great-great-grandpa Jeb above the mantle. You can take the picture down but the house will still be standing, and you chose to live in it.

What is more, protesting historical iniquities in the creation of wealth can be a way of ignoring present inequities in the way that wealth is maintained

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and increased. I do not just mean investments in oil companies or donations from hedge fund managers. The meritocracy itself, the rigged admissions process that continues to favor the affluent, is part of the way that rich institutions stay rich. By choosing to attend a selective private college, even if you are poor yourself, you are electing to participate in that process. You are grabbing for a piece of the rich man’s ill-gotten gains. That may be a reasonable thing to do, and it is certainly an understandable thing to do. But you might consider being a little less self-righteous about it.

And this, finally, is the connection between the religion of success and the religion of political correctness. Political correctness is a moral fig leaf for the competitive individualism of meritocratic neoliberalism, with its worship of success above all. Political correctness may speak about dismantling the elite, but it is really about (a) flattering the elite and (b) negotiating the terms of entry of a limited number of individuals from underprivileged groups into the elite. With the new campus protests, that negotiation seems to be more troubled now than it was. It may be that some of the protesting students really do not want to take the bargain, really do want to break the system. Only time will tell. But what seems clear to me is that when we talk about political correctness and many of its current manifestations, a lot of what we are talking about—or, rather, not talking about—are the pathologies, the psychopathologies, of the American class system. Those are what we need to come to terms with.

1. David Bromwich, “What Are We Allowed to Say?” London Review of Books 38, no. 18 (September 22, 2016): 10.

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William Deresiewicz

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The Trouble with Following the Rules Mary Gaitskill

I write fiction. It’s generally not of a political nature. I also teach writing at the university level; while I am aware of Title IX, I have no practical involvement in it other than taking a mandatory test during which I answered questions such as “Is it harassment to touch a student’s shoulder during conversation?”

The answer, in case you’re wondering, is yes, at least at the New School.

I’m here because of an essay that I wrote for Harper’s in 1994.1 I wrote it in response to a media hysteria at the time about how no one would take responsibility anymore. There was a public outrage fest about anything and everything, from 12-step programs, to inner-child therapy, to everybody supposedly wanting to be a victim, and to the newly described issue of date rape.

I was fascinated, appalled, and rather naive about such public discussions.

They were so loud and so hostile. Camille Paglia was on the rampage, raving that feminists didn’t understand how euphoric a gang bang could be. And then there was, on the other extreme, Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, saying that all porn was criminally violent, that it led to rape and should therefore be banned. You could get whiplash going back and forth listening to all of it. And I remember feeling that, while much of it was very intelligent and informed, none of it described certain raw and confusing experiences that I’d had when I was young.

As a woman in my 30s, which I was at that time, I basically agreed that the phenomenon of date rape was being exaggerated and distorted until, at a certain point, I listened to a discussion on the radio that made me remember with some uncomfortable clarity that I had a kind of date-rape experience myself, an experience I still felt lack of clarity about almost 20 years after it occurred.

I wrote the Harper’s essay out of a desire for reconciliation not only with myself but also for others. I wanted to honor both sides of what seemed to me a cartoonishly polarized debate. What I wrote was nuanced and pretty gentle.

Its subject is not so much the crime of rape or date rape, but the question of what personal responsibility is, what it is internally. I asked how responsibility is based on one’s own core response to the world, not what one has been told either directly or implicitly by anyone. It speaks more to internal states that almost by definition cannot be addressed by law, and yet which the law touches upon, sometimes shockingly, in emotional crimes such as rape. I would like to revisit that essay, which seems very foreign to me now: In the early 1970s I had an experience that could be described as date rape even if it didn’t happen when I was on a date. I was 16 and staying in the apartment of a slightly older girl I’d just met at a seedy community center in Detroit, where I was passing through in my unsuccessful attempt to hitchhike 34

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to Canada. I’d been in her apartment for a few days when an older guy— meaning he was in his mid-20s—came over and asked us if we wanted to drop some acid. In those years doing acid with strangers was consistent with my idea of a good time, so I shared a tab with them. When I started peaking, my hostess decided that she had to go do something else, and there I was alone with this guy who was all of a sudden really close to me. He seemed to be coming on to me, but I wasn’t sure. LSD in those days was a very potent drug, and on it my perception was hallucinatory. On top of that, he was black and urban poor, which meant that I, being very inexperienced and suburban white, did not know how to read him the way I might have read another kid from my own milieu. I tried to distract him with conversation, but it was hard because I was having trouble with logical sentences, let alone repartee. During one long silence I asked him what he was thinking. Although he was sitting quite close to me, he looked away from me when he answered: “If I wasn’t such a nice guy you could really be getting screwed right now.”

This sounded to me like a threat, albeit a low-key one; but instead of asking him to explain himself or leave, I changed the subject. Some moments later, when he put his hand on my leg, I let myself be drawn into sex because I could not face the idea that if I said no things might get ugly. I don’t think he had any idea of how unwilling I was. The cultural unfamiliarity cut both ways, and I suppose he may have thought that white girls kind of lie there and don’t do much. My bad time was made worse by his extreme gentleness. He was obviously trying very hard to turn me on, which, for reasons I didn’t understand, broke my heart. Even as inexperienced as I was I could see that he wanted a sweet time.

For some time afterward I described this event as a time I was raped.

I knew when I said it that the description wasn’t accurate, that I had not said no and I had not been physically forced. Yet it curiously felt accurate to me. In spite of my ambiguous, even empathic feelings for my unchosen partner, unwanted sex on acid is a nightmare, and I did feel violated by the experience. At times I even elaborately lied about what happened, grossly exaggerating the threatening words, adding violence, not out of shame or guilt, but because the pumped-up version was more congruent with my feelings of violation than the confusing facts. (Well, let me walk back a second: there was some shame and guilt that I had allowed that to happen, but the other thing I said was true too.)

Every now and then, in the middle of telling an exaggerated version of the story, I would remember the actual man and internally pause, uncertain why I was saying these things or why they felt true. And then I would continue with the story. I am ashamed to admit this because it is embarrassing and because it conforms to the worst stereotypes of white women. I’m also afraid the admission could be taken as evidence that women lie to get revenge or attention. My lies were told far from the event; I had left Detroit when I told

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them. I would never have told them in court for revenge or for any other purpose. They were told in the service of what I felt to be a metaphorical truth, although what that truth was was not at all clear to me then or even now. I remember that experience, including the aftermath, every time I hear or read yet another discussion of what constitutes date rape. I remember it when yet another critic castigates victimism, and complains that everyone imagines himself or herself to be a victim, and that no one accepts responsibility anymore. I could imagine telling my story as a verification that rape occurs by subtle threat as well as by overt force. I could also imagine casting myself as one of those crybabies who wants to feel like a victim. Both stories would be true and not true. The complete truth is more complicated than most of the intellectuals who have written scolding essays on victimism seem willing to accept. I didn’t even begin to understand my own story fully until I described it to an older woman many years later as proof of the unreliability of feelings. Oh, she said, I think your feelings were reliable. It sounds like you were raped. It sounds like you raped yourself.

I didn’t like her tone, but I immediately understood what she meant, that in failing to even try to speak for myself I had done violence to myself. I don’t say this in a tone of self-recrimination. I was in a difficult situation. I was very young and unready to deal with such an intense culture clash of poverty and privilege, such contradictory and mixed levels of power and vulnerability, let alone ready to deal with it on drugs. But the difficult circumstances alone do not explain my inability to speak for myself. I was unable to effectively stand up for myself because I had never been taught how.

When I was growing up in the early ’60s, I was taught by the adult world that good girls did not have sex outside marriage and bad girls did. This rule had clarity going for it, but little else. As it was presented to me, it allowed no room for what I might feel, what I might want or not want. Within the confines of this rule I didn’t count for much, and so I rejected it.

Then came the less clear rules of cultural trend and peer example, which said that if you were cool you wanted to have sex with as many people as possible. This message was never stated as a rule, but considering how absolutely it was woven into the social etiquette of the time, at least in circles I cared about, it may as well have been. It suited me better than the adults’ rule. It allowed me my sexuality at least. But again, it didn’t take into account what I might want or not want.

The encounter in Detroit, however, had nothing to do with being good or bad, cool or uncool. It was about someone wanting something I didn’t want.

Since I had only learned how to follow rules or social codes that were somehow more important than I was, I didn’t know what to do in a situation where no rules obtained and that required me to speak up for myself. I had never been taught that my behalf mattered, and so I felt helpless, even victimized, without really knowing why.

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Now, I realize it might sound absurd to say that, as a white middle-class person growing up in a fairly privileged environment, I felt like my behalf didn’t matter as, on one hand, I was certainly treated as if it did. I wasn’t dealing with teachers who treated me like I was an idiot or a potential criminal. I didn’t view the police as people who might kill me or my relatives. But what I remember of the ethos of the time—and remember, this is some time ago—was that the most important thing I could be was pretty, charming, and agreeable to others. I wasn’t foolish enough or weak enough to go along with that or buy that completely; in fact, I rebelled against it pretty strongly, partly because I was almost utterly charmless as a child. I couldn’t be charming, it seemed; I wasn’t considered pretty. But my only way of rebelling was simply to withdraw into my grim little being and not play that game at all. I wasn’t happy that way. I very much wanted to relate to the world, but the only way I knew how to be myself was to not do any of that and read my de Sade and Dante’s Inferno.

I got no support for this; in fact, the reason I was on my way to Detroit to hitchhike to Canada was that my parents had arranged to have me institutionalized for being mentally ill. I didn’t want that. I wanted to be out into the world. I wanted to be somewhere where I could relate to people who didn’t require me to be charming, etc. The problem with that was that I did not know how to relate to people and maintain my own sense of integrity, because that had not been modeled for me at all. So, in Detroit, I actually wanted to talk to this guy. When the girl left and I was alone with him, my first reaction wasn’t to be afraid of him. I was interested in hanging out with him, but I didn’t know how to do that and stay on my own territory. I had to step onto his. I didn’t know any middle ground, and I was not equipped to deal with his territory. I was completely at sea, and I imagine he had no idea what I was going through.

So skipping ahead to another part in the essay, the part where I heard the radio conversation that made me rethink the whole date-rape thing: During this time I heard a panel of feminists on talk radio advocating that laws be passed prohibiting men from touching or making sexual comments to women on the street. (This is still going on.) Listeners called in to express reactions pro and con, but the one I remember was a caller who said, “I’m an Italian woman. If a man touches me and I don’t want it, I don’t need no law. I’m gonna beat the hell outta him.”

This is still a key issue. The feminists who are advocating for strength and autonomy for women, are they looking to paternalistic laws and rules to protect them? I, by the way, as an older person, much later than the Detroit experience, have hit, slapped, and kicked men who touched me on the street.

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I do realize that you’re likely to get the snot beat out of you if you do it to the wrong person, but you can do it; at the time, listening to these women on the radio, the panelists were silent, and one of them rather meekly and uncertainly responded, “I guess I never learned how to do that.” I felt contempt. If this woman’s self-respect is so easily shaken by an obscene comment or even a touch made by some random guy on the street, how does she expect to get through life?

I felt very self-righteous—until I remembered that there had been a time in my own life when I couldn’t stand up for myself. Why was I expecting other people to do it? It could be argued that grown women on a panel like that should be capable, more capable at least than a 16-year-old girl on acid.

But that idea presupposes that people develop at a predictable rate or react to circumstances by coming to universally agreed-upon conclusions.

This seems the crucial, unspoken presumption at the center of the daterape debate, as well as of the larger discourse on victimism. It is a presumption that in a broad but potent way reminds me of a rule. Feminists who postulate that boys must obtain a spelled-out yes before having sex are trying to establish rules cut in stone that will apply to any and every encounter, and that every responsible person must obey. The new rule resembles the old goodgirl-bad-girl rule not only because of its implicit suggestion that girls have to be protected but also by its absolute nature, its ironfisted denial of complexity and ambiguity. I bristle at such a rule and so do a lot of other people.

But should we really be so puzzled and indignant that another rule or series of rules has been presented? If people have been brought up believing that to be responsible is to obey rules, what are they going to do with the can of worms like date rape except try to make new rules that they see as more fair or useful than the old ones?

The rape-crisis feminists—and I’m speaking in the old language of the ’90s now—are not the only rules absolutists here; their critics play the same game. The aforementioned Camille Paglia has stated repeatedly that any girl who goes alone into a frat house and drinks is cruising for a gang bang, and if she doesn’t know that, then she’s an idiot. The remark is striking not only for its crude unkindness but also for its reductive solipsism. It assumes that all college girls have had the same life experiences as Paglia and have come to the same conclusions about them.

By the time I got to college I’d been living away from home for years and had been around the block several times. I never went to a frat house, but I got involved with men who lived in rowdy boy houses that reeked of sex and loud music. I would go over, drink, and spend the night with my lover, and it never occurred to me that I was in danger of being gang-raped. If I had been, I would have been pretty shocked. My experience, though some of it had been bad, hadn’t led me to conclude that boys plus alcohol equals gang bang, and I was not naive or idiotic.

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Katie Roiphe has criticized girls who in her view created a myth of false innocence, saying: “Did these 20th-century girls raised on Madonna videos and the 6 o’clock news really trust that people were good until they themselves were raped? Maybe. Were these girls, raised on horror movies and glossy Hollywood sex scenes, really as innocent as all that?”2 I cannot help but be sympathetic to her annoyance. But I am surprised that a smart-ass like her apparently doesn’t know that people process information and imagery with a complex subjectivity that doesn’t alter their ideas about what they can expect from life in any predictable way. I trusted that the particular guys in their all-boy houses would not rape me, not because I was innocent, but because I was experienced enough to read them correctly. Roiphe and Paglia were not exactly evoking rules, but their comments seemed to derive from the belief that everyone except idiots interprets information and experience in the same way. In that sense they are not so different from those ladies dedicated to establishing feminist-based rules and regulations for sex. Such rules, like the old rules, assume a certain psychological uniformity of experience, a right way.

None of what I’ve said is intended to be prescriptive, and it can’t be. I am talking in a very, as I say, nuanced and rather gentle way about an experience.

There are experiences that are not nuanced, as in the 2013 case at Hobart and William Smith, where a girl was raped so badly her body was torn open.

But I read from my polite 1994 Harper’s essay to give you some sense of where the current discussion around acquaintance rape and Title IX came from and what I think is underpinning it: the difficulty many people have in understanding where they stand in relation to what rules are, whether these are social rules that are not openly stated or rules that are legal rules. I may have been a very particular person, and I came from a particular time, but from what I see in my classes, I think a great many young women still have an awful lot of difficulty understanding how to be in the realm of relating to other people and caring for other people, and standing their own ground.

Perhaps boys do, too.

1. Mary Gaitskill, “On Not Being a Victim,” Harper’s Magazine (March 1994): 35–44.

2. Katie Roiphe, “Date Rape’s Other Victim,” The New York Times Magazine, June 13, 1993. nytimes.com/1993/06/13/magazine/date-rape-s-other-victim.html?pagewanted=all.

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Toward Fairness for All Students Janet Halley I’m a long-term feminist. I’ve written a book on how and why to take a break from feminism because I think there are other forms of power and power dynamics that aren’t necessarily going to be captured through feminism.1 But I am a long-term feminist, and it’s as a feminist that I assess sexual harassment and Title IX. I come from a particular place in feminism. I was one of the many feminists who bounced off of the antipornography ordinance proposed by Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin in the early 1980s, to take one example.

Banning pornography was not what I envisioned feminism to be. That struggle woke me and many others up to the fact that we saw feminism as a sexual liberation project. We formed strong alliances with gay men who were pursuing sexual liberation, and went into the early HIV crisis allied with them as they faced a deadly epidemic and brutal social and legal suppression. We had the idea—and I’m drawing from a title to a book about this effort in feminism

by Carol Vance—that sexuality was a powerful force in human life, productive of pleasure and danger.2 We saw that sexuality was something that was so human, so important, so deep, so strange, so frightening, so interconnected, so isolating, and therefore so dangerous that you could go right from the pleasure to the danger and back again in a truly confusing way. Feminists like me try to hold both poles of the phenomenon, the pleasure and the danger of life in sexuality.

So it was with great admiration that I saw Alexandra Brodsky’s generation of student activists take up the project of dealing with academic and public institutions’ dereliction of duty on the question of danger. The Title IX movement, the movement in feminism to address rape and sexual violence, can be construed as a sexual liberation movement. But there are tensions, and the tensions are what I have been drawn to thinking about. There is another branch of feminism, a branch of feminism that I just mentioned, the one I bounced off of (the MacKinnon–Dworkin antipornography ordinance being a tag phrase for it), that I do not see as a sexual liberation movement. This other branch is focused on social control. Those two branches of feminism flowed into the space where Title IX reforms were being orchestrated in the last several years, and have created tensions there.

Another project of mine is to think about what happens when feminism manages to get incorporated into government. What happens when a social movement that originates in radical and emancipatory language involves itself inside institutions that have their own momentum, their own interests, and their own dynamics? I think what has happened in Title IX is part of the

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governance-feminism phenomenon. I absolutely think that the movement that says “Let’s wash our hands of it and hand it over to law enforcement” is wrong. I think it is, first of all, legally wrong. Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination. Title IX tells institutions of higher education that they have to respond to sex discrimination. Even without that, we have a moral obligation to deal with serious wrongdoing in our communities, whether we are legally required to or not. Washing our hands, saying “Let’s hand it over to law enforcement,” is two things: legally not an option and morally not right.

Addressing sexual harassment on campuses means getting our hands dirty in building processes for actually handling complaints. We have no choice but to use human tools here. I am going to talk a little bit about some of the problems that I see, problems that we face as the institutions of Title IX grow and harden, as they become offices on campus, and as they begin to develop habits about how they operate.

I’ll begin with the problem of overinclusive definitions. Sexual harassment as described by the Supreme Court is unwanted sexual conduct that is sufficiently severe and pervasive to interfere with work or education. The Supreme Court has also said that sexual harassment, the many elements of the definition I just laid out, has to meet a reasonable-person test: it is not just the subjective feeling, the perception of the victim, although that is an important part. It is also whether that is reasonable.

Under the Obama administration, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights actually required one school, the University of Montana, to adopt a very different definition: that sexual harassment is simply unwelcome sexual conduct, full stop. This definition leaves out severity and pervasiveness; it leaves out impact; and it leaves out the reasonable-person standard. In fact, the university was required to eliminate its reasonable-person requirement.

That definition is overinclusive in my view. It includes within the definition of sexual harassment far too much conduct.

Even in the Supreme Court’s definition, there is no testing sexual harassment for what the knowledge level or the intent or the recklessness or the negligence of the wrongdoer is. The reasonable-person test is the only brake on the subjective claim of a complainant that the sex he or she had with the accused was not good sex. This is an overinclusive definition of wrongdoing.

The project in some hands has become all-punishment-all-the-time.

That approach seems strangely inconsistent with the gigantic critique of allpunishment-all-the-time policy that is coming out of the Black Lives Matter movement. There is tension there, and I think we need to address it. For instance, California recently adopted a statutory bar on probation in sexual assault cases: anyone convicted must go to prison.3 The state adopted this law in response to an all-punishment-all-the-time feminist movement. But we have learned through our criticism of the criminal justice system that mandatoryminimum sentences are a prime mover of mass incarceration. They facilitate

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the vast, disproportionate incarceration of men of color. How could feminists miss this criticism?

Another problem with the institutionalization of Title IX concerns due process and equality problems in the processes for handling sexual harassment on campuses. These processes are never going to be perfect. There are always going to be some false positives; that is, some people who did nothing wrong are going to be punished. They are always going to get some false negatives; that is, some wrongdoers who should get punished are not. That is life in the legal order. I am not talking about setting up a perfect legal system.

I am talking about trying to devise a better one, a better administrative and disciplinary system.

Let me run through some of the problems with the processes under Title IX that I have seen in cases that I have been involved in. First, the accused should be able to see the complaint so that they can know what they are accused of. That goes back really far in our legal system as an element of fundamental fairness. Second, the accused should have assistance. It should not be up to the families to cough up the $10,000 that it takes to get a lawyer.

Almost no students, and very few families, can afford that kind of assistance.

In one case I helped on, the only faculty member whom the accused student trusted to help him was not allowed to play that role because he was on the Title IX oversight committee, and this was supposedly a conflict of interest.

The student represented himself and suffered greatly as a result. It is not only the accuser who needs assistance through this process; the accused student does too. Remember: they’re young, and may be innocent.

Third, the basic model of the proceeding at many schools needs to be changed. Some schools have hearings and some schools have investigator-only inquiries. Both models have problems, both have advantages, but a hearing solves a lot of the problems with the investigator-only process. Investigators do not tell either party what they are learning in interviews to which they are not invited. I was involved in a case—in an investigator-only process—in which the investigator disclosed nothing—zero—about what she was hearing from the accuser and the witnesses. The problem is not fixed by having the investigator report back. That information is cooked, and you cannot guess what has been left out. Exculpatory information that comes into possession of the investigator can be left out at the investigator’s discretion. A hearing is needed to solve these problems, but many schools do not provide them.

There is something else about investigations that is only slowly coming into focus and has not been much discussed. I have sat next to both complainants and the accused, serving as a “personal adviser.” What I have seen has horrified me again and again. The process is extremely cold. It is rule-bound.

It is formalistic. It is getting more and more bureaucratic. Here would be an example: Two students accused each other of penetrative sexual assault on each other in the same sexual encounter. I was helping one of them through

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the process. That person attempted suicide and was hospitalized. When I asked the student whom I was assisting what the context was that gave rise to this crisis, they said it was about getting text messages and voicemail messages from the investigator at all times of the day and night.

So I said to the Title IX office, “Why don’t you send the messages to me?

I’ll pass them all along, but in an orderly way that provides support.” And they said, “No, there’s no rule that allows us to send them to you instead.

We have to send them to the student. It’s in the rules; we have to follow the rules.” It was cold. It was hard. It was unsympathetic. I sometimes come out of these processes, whether I am helping an accuser or the accused, thinking, “And that’s what we want to teach the young about how we solve serious moral problems?” I think we’ve taught students on both sides of this issue something dreadful.

Let me address just a couple of other things that are harder to talk about.

Title IX administrators, inevitably, because they are human, carry with them other forms of power and other moral problems. In my experience—I have no numbers for my observations—that means that there is a disproportionate number of men of color being accused. There is absolutely no reason to think that broad societal racial discrimination will stand back from Title IX and leave it pure. Any step of the process can be the moment when it flows in: in the initial sexual encounter, in the misunderstood cultural languages that come into play in it, in the complainant’s conviction that it was unwelcome, in the Title IX officer’s decision that the case is serious, in the investigator’s questions and analysis of the evidence, in the attitudes of witnesses, in the understandings of decision makers. This is a problem that we are going to have to begin to face.

There are other equality issues at play here. Take, for instance, disability.

When a disabled student is accused, nobody stops to think, does the disability of this student make it harder for him or her to answer the questions that are being posed by this process? I helped a student who had a speech impediment that was increased by anxiety; the process increased the speech impediment so much that he just basically wept through his interview with the investigator. No one noticed that he had a disability. No one offered him assistance; no one offered to accommodate him in any way.

The race issue and the disability issue are intensified by the fact that Title IX offices have no particular mandate to watch out for racial bias or the rights of disabled students. Their sole mandate is sex equality. Title IX’s sole mandate is sex equality. This is a structural deficit. And this structural problem is even worse than that. Schools that make their Title IX employees into the decision makers are opting into structural bias against the accused. Too many of the decision makers in investigator-only and also hearing models are in the Title IX office itself. The structural imperatives set up by the Obama-era Office for Civil Rights and the public outcry that attends the disclosure of any

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data suggesting that the accused is not held responsible in every case means that the Title IX office has to show high enforcement numbers. The Title IX enforcement officers’ jobs are on the line here. That raises the risk of false positives. Where are you going to get structurally unbiased decision makers?

I have some ideas. It is hard to do. But it seems crucial if the process is to be even minimally fair.

I also want to put alcohol on the table. I am totally on board with the feminist project of not blaming the victim. That piece of the activist movement I have been in agreement with since I became a feminist; I think it is extremely important. But it is not blaming the victim to point out the simple fact that most complaints to Title IX offices involve extreme drinking.4 In those cases, and in the campus sexual assault conversation generally, we have got to figure out how to talk about alcohol without blaming the victim.

We are frozen over this issue. I was talking with a university president about why we are not dealing with the alcohol problem, and she said to me, “I was told we can’t touch that issue.” I think we have to touch that issue. I think that the problem of extreme drinking is a real public health issue on our campuses, quite distinct from its Title IX consequences. But it also has huge Title IX consequences. Should a student be expelled when the complainant was so intoxicated that she cannot remember what happened and the accused student says the sex was mutual? The science clearly shows that you can be capable of consent while quite drunk and yet not remember anything that happened later on; the cognitive circuits involved in conscious consent and in memory retention and loss are distinct.5 But many think that memory loss is proof against the accused. Second, in many systems, the Title IX office is explicitly barred from considering whether the accused student knew or should have known that the complainant was drunk. We are basically dealing with the problem of extreme drinking by punishing those accused of having sex with extreme drinkers. We are missing the focus here: extreme drinking itself, and the social understandings that make it a normal part of campus culture.

Finally, I want to allude to the famous preponderance-of-evidence standard required by the Obama Office for Civil Rights for all campus Title IX proceedings. People have focused on it because it is easy to understand and fits into the sound bites required by the media. But I am not a preponderance fetishist. I think if you have a definition that focuses on wrongful conduct and is not overbroad; if you have a good process; if you have independent and neutral decision makers, preponderance would make less of a difference. But the definitions are overbroad; the processes are not fair; the decision makers are structurally biased. When you put preponderance on top of all that other bad judgment and unfairness, you are basically saying you want to hold innocent students responsible for a grave moral and legal violation.

And why does this concern me, as a pleasure-and-danger feminist? I think we are constructing a system that treats women like fragile, passive participants

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in their own sexual lives, and men like their all-powerful protectors. A system built around the aspiration for female sexual agency would not look like this.

It leaves out pleasure and its manifold consequences. But it also leaves out danger. This system is losing legitimacy. It will not be able to send the message that intentional and reckless sexual appropriation of another human being is a grave wrong. Instead, it is sending the message that students who have confusing sex can wield, and are at the mercy of, a machinelike bureaucracy—for their own good.

I want to close by saying that many of these problems are inevitable.

Paternalistic and social-conservative nonfeminist forces were actively involved in tilting these systems in the direction they have gone. The all-punishmentall-the-time feminists were the ones they liked to listen to. Plus, it is a new system. It is flawed. We are humans. There are going to be problems. I am not saying the project is a misconceived one, but it is a hard one. And staying with the problem seems to me to be part of what Mary Gaitskill was talking about: trying to live a responsible life.

1. Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

2. Carole S. Vance, Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).

3. Cal. Penal Code sec. 1203.065 (2016).

4. L ori E. Shaw, “Title IX, Sexual Assault, and the Issue of Effective Consent,” Indiana Law Journal 91, no. 4 (2016): 1363.

5. Id.

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Feeling Safe Uday Mehta We live in a time when the demand for security and safety is defining expectations of individual and collective life. An edifice of staggering reach and inscrutable penetration has been built to service this expectation and to assuage the fear and anxiety that fuels it. The dissemination of fear, and the insistence on its correlate, security, is, not for the first time but perhaps to a new extent, now the singular ground for an emerging and suffocating national consensus that extends to our universities. The American creed, like other nationalist yearnings when they give overwhelming priority to the need for unity, has had a long-standing impulse to compound an irrational sense of imminent and vague terror, whose only redress is believed to lie in a reassertion of conformity. What is new, at least in its reach, is that this conformity now threatens to extend to an expressive domain, to the realm of feelings and private idiosyncrasies, which until recently was largely free from the supervision of authorities because it did not seek the assurance of safety.

Security is the central catechism of our contemporary secular theology. It is not merely that a concern with security has been the authorizing warrant for the perpetual motion of recent foreign wars, or that security, and not ideology in its traditional sense, now underwrites a global vision that needs the buttress of far-flung garrisons. Security, which until not so long ago constituted a distinct, or exceptional, zone of political consideration, now laces every aspect of domestic policy, ranging over food production; energy policies; the fear of viruses and diseases; the guard posts at our schools, colleges, airports, and public arenas; the integrity of our banks; the unfathomable web of information and communications; and, of course, the people we choose to admit within our borders. At one level, all of this testifies to the new ways in which everything is connected, and to the fact that the designation of “separate spheres,”on which liberalism relied and on whose denial totalitarianism prospered, is increasingly tenuous. But the priority that security has assumed is a distinct matter. It is now a familiar fact that officials justify even the most mundane aspects of public policies by invoking the idea of security. Terms such as justice, equality, decency, and even freedom, which once carried the hope and burden of our public ethos, have receded to the disused recesses of our shared vocabulary. Even an avowedly liberal President Obama described his duty as the protection of the American people and not in terms of the more complex mandate to preserve and defend the Constitution.

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mundane aspects of our lives with such subcutaneous and manifest ubiquity that they are now paradoxically below the threshold of our conscious anxieties.

We live with them with the same mix of horror and complacency that medieval Christians lived with the presence of demons. To a considerable extent, in the North Atlantic democracies (unlike many other parts of the world where fear is the response to real and felt danger) fear has ceased to be an emotion. It is instead deployed as a policing device between what is collectively acceptable and the “unhelpful opinions” that challenge our preestablished certainties.

When fear is invoked, as it so often is, as a cant to confirm narrow group identities or to exaggerate an imminent threat to the nation, it obscures the real reasons why at least some people have genuine cause to fear: a loss of health care, or of jobs with a reasonable prospect of well-being and dignity, or of the all-too-easy incarceration that blights some communities.

Ironically, the vast paraphernalia of security is now perhaps the most sustained link that ordinary citizens have with public authorities. In a perverse inversion of what is otherwise a telling absence, when it comes to being enmeshed with matters relating to security we live in a highly participatory democracy, but one that tends to amplify our sense of helplessness and further roots us, as Franklin D. Roosevelt famously warned, in “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed effort.” This may be a premonition of the fate of democracies, which originally sought to make us safe so that we would be free to enrich our lives and our communities in myriad ways, but which through a dialectical inversion now make a concern with safety the very ground of our sense of community—a community, moreover, in which an obsession with security is coupled with mutual distrust. It is not surprising that, as an administrative dictate, such a capacious anxiety has to be housed under the vague and indefinite rubric of Homeland Security.

Through a mix of coercion, paranoia, consent, neglect, and ignorance we live as inmates, under conditions that until not so long ago were reserved for the criminally consigned.

In a sense, this predicament is the culmination of an old idea. As far back as the 17th century, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes articulated a vision that was premised on salus populi suprema lex esto: the safety of the people is the supreme law. What gave this idea its captivating appeal was that it animated a primordial anxiety, not simply of death, which after all was natural and inevitable, but rather of violent and painful death, which was unnatural and avoidable. Under conditions of searing religious and sectarian violence and widespread social upheaval, the prospect of such an unnatural death, according to Hobbes, was all but assured and intimately proximate. Its redress turned on a political state with unbounded powers, to which individuals resigned their own powers of self-protection.

The psychological insight that backed this thought was that in the face of the overwhelming power of the state, individuals were more likely to refrain

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from the extravagant sectarian disputes that motivated everyday forms of violence and mayhem. It was a vision that gave self-preservation and security a trumping priority. It was suspicious of private judgments and individual virtues, especially to the extent that they encouraged behavior that was indifferent to this priority. Despite this emphasis, at least implicitly, it permitted an idea of individual flourishing, which related to the things that made their lives distinctive. With an all-powerful leviathan bearing over them and securing their existence and public order, people could refocus their existence on all the things that gave meaning to their lives—commerce, industry, the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It was as if Hobbes built an elaborate theory about the importance of a powerful state by amplifying on Samuel Johnson’s quip about the prospect of a hanging concentrating the mind. The state and its sheriffs were to be the guarantors of a secure life for individuals and for the collective political unit.

The life that the state has been pledged to secure, and on account of which Hobbes’s influence is decisive even in democratic regimes, was corporeal. It was physical, pulsating biological life that mattered. Its limit and focus was the body, which felt physical pain and, through a contrivance with political power, sought to be protected from the prospect of a violent and unnatural death. To the extent that the body could be threatened by an inexhaustible set of possible circumstances there was always the implicit possibility, even in democratic societies, that something like Hobbes’s overbearing leviathan state would be required to make good on the pledge. The mandate of security could indeed colonize other values, but it did not require such overreach because, if not in Hobbes at least in his liberal variants, it was constrained by another contending vision.

What once chastened this draconian prospect and allowed this conception of security to coexist with, rather than overwhelm, a vision that vouched for free speech is that, until recently, it was restricted to the perimeter of the physical human body, just as the concern with national security had once been limited to the violation of national boundaries and had not yet entered all the capillaries of our social life. That coexistence is crucial if society is to be more than a mere security pact pegged to the dream, the paranoid dream, of seeking complete safety or, what amounts to the same, the compulsion to treat all challenges and offenses as physical threats. The importance of both self-preservation and the value of freedom requires a commitment to the coexistence of two distinct ideas and not to the comforting palliative of a supposed delicate “balance,” which puts security and the rights of free individuals in the same hamper and makes them tradable alternatives. Any regime that fails in the recognition and endorsement of this dual commitment misses the essential connection through which our public purposes and the richness of our private imaginings can be secured and given a democratic form. A conception of democracy that privileges a political form along with its implicit reliance

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on unity and safety is liable to coalesce around the banal rigidities of what is proper and what is not. As the philosopher Richard Rorty emphasized, our “final vocabularies” should be chastened by an awareness that they are always in the process of being redescribed, and that poetry and other imaginative acts have always played a significant role in that redescription.

This other vision has traditionally represented a limit to what individuals expect from the state and other authorities, but it also pointed to what they pledged to retain as inalienable because it was internal to their self-conception as free subjects. It related to their singularity, their expressive nature, the urges of conscience, and the type of self-regard that has a spiritual and poetical aspect, for which the physical body, both of the individual and of the collective, is neither a stand-in nor an alibi. It referred to that kernel of the self, which, even while it is touched by the conformities of time and history, retains the urge to look beyond them. It is what Shelley had in mind when he spoke of the imagination as the instrument of moral good and of poetry as “the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.” It is the internal domain that sought, in the famous words of Justice Brandeis, “to be left alone” to the risky adventure of living. It is predicated on the thought that speech, the disputation of debate, the pursuits of the imagination, and the feelings they engender not only do not require security, but that their flourishing has an ineradicable element of risk attached to it. It considers thoughts, ideas, and feelings as belonging to a different register of existential needs than that of the body. It conceives of them as retaining that spirit that is indifferent to safety and security and to the vigilance and mediation of authorities. It vouches for a citizenry that does not take all its cues from a collective project, bound together around a single catechism. It is committed to the idea that our public purposes do not have a presumptive priority over our private attempts at self-creation, and that the inevitable tensions between these two should not automatically be settled by invoking “the founding principles of the republic” or any other lofty public trumps. Unlike the idea of a balance, which ultimately takes refuge in a singular political rationale because it is the thing by which the balance is measured, this vision is wedded to an ordinary and messy heroism that values the republic not just for the security it ensures but also because it includes spaces in which thoughts, ideas, and feelings are exempt from a collective supervision and calculus. This vision is crucial to a vibrant democracy—as, indeed, it is to any form of collective order—because it insists that not everything worth valuing should be made subsidiary to the political rationale of security, unity, or anything else.

The universities have traditionally conceived of themselves as having a special link to this other vision and hence to a republic in which they and it flourish together. Until roughly a decade and a half ago, university administrators, deans, and professors exercised an authority that only in rare and exceptional instances bore a resemblance to the sheriffs of the state. This

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always represented a privilege on account of which universities and schools were acknowledged as special spaces. But it was a privilege that was a tribute to the larger society and to an ideal of democracy that was not narrowly or exclusively political. It professed that ideas, thoughts, opinions, and all the arts that produce feelings of joy, puzzlement, and uncertainty, and which often give offense, do not require the comforting emollient of “feeling safe.”

In their own way, universities represented and vouched for a martial virtue that presumed on individual maturity without making it conditional on collective identities that merited special care and protection. They permitted giving offense and feeling hurt or disoriented, which are the necessary effects of being challenged on one’s opinions and encountering those who are different from oneself. They similarly taught and encouraged those forms of conversation, tolerance, persuasion, and reconsideration as ways of navigating those unsettling encounters.

Perhaps because there was some residual sense that the fate and functioning of universities, especially elite universities, was not so dependent on the largesse of the government and wealthy donors, they could resist being cowed by political and social pressures. They could resist the idea, which now so often appears positively utopian (or worse, reactionary), that the republic did not have to function as though it were made up of similar parts yoked to a uniform way of life. In many ways, universities were exemplars of that vision of society in which our various conceptions of the good did not have to neatly conform with each other, and where the untidy edges did not have to be resolved by reference to some higher set of political purposes.

Our universities and our everyday norms of “appropriate” speech have already ceded much ground to an ever-expanding regimen of safety that now extends to the internal realm. A vast therapeutic establishment of doctors, caregivers, and counselors is now felt to be a necessary appendage of our schools and universities. Because they are integral to our idea of education, in many instances they do serve a valuable purpose. Their mandate is to minister to our feelings and our identities, the main terms of which are given to us in precut molds. We expect not to feel offended. We expect to have the rape of Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphoses cushioned by a prior warning, just as we expect university officials to help us contend with, if not altogether exclude, the provocations of right- and left-wing ideologues. We expect our university classrooms and dormitories to be a peculiar extension of our childhood homes rather than that intermediate station where a loss of innocence and a challenge to our identities are taken to be preconditions of learning and our gathering maturity. We expect to have our encounter with new information or old texts smothered in a lotion that rids them of any possible astringent effects. We expect our collective identities to be secured before we are exposed to the bracing air of the unfamiliar. But even here there is something partial in what we defend: despite the renewed attention that inequality

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has received in recent public discourse, the language of victimization typically does not extend to the recuperation of any talk of exploitation or the debilitating effects of poverty.

We presume on a set of obvious standards by which speech or texts can be judged to have caused traumas or to have given offense. We can do so because the internal domain, which was in some loose sense cordoned off from the tidal forces of social conformity, is now so thoroughly constituted by a consensus (of “likes” and “dislikes,” “friended” and “unfriended”), and that our private convictions, along with anything that unsettles them, can be judged by standards that are thoroughly conventional. Our idealism on behalf of what is “different” tends to rely on a normative confirmation of what is utterly familiar. We are in danger of allowing bourgeois conventionality to extend beyond the class to which it referred and to instead become a norm for society as a whole. As this invigilating mentality colonizes the expressive domain, it eviscerates the internal and private sources through which so often that very conventionality alleviated the social suffocations of the bourgeois vision of life.

Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill it has been recognized that in democratic societies majorities could smother the will and interests of minorities. In many ways this has been the conscious worry of democratic polities, which constitutional assurances and institutional arrangements have to some extent assuaged, even if they have often done so only at a formal level and only with respect to some issues and some minorities. But there is a linked problem of far greater ethical gravity and contemporary urgency, which in its nature does not lend itself to any easy legal redress. It is what Mill had in mind when he spoke of the “quiet suppression” of opinions that draws us into the fold of unanimity and presses us with subtle impulsion toward conformity.

The problem is of greater ethical importance precisely because unanimity and conformity tend to assert themselves by invoking values and urgencies, such as the perils to the community and its security, that are taken to be the anchoring struts of a political order that can hence wrap itself in a higher purpose. What this rhetoric invariably conceals is the costs that it exacts through the pacification of intellectual freedom and moral courage. The demand of allegiance to a common standard, which in moments of feigned public gravity views deviations from that standard with hyperbolic suspicion, surrenders the variety and the privacy that otherwise are the proud boasts of an ostensibly individualistic culture. It is a reminder that nationalism, especially in moments of escalated zeal, is not an argument but rather the manufacturing of a collective emotion.

Universities and those who administer them are only partial culprits in this state of affairs. Their complicity stems from having been, for the most part, willing accomplices to a general cultural condition that seeks safety for an expressive domain and hence reneges on a privilege that made teaching, debate, conversation, and persuasion different from the contrivance of power.

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When we seek to be made safe in our feelings, when we profess a right not to be offended or that we expect to be shielded from unwelcome words, or when we assert a right to feel good about our identities we are lowering the wall that made deans and professors different from the sheriffs of the state. When we conceive of students as “customers” whose claim on the university is commercially contracted—admittedly, how could it not be given the price tag?—we are inviting into the university the attitude in which “feeling good” about a “transaction” is a perfectly normal extension of a commercial culture. But in the process we are also repudiating the Kantian insight that associated enlightenment with courage and maturity, and that identified these terms with the practice of freedom. Perhaps most important, when we extend the mandate of security we diminish the responsibility we have to ourselves. It is a troubling invitation for a single and exclusive rationale to pervade the republic.

Gandhi famously said, “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”

He did not, of course, mean that no one could cause him pain without his permission. His body had the same vascular structure as ours, one that registered pain when afflicted. What made the hurt different was that it required self-authorization. It required taking responsibility for who one was and not allowing one’s identity to be determined by one’s oppressors, let alone by the presumed slights to it. Gandhi was perhaps unique among leaders struggling against mighty empires and other forms of oppression in the degree to which his identity and self-confidence were secure and not reactive to the racism and other obvious cultural and political acts of turpitude that characterize imperial modes of governance.

We are in danger of transforming our relationship to ourselves so that being hurt or offended requires no assent of our own will, but instead turns on a casual submission to an anesthetizing ether, which in the main is a compendium of narrow conventionality. A republic in which this is the norm and in which universities are complicit in this norm debases the idea of consent and gives credence to the thesis that consent is simply a manufactured commodity, hitched like a caboose to an anxious, bellicose, and commercial republic.

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The Learning Edge Erica Hunt

Preamble: as the date of the conference indicates, my remarks were delivered before the momentous (and calamitous) presidential election of 2017. I grapple, as many do, with the sweep of all three branches of government by an extreme right wing hostile to even the weakest forms of democracy, and terrifyingly tolerant of nationalist, racist, and xenophobic allies and policies.

Naturally, this has led me to thinking about what it means to be a writer and teacher in these times, and about what to do with the anger and fear with which many of us walk around, calculating how much of the daily portion of disgust, loathing, and rage we let in. How do we preserve psychic space for joy and the work of imagination and art necessary for advancing a future in which we wish to live?

••• I want to begin by telling you a bit about myself, how I came to be an improbable person, as I sometimes think of myself. I grew up in New York City and attended public schools during a time of generational change: the civil rights movement, the Black liberation movement, the antiwar and women’s movements were abuzz around me, though I was too young to directly participate.

They influenced my view of the world. From my Harlem-born Caribbean and Black unionist parents, I learned about collectivity, struggle, and hard work.

From movement activists I acquired the language of “freedom,” a stringent and elusive value, an ideal not to be shelved, an active praxis to release people to live to their fullest potential and gifts, and a lens to view all the ways we live constrained in a broken democracy.

I had many jobs as an adult, some volunteer and some paid, working at a grassroots level for social change. I backed into social justice philanthropy.

It was a tremendous privilege to work to bridge the gap in communities struggling for basic needs—housing, schooling, clean water, democratic participation in their towns and states—with money and resources from foundations willing to partner, to an extent, toward the same goals.

The result is that, for more than 18 years, I routinely met people of extraordinary courage, far from the precincts of New York City, with its mix of skepticism and irony, people who were putting everything on the line—their families, their careers—to challenge local powers, their own homegrown masters of the universe. They devised campaigns to win power because it meant their survival against the sugar growers of South Florida, who were receiving government subsidies even as they dumped pesticides into the aquifers of

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the communities around them. They organized to stop daytime crop dusting near the Black elementary school, or the unaccountable governor using Katrina recovery funds to build a road to a Toyota plant not yet built, hundreds of miles from flooded Black areas, in the white part of the state.

The people I met and partnered with had often been contending with blood-boiling assaults against themselves, their families, and their neighbors, had been dealing with state-administered contempt for their lives for generations. It is important to name some of these folks here: I am grateful to Sophia Bracy Harris, Scott Walker, and Leroy Johnson, and other activists in Alabama and Mississippi, who taught me about what it is to have courageous, truth-telling conversations. In witness and partnership, I learned with them to acknowledge that these struggles and truths may just plant the seeds, and we may not see the full harvest of the “freedom” we seek to make.

Later I led a Black foundation, the mission of which was to support Black community change. We funded the first Black Men and Boys initiatives, which assembled research, helped to frame the dialogue, and created the space for activists, policymakers, and research people to collaborate on strategies to critically intervene in mass incarceration, elevating Black-led problem solving and policy remedies. We also led the fundraising from New York City in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, making $6 million in direct grants to community-based organizations in Louisiana and Mississippi and leveraging millions of dollars from other foundations and donors by sharing our dockets and our lists, and in some cases bringing donors to meet local leaders and groups in the Gulf.

These are some of the experiences I bring to this discussion concerning real talk. When I hear the question “How can colleges and universities be safe and inclusive places for asking uncomfortable questions essential to our democracy,” I think, “Whose democracy?” and “When will it be truly our democracy?”

It strikes me that uncomfortable questions, discomforting to those in power, are often asked in struggling communities, and in movement building, and in movement circles.

The way we have framed the discussion is interesting; it is as if the conversations we have in the classroom could be detached from what is happening outside the college classroom, in the community at large. I am not saying that it is impossible to discuss race, sex, gender expression, and class dispassionately; I am saying that we need to watch out for neutrality, for objectivity, for impartiality divorced from issues of power and privilege. The issues of subject position—for example, how does one come to be in the room, how do you come to be at the table of discussion about difficult questions and conversations in the classroom space?—are baked into the discussion. My representation is not your representation, my picture is not your picture, my imagination is not your imagination. Conversation is where we clarify what spaces can be shared.

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I was lucky, around 2004, to have an exchange with Desmond Tutu. In the course of the conversation about Guantánamo Bay, among other things, I said in a devil’s advocate kind of way, “We New Yorkers are so psychologically devastated by what happened to our downtown on 9/11. You have to imagine the amount of grief we feel, and why we might feel terrified, and so afraid, that we might want to detain anyone remotely responsible for the catastrophe. Don’t we have a right to be safe?” I knew better than that, but I was in front of an audience, and everybody thought Guantánamo was wrong, but I wanted to poke a little bit at our consensus.

He went into a homily, and what I remember is that he said, “There are no safe spaces. The world is not safe. And if we value our safety over the dignity of others, we will never be safe.”

In South Africa, he said, the anti-apartheid movement had to persuade a group of people to give up their idea of safety so that all could have their dignity, so that all could experience all their rights in a democracy. I thought that was a powerful idea, that safety and the dignity of others are linked to our own safety and dignity. We can only have safety if we have respect for each other and if we hear each other, if we do the deep listening and the work. But safety is also relative. There is no absolute safety in the world.

This is echoed in a James Baldwin quote from his essay “As Much Truth as One Can Bear.” He says, “The writer must remember however powerful the many who would rather forget, that life is the only touchstone, and that life is dangerous and that without joyful acceptance of this danger there can never be any safety for anyone ever anywhere” (emphasis mine). He goes on to say in that same article, “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”1 We cannot make change if we are not open to risk and vulnerability. Safety is the siren song, pitting “normalcy” and acquiescence against the quest for a free society, a democracy built on respect, and equality.

There is a second feature I notice in the frame around “courageous conversation”: people often place at the end what should come at the beginning, what should be a ground rule as we enter; that is, the understanding of mutual respect and assumed equality of opinion, particularly giving the benefit of the doubt to people who racial or gender or class hierarchy do not privilege.

Part of what we are learning together in a classroom or an art space is that we are in this together and that we have a stake in each other. Once we have learned that, we can create a space of safety to say difficult things, to have difficult conversations, courageous conversations.

This is a theme in dozens of works by writers I admire: George Yancy, Bell Hooks, Sarah Schulman, whose new book, Conflict Is Not Abuse, is very much about this point and aligned with this conference. Yancy names the space of the classroom as “the place where we practice loving wisdom and playing with danger.”

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Here’s another theory of why we need to get to these difficult conversations: why don’t we consider them rehearsals? Why don’t we think of these conversations as practice and the classroom as the laboratory? We don’t have many places to have those conversations anymore, part of the problem of the dwindling public sphere—virtual meeting grounds have no accountability, as we have learned, and our society has reduced or diminished public space through attrition. The classroom, where you set ground rules of mutual respect from the very onset, may well be the space to start practicing having difficult conversations, conversations that deal with all the levels of oppression; or bystander syndrome, that attitude that supposes, “Oh, it doesn’t have anything to do with me!”; or indifference; or white innocence, which extinguishes the possibility of true allyship.

All of those principles and practices have to be rehearsed, in a classroom, or, if not a classroom, because not everybody gets to a college classroom or a small liberal arts campus, perhaps a community space or an art space.

The classroom can be a place to practice deep listening, not just listening to oneself or to ideas that are familiar. It is a place to practice as a team member, taking responsibility for the learning and knowledge created with others.

This is Paulo Freire’s notion of authentic education as carried on not by A for B, or by A about B, but by A with B. That means that even the instructor is in a position of learning, and that may mean they give up some power. It might mean hearing something they may never have heard before or that is new to them and being willing to change their minds and be surprised.

In that spirit, it is important to leave your comfort zone, with the goal of discovering your learning edge. The comfort zone is that place of no challenge, nothing new, nothing to see here. It is different for different people. The comfort zone is racialized, or perhaps it has a gender dimension.

Sexual identity and gender expression for cis straight people offers a nice cocoon and sprawl in the comfort zone, even while it is excruciating for others. The comfort zone can also be comfortably quiet, a place of silence, like sitting in a classroom and being passive and not saying anything, even though you have a different story to tell.

The learning edge, on the other hand, can be anxious-making. It can also be exciting, a place of liberation, a new North Star. If, for you, it is not a great place to be routinely, I suspect you have to practice being stretched, annoyed or surprised, confused or defensive, in order to take in a new perspective. For some people, especially people of color, letting white people stay with their discomfort and not rescuing them by ending the conversation is a learning edge. For a long time, I used to rescue people. For white students, it may mean learning to stop listening to the voices of authority and to acknowledge the need to listen more deeply. Where the learning edge exists for different people is something to be aware of in the classroom and in classroom practice.

And, again, it is about setting ground rules, the ground rules you could make up. Some useful guidelines or ground rules are (and you could add your

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own): respect, listening, speaking for yourself, using “I” statements, learning how to disagree without being disagreeable, and being willing to change your mind. None of this is new, right?

These spaces require new kinds of community strategies, like Ouch and Oops. Do you know this technique? The young people do. It makes space for feedback, where “Ouch” means “That hurt” and “Oops” means “I erred.”

Ouch and Oops is a call to make space, and to practice, practice, practice speaking our truth and taking responsibility in conversation.

Another strategy is meshing, which is a way to hold on to your power as a person of color. When someone says something so staggeringly insulting, when it renders you almost speechless, rather than getting knocked down or knocked back you try to envision yourself as a mesh screen door, and the wind is pouring, just blowing, through and not blowing you over. Rather than being staggered by it, you let it pass through. And you use your breath, your body, to resist and rise. You center, and you breathe, and you clarify, and you say what you heard and you say how you want to be treated, what you wish for, the world you want to enter. We don’t get practice at that, do we? We let ourselves get knocked off our feet.

Finally, there is a technique that helps us to understand each other’s stories within the context of the stories others want to tell about us, stories not of our making. This reframing technique helps to surface these hidden stereotype narratives, in order to produce new narratives. We start by identifying stock narratives. Those are the stereotypes that we have about each other, about why things are the way they are. Those stock narratives are celebrated in history, in ritual, in the law, and in the arts. They tell us what society sees as meaningful and important, ideas like meritocracy, the American Dream, colorblindness—these are stock stories.

Then, we identify concealed stories. Concealed stories are told by people on the margin, what really happens: “I almost did this. This almost happened in our family. We owned this land here, and then it was stolen from us.” How many Black people can say that about homes and land in the South, can reveal the concealed story of Black land loss and its impact on generations of Black Americans and Black wealth? How many times have you heard “We used to own this land over here on the South Carolina coast, all up and down, but it’s gone now”; or, “I served in the Great War. It was hell, and it wasn’t from the enemy; it was from my white comrades-in-arms.” Concealed stories are stories that do not get told by the official narrative. You have to look for the concealed stories, and the concealed stories are important.

Next, we look for resistance stories. Resistance stories are historical and contemporary stories that exemplify challenges to the racial status quo that we do not hear about as often as is probably necessary. We recycle the same few.

We have Martin Luther King Jr. and we have Rosa Parks—both of whom, by the way, practiced, practiced, practiced. Rosa Parks practiced at Highlander2

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getting knocked out of her bus seat so she would know what to do when she was challenged. But there are many more stories, with a small h or a large H, a small r or a large R, of simple heroism and resistance. People practice their freedom.

They practice what it is to live as a free person. We all have these stories, but they have to be excavated. That is part of the job of art and culture and writing.

Resistance narratives are also a critical thinking strategy, a way to strengthen our practice about ways to resist and work against racism or to act as an ally for justice. How else will we learn when and how to step in, to intervene, to know when enough is enough when we think that a situation is not right?

Finally, there is a fourth type of storytelling: counternarratives. Counternarratives are also a form of critique and resistance. They help to create new narratives, a rereading or a retreating of the archive. There’s a great book right now, a series of short stories by John Keene called Counternarratives, in which he reimagines Black people into historical narratives where people of color have been totally erased. How do we reimagine ourselves, who are not written into history, by reimagining history itself? How do we move beyond the constraints of stock narratives, the documents with their yawning silences, their one-line dismissals, to capacious historical accounts that acknowledge past and present brutal truths while giving space to a future we want to live in? Doing this work is a deep act of imagination and creativity in our scholarship, in art, and in our civic life together.

The question is, who has the right story or the right narrative? We’d be fooling ourselves if we left out power, race, sex, and status in our tellings. Try telling the Katrina story without raising class, or telling your personal story without acknowledging race and class, because the distortions will creep in.

When we do not face how race, class, and sex impact us, influence us, the shield we use will come back to wound us.

I am going to end with a quote from an article I just wrote about James Baldwin: “Art and writing, as well as a classroom, are sites to rehearse the open predicates of choice, and the work we do now, speculative and specific, demolishes the confining brackets of a zero-sum game, the presumptive culture of absolute winners and losers.”3 You see, there is no line of demarcation, really, that separates us from another’s pain, Baldwin said repeatedly. I think he would remind us again, especially now, encouraging us to speak our best present truth and open ourselves to listen.

1. James Baldwin, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” The New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1962; republished in Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, ed. Randall Kenan (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 41.

2. The Highlander Research and Education School, formerly the Highlander Folk School, is a social justice leadership training school established in Tennessee in the 1930s.

3.

Erica Hunt, “Love Is a Growing Up,” The Brooklyn Rail, October 4, 2016. brooklynrail. org/2016/10/criticspage/love-is-a-growing-up.

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Let’s Take a Break from the National Conversation on Race Deroy Murdock

Once upon a time, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen met while students on this campus. After their years here, they founded Steely Dan, one of the finest rock ’n’ roll bands of all time. I have been a huge Steely Dan fan since at least junior high school. This is my first time at Bard College, although musically, I feel today that I have come back to my old school. Thank you again for that distinct pleasure.

Let me begin by talking about Eric Holder. In February 2009, he gave one of his first speeches as Obama’s newly installed attorney general. Holder took that opportunity to declare that America is “essentially a nation of cowards,” because we refuse to conduct a national conversation on race. As Holder put it, “We, average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race.”

What an amazing comment! First, it’s unusual for a federal cabinet official to attack Americans as “cowards.” Second, Americans are not just cowards but cowards on race—this, coming from America’s first black attorney general, who was nominated by America’s first black president, who reached the White House after being elected comfortably and enjoying a 70 percent approval rating right after he took office in January 2009. How rich. Third, what the hell was Eric Holder talking about? America refuses to conduct a national conversation on race? Huh? Was Eric Holder living beneath a rock?

America has engaged in a national conversation on race since 1787. That year, the Constitutional Convention waged a debate over the Three-Fifths Compromise and then decided to count each slave as three-fifths of a human being. Was that insulting, degrading, and dehumanizing? Yes, yes, and yes.

But that decision reduced the number of seats that the Southern states would have in the U.S. House of Representatives, thus weakening the South’s political power as a bloc in Congress.

So, some good emerged from that very strange decision.

The national conversation on race then moved on to: abolitionism; the Underground Railroad; then we had a little something called the Civil War; surely many conversations raged over the Emancipation Proclamation; and then came Reconstruction; Jim Crow; the assimilation and Americanization of immigrants; the civil rights movement; voting rights; forced busing; racial preferences, affirmative action, and set-asides; divestment and the conversation on apartheid in South Africa; school choice; gangsta rap; and much more. In other words, if Eric Holder did not detect a national conversation on

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race in 2009, he must have flunked American history, failed current events, and not read a newspaper or clicked on a TV since he was a baby. Regardless, former attorney general Eric Holder should be happy because the national conversation on race is as relentless and all-encompassing as ever. And frankly, in my opinion, it is ubiquitous—to a fault.

We can and should have personal, local, and national dialogue about how to understand each other, learn from each other, and build a better society together, whatever our racial and ethnic identities. But we have gone far, far beyond that point.

Karl Marx created the concept of economic determinism. To put it perhaps a little too simply, this is the idea that to understand a society, pretty much all you need to do is figure out how its economy works. Similarly, America seems to have adopted a sort of racial determinism. The sense increasingly grows that race should be the primary, if not the only, lens that we should employ to examine America and events in our country. Here’s what’s most troubling about this development: a constant and universal focus on race and a presumption of boundless racism corrode and rupture the common ties that bind this highly pluralistic, multiethnic nation. All of this manifests itself in very strange, counterproductive, and ultimately destructive ways.

Take the case of a young filmmaker friend of mine who lives on Manhattan Island. He’s a recent graduate of New York University’s film program. He is white, Jewish, and gay. He wrote a script for one of his classes. It happened to have an all-white cast. Uh-oh! You can imagine the response: “Why don’t you have people of color in your script? They’re all white.” His screenplay was like a Woody Allen picture—nothing but white people.

So, in his next script, he created several black characters. Uh-oh! You can imagine the response: “Who are you to write dialogue for black characters?”

“What do you know about the black experience?” “What do you know about black people?” This young filmmaker looked at me with a bewildered expression. He told me: “I’m damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.”

And then we have the matter of pumpkin spice lattes. Consider an October 12, 2016, article by my National Review Online colleague Katherine Timpf.

She headlined it “‘Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins’ Study Deems Pumpkin Spice Lattes ‘White Privilege.’” To quote Ms. Timpf: “In a study titled ‘The Perilous Whiteness of Pumpkins’—yes, that’s seriously what it’s called—Lisa Jordan Powell ‘examines the symbolic whiteness associated with pumpkins in the contemporary United States.’” She goes on: “Although the PSL [Pumpkin Spice Latte] was celebrated as a company and cultural success in 2013, one year later it was firmly hitched to discussions of white female identity and consumerism as both a dismissive, racially coded slur and a rallying counterpoint,” Powell writes. . . . “PSLs are one step further from actual

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pumpkins. Their fluffiness, lack of substance, and triviality, regardless of attempts to dismiss them as ‘basic,’ make them ultimate luxuries and hence markers of distinction and white privilege.”

I kid you not. So, next time you see a pumpkin spiced latte at Starbucks, be sure and scream racism, sexism, etc.

We are urged every day to “celebrate diversity,” and yet “celebrating diversity” is one of the fastest ways to get into big trouble. In February 2016, students at Bowdoin College threw a tequila party. And some of them wore sombreros. All hell broke loose. Students of Mexican descent rebelled. They screamed, “Racism!” Bowdoin brought in psychologists and trauma counselors to help the aggrieved students of Mexican ancestry overcome their sense of grievance and isolation.

But what would happen if some of those Hispanic students wore green shirts on St. Patrick’s Day? Would that be anti-Irish bias? What if they wore berets at a Bastille Day celebration? Is that Francophobia? How about if they wore kilts at a reading of poems by Robert Burns? Does that reflect hatred of Scottish people and trivialization of Scottish culture? Or are sombreros the only accessory that generates such a response?

And most important: where, oh where, are the university administrators who will stand up to these babies and say, “Grow up! It’s just a hat. If you don’t like it, skip the tequila party. Now, go to the library and do your homework!”

As former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg put it: “Microaggressions are just that: micro.”

What America’s universities desperately need is adult supervision conducted by actual adults. America’s fragile, racially sensitive, and exquisitely politically correct snowflakes must hear this message: if you cannot handle pumpkin spice lattes and sombreros while you are on a leafy campus filled with vast lawns and squirrels, how on earth will you survive a little something called adult life? If you need safe spaces and counselors after seeing a white guy wear a sombrero, how are you going to cope with the realities of being a grown-up in this country? These include real traumas: tax audits, unemployment, bankruptcy, divorce, bone cancer, fatal car crashes, losing a loved one in war, burying one’s parents . . . and children.

We constantly are instructed to celebrate diversity. But for God’s sake, do not ask people where they are from. We now hear that this expresses bias and creates discomfort. But if I do not know that your accent means that you’re from Turkey, how can I tell you that I have visited your native country, had a lovely time there, and would be thrilled to return? How can I celebrate your diversity without knowing what makes you diverse?

Let’s say I am at a reception and see that a guest is wearing a name tag.

It says: “Hi! My name is Titiporn Punjesticle.” How—without asking—will I know that this is an actual Thai name? Without asking and then learning

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from Titiporn that she is from Bangkok, how would I know to tell her that I have visited her hometown and have friends who live and work there? Who knows? They could be mutual friends of ours. That does happen!

No, we now are instructed: Keep such things to yourself. Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Don’t reach out. Don’t take that opportunity to start a dialogue. Much better to clam up and walk away. Now, how does that help build bridges or bring people together?

Next, we have the entire concept of “cultural appropriation.” In November 2015, a free, weekly yoga class at the University of Ottawa’s Centre for Students with Disabilities was canceled. Some complained that white people doing yoga constituted cultural appropriation. Never mind that this class was for disabled people, whose exercise options are, shall we say, limited. The yoga teacher suggested renaming the class “mindful stretching.” Unfortunately, there was no easy way to translate that into French. And if you cannot say it in French, you cannot say it in Canada. So they ditched that idea. Oh, well. No more yoga for the disabled at the University of Ottawa.

Back here in the USA, Oberlin College apologized to a Vietnamese student who complained that her culture was appropriated when she ate a banh mi sandwich at Stevenson Dining Hall. Rather than grilled pork, paté, pickled vegetables, and fresh herbs on a baguette, these monsters at Oberlin presented a sandwich on ciabatta bread, with pulled pork and coleslaw. As freshman Diep Nguyen moaned in the Oberlin Review: “How could they just throw out something completely different and label it as another country’s traditional food?” Okay, Diep. Here’s an idea: Oberlin could skip the interesting food and, instead, serve sloppy joes and mystery meat. How would you like that?

I gladly would have traded culturally appropriated Asian food for the stuff I got served at the cafeteria at Georgetown when I was your age.

But isn’t this a two-way street? If a universal truth is true in one direction, it should be true in the other direction. If it is cultural appropriation for white people to do yoga and cook Vietnamese sandwiches, isn’t it cultural appropriation for black actors to perform Shakespeare? What the hell does Denzel Washington know about being a 16th-century Scot? So, let’s leave Macbeth to the experts—white people with British roots. And Yo-Yo Ma is an American, born in Paris, with Chinese roots. He is not a Czech, born in Prague, with Czech roots. So, no more Dvořák’s Cello Concerto in B Minor for him! We would not want to make the Czechs uncomfortable, now would we?

These days, we are plagued in America by an assumption of racism.

Whenever a controversy erupts, step one is to assume that your opponents are propelled by racial bias. Take the debate over requiring voters to show photo ID and prove they are who say they are. Obviously, Democrats say, this is a racist plot by Republicans who do not want black people to vote. Well, it could be that Republicans actually want to fight vote fraud, mainly because vote fraud is a thing.

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In May 2016, the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles discovered 265 people who voted “year after year”—even though they were dead. In January 2012, South Carolina’s attorney general very elegantly explained that 953 people “were deceased at the time of their participation in recent elections.” The Heritage Foundation maintains a database of criminal convictions for vote fraud. While not all of these cases would be prevented by voter ID laws, the Heritage Foundation currently cites 742 such convictions since 1982.

In Philadelphia, 59 voting divisions in primarily black neighborhoods voted 100 percent for Obama and zero percent for Romney in 2012. Now, Mitt Romney got about 6 percent of the black vote across the country—not a big number, but he got 6 percent of the black vote. And he did not get 6 percent of the black vote in these precincts in Philadelphia, or 4 percent, or 3, or 1. He got zero votes. Not even accidental votes. Maybe somebody wanted to vote for Obama but accidentally pulled the wrong lever or filled in the wrong bubble. Nope. Zero votes.

Politifact dismisses vote-fraud claims by observing that these 59 voting units contained an average of just 17 Republicans each. This specific datum should deepen suspicions. So, among roughly 1,003 Republicans registered in these electoral divisions, not even one voted for Romney? All 1,003 of these 1,003 registered Republicans either abandoned their party nominee and voted for Obama, stayed home, moved away, or dropped dead before Election Day 2012? I don’t think so.

In Troy, New York—not that far from where we sit today—four Democratic politicians pled guilty to a variety of vote-fraud schemes. Forty voters were registered at a halfway house with just eight beds.

Despite stories like this, from coast to coast, if you believe in vote fraud, you are not a sincere citizen who wants ballot integrity. If you want voters to show photo ID at the polls, you will be attacked as an antiblack, racist Republican. After all, black people cannot be expected to possess photo ID. Funny, that objection vanishes everywhere else in America. Then attorney general Eric Holder complained endlessly about racism, and yet he required everyone—even blacks—to show photo ID before entering Justice Department headquarters.

Americans, even black people, have to show photo ID before buying certain over-the-counter anticold remedies. This is designed to frustrate crystal meth makers. Congress voted for this photo ID requirement. And those who voted for making black folks show photo ID to buy antihistamines include then senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

What racists!

Magically, black people supposedly have no photo ID cards on Election Day. But the other days of the year, we are expected to present photo ID when we borrow books from public libraries, cash checks at federally regulated banks, and go through TSA security checks at airports. When I go to

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Newark Airport or LAX, nobody says to me, “Well, you’re black, and your family’s gone through racism and slavery and so on. So, just get on the plane.”

Nope. That never has happened to me. The TSA demands my ID card every single solitary time. No exceptions.

We also have the New York City Department of Homeless Services. A DHS flyer asks: “Where can New Yorkers apply for shelter?” Before any New Yorker can enter shelter, he or she must first apply at the intake center that is designated for his or her family composition. What documents are required to apply? The flyer states: “All families and individuals applying for shelter must have a valid original identification, such as: A welfare ID card; green card; driver’s license; passport or visa; picture employment card.” Again, what racists! Imagine asking black homeless people to show ID. Shelter applicants in New York City who lack photo ID present birth certificates, Social Security cards, Medicaid cards, or pay stubs. But the point is, they cannot just waltz in and holler, “Jim Crow!” They need to show something that proves they are who they say they are.

Now, let’s address Black Lives Matter. This group correctly focuses on examples of out-of-control, trigger-happy, and perhaps racist cops. But not all unarmed black men are shot by white cops. BLM makes a lot less noise in those cases. Some black men who have been shot either were armed with guns or pointed things at cops that resembled firearms.

When a black man in San Diego recently stood in an assault posture and pointed a metal tobacco vapor pipe at several cops, they fatally shot him.

Tragic? Yes. But what were the police supposed to do when it appeared as if that man were holding a gun? That could be racism. But I think it more likely was an unfortunate, very tragic situation. And it easily could have been avoided had this gentleman not pointed that metal object at the police. Did white racism force him to do that?

USA Today analyzed fatal shootings of blacks in America from 2008 to 2013.

There were about 100 police-involved killings annually—justified, unjustified, armed, and unarmed. Let’s assume, though, that those 100 were all unjustified, police-involved fatal shootings of unarmed black Americans. Now let’s compare those with the number of black people killed annually by other black people. That’s about 5,000 per year, according to the FBI’s annual Crime in the United States reports.

If black lives matter, and police-involved shootings equal, at most, 2 percent of black-on-black homicides, why is it racist to discuss the other 98 percent?

Do we not owe it to the murdered victims of black-on-black homicides to discuss this problem and figure out how to reduce this sky-high level of killings?

So, in conclusion, I propose that we go in a direction exactly opposite from what former attorney general Eric Holder suggested. It’s time to take a break from the national conversation on race. Let’s look at culture for a while, including family size and family formation. Let’s look at the economy

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and how economic growth and increasing prosperity can ease racial tensions.

In the first quarter of 2017, the Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated the economy would grow by 1.4 percent this year, a very, very weak rate of economic expansion. If we were growing robustly, and more people had more jobs, more income, and they could pay their bills more easily, that would not end racism altogether, but a lot of what brings out tensions in people is having trouble paying their bills and taking care of themselves and their loved ones. That, too often, leads people to think: “I’m in trouble because of the white people, the black people, the gays, the Jews, the Catholics, the liberals, the conservatives, or . . . the other.” Economic stagnation usually exacerbates such finger-pointing, while economic growth tends to diminish it.

Let us restore our sense of humor. “That’s not funny!” is a great way to shut down dialogue. If we engaged each other with more of a sense of goodwill and more of a sense of good humor, I think we’d find a lot more capacity for dialogue and consensus than for division and dissensus.

Finally, let’s not assume each other’s ill will. “Implicit bias” assumes, as step one, that the other guy or gal is, deep down, a racist. It’s up to the accused to prove that he is not a racist, not the reverse, which is the American way. Seeing racism everywhere, in every corner, is a good way to make a fool of yourself.

A student at Bowling Green State University recently complained that she saw a Ku Klux Klan meeting taking place in a classroom on her campus.

School officials immediately investigated. As university president Mary Ellen Mazey announced: “We looked into this. We discovered it’s a cover on a piece of lab equipment.” Yup. A white sheet atop a scientific instrument—a tool of reason confused for an object of hate.

Let’s try something completely different. Let’s assume “implicit decency.”

Let us go forth with the belief that the other guy or gal is, deep down, a human being of goodwill. Let’s expect any accuser to prove otherwise. As the saying goes, when you hold a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Likewise, when you always look for racism, everyone looks like a racist. Thus, ladies and gentlemen, for these reasons and many more, the time is now to give our hammers a rest.

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Free Speech on Campus: A Battle of Narratives Greg Lukianoff

I am giving this talk out of a little bit of frustration with the way people talk about free speech issues on campus. I’m going to elaborate on what I refer to as the “Simple Theories” about what’s going on on college campuses; taken together, the overall point is that what goes on is more complex than any simple theory.

Simple Theory Number One: PC Run Amok The threats to free speech on campus arise from “political correctness run amok.”

I would like to stress that I do not love the term political correctness. I feel like I have to use it because we do not have other terminology for the phenomenon it describes. To be clear, there is some truth to each of these “simple” theories, and we at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education have certainly seen many cases that fit the cliché of “PC run amok.” Let’s look at a case, one of the biggest cases of the past year, and see how well this narrative fits.

At Northern Michigan University, if a student went to the counseling services and reported being raped or experiencing depression or anxiety, they would later receive a letter from the dean of students’ office telling the student not to talk to friends about any “suicidal or self-destructive thoughts.”

If they did, they would be disciplined. One version of the letter widely circulated online begins compassionately enough, reassuring students that “folks at NMU care about you and want to make sure you are okay.” But it continues ominously: “Engaging in any discussion of suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions with other students interferes with, or can hinder, their pursuit of education and success in the NMU community. If you involve other students in your suicidal or self-destructive thoughts or actions, you will face disciplinary action.” This letter was sometimes also sent to students who did not mention anything about self-harm or suicide. One student, who sought counseling after a sexual assault and reported no self-destructive or suicidal thoughts, received a version of the letter that concluded, “My hope is that, knowing exactly what could result in discipline, you can avoid putting yourself in that position.”

Administrators at NMU admitted that they sent the letter to between 25 and 30 students each semester. To me, this is absolutely insane. Aside from being a clear example of prior restraint on student speech, one of the most

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serious infringements of First Amendment rights, many experts agree that peer support is an important part of suicide prevention. Anyone who knows anything about mental health knows that telling anyone that they are a burden to their friends is bad enough, much less saying that to someone who is depressed or suicidal. To go further and instruct them to stop talking to friends—to essentially force depressed and suicidal students to isolate themselves—is about the worst thing that can be done. One former NMU student who received the letter recounted that it was “degrading and debilitating beyond belief,” and reported that her “collegiate career was ruined.”

So why did Northern Michigan University require this? Whose narrative does this fit? Is the case against this practice a liberal case? Is it a conservative case? How can we make sense of it? It certainly does not seem to fit Simple Theory Number One. So the theory of “It’s just political correctness” is overly simple and not entirely explanatory. But I have a second Simple Theory, one I expanded upon in my book Unlearning Liberty in 2012.

Simple Theory Number Two: Admins Run Amok The threats to free speech on campus arise from the expansion of the administrative class at universities.

We are witnessing the era of administrative overregulation; university administrations are now regulating aspects of students’ lives that were once considered off-limits.

Consider the University of Hawaii at Hilo, where, in 2014, administrators told students that they could not hand out copies of the Constitution or protest the National Security Agency outside a tiny free speech swamp (really a puddle) on campus (see photo, page 68). They had to ask for permission to use the area two weeks in advance.

Consider, too, the 2015 case at California State Polytechnic University– Pomona: a student was protesting cruelty to animals and was told that he was not only required to remain inside a tiny free speech zone but also had to ask in advance for permission to use it. The school even required him to wear a badge signed by an administrator that explained that he had been granted permission by the university in order to engage in his free speech activities.

All three of the schools I have mentioned are publicly funded state schools.

The First Amendment applies to each of them. Their restrictions on speech are unconstitutional, yet they and others continue to unlawfully restrict free speech. So what narrative does this fit? Is it political correctness? Or do cases like these at California Polytechnic and Northern Michigan University actually fit my simple theory of administrative overreach? I believe they do. But I also acknowledge that even my theory of administrative intrusion is overly

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Photo: Courtesy of FIRE

simple and does not entirely explain the excessive regulation of speech that is happening on campuses.

The Title IX Twist You may have heard about the Laura Kipnis case, that of a feminist professor who wrote an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education arguing that certain dramatic interpretations of Title IX are disempowering and infantilizing to women. In the essay, Kipnis also mentioned some details (which were, at the time, already public) about Title IX investigations and lawsuits at her school, Northwestern University.

The next thing you know, Kipnis was being investigated under Title IX for writing an article criticizing the overreach of Title IX. In the bizarre and Kafkaesque institutional investigation that ensued, Kipnis had to repeatedly push the school to provide her with information about who her accusers were, what the charges against her were, and what those charges stemmed from.

What ultimately resolved her case was that she wrote another article for the Chronicle of Higher Education and blew the whistle on the university’s lengthy, unfair, and unfounded investigation. Within days of the article’s publication, Northwestern dropped the case.

The Kipnis case inserts a twist into our narrative, one that cannot be explained simply as administrators overadministering. It is not that adminis-

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trators at Northwestern and other universities are acting from out of nowhere or imagining phantoms. There are reasons they are investigating professors like Kipnis and banning the handing out of the Constitution.

Administrators across the academy are being incentivized to overreact.

That is partially because of the Department of Education and the aggressive and expansive enforcement of Title IX. In 2013 the Department of Education, of its own accord and relying on no precedent, wrote a new definition of harassment, a “blueprint” it said every college should follow. This definition is unconstitutionally vague and broad.

This “blueprint” defines sexual harassment as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature.” Gone is the standard that the conduct be “objectively” offensive and gone is the requirement that conduct be “severe” or “pervasive.” Now any “unwelcome” conduct of a sexual nature is to be considered “harassment.”

If I could get the “blueprint” definition of harassment in front of a judge, I can all but guarantee it would be laughed out of court because it is so inconsistent with existing First Amendment law. In fact, FIRE is sponsoring ongoing First Amendment litigation against Louisiana State University, on behalf of a tenured female associate professor who was fired for alleged “sexual harassment.” What did she say? The university punished her for the occasional use of profanity and sex-related language in teaching her adult students about the interactions they could expect in the real world. When her firing sparked outrage and criticism in the national media, LSU claimed the Department of Education’s “blueprint” definition of sexual harassment required her termination. In a statement to the press, LSU claimed to be just following orders, arguing that it was simply following “the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights’ [sic] advisements.”

Administrators are being nudged into overreacting partly because of an overbroad definition of Title IX. But there is another reason that administrators are intrusively overregulating, and it emerges from a more recent phenomenon. This brings us to my third Simple Theory.

Simple Theory Number Three: Students Run Amok The threats to free speech on campus arise in response to the increase in student demands.

I have been distressed over the past couple of years by the fact that, instead of asking for freedom of speech, students are in some cases asking for freedom from speech (as I titled a booklet I wrote). For most of my career, the single constituency on campus that most reliably demanded freedom of speech had been students, particularly poor and minority students, nontraditional students, and people who felt like they did not fit in. In many situations,

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they understood free speech better than their professors, and they certainly understood free speech better than administrators. That started to change a couple of years ago.

For example, by 2014 the University of California system had come up with a list of microaggressions—small, usually unconscious slights that a person might commit that have either racist or sexist undertones, or could be otherwise construed as in some way demeaning to marginalized people—and trained deans and department chairs to avoid saying them. As an aside, I am fascinated by the topic of microaggressions, and I think we should absolutely be studying it, but we should not create corresponding regulations or policies. Once administrators have the power to define what constitutes a microaggression, the administrators’ definitions pretty quickly look like a list of things you should not say.

The UC system’s list included statements like “America is a melting pot”; “I believe the most qualified person should get the job”; and “America is a land of opportunity.” We also find ridiculous circumstances like at the University of New Hampshire, which determined that “problematic” language, “demean[s] people based on personal characteristics,” and as a result, UNH administrators created a list of “bias free” terms the university preferred to more common, problematic terms. Words like Caucasian, Arab, and American were listed as “problematic,” and the terms white people and European-American individuals were preferred to Caucasian; Western Asian people and Northern African people were preferred to Arab; and U.S. citizen and resident of the U.S. were preferred to American.

Of course, Fox News fixated on the word American and thought calling it “problematic” was totally offensive. I grew up with a lot of friends from Central and South America, so I am very familiar with the argument that everyone from the Americas is an American. But the “problematic” word that I thought was most horrifying was Arab. I have a lot of Lebanese friends, because I used to work in a Lebanese restaurant, and they proudly identify as Arab. Now they are being told by the University of New Hampshire that being called “Arab” is “demeaning.” I wonder if UNH actually consulted anyone who was actually Arab when they created that list. It reminds me of an episode of The Office called “Diversity Day,” when Michael Scott asks one of his beloved employees, Oscar, how he self-identifies. Oscar replies, “Well, I’m Mexican,” and Michael’s clueless response is, “Is there a term besides Mexican that you prefer? Something less offensive?” Which is, of course, the most offensive thing he could have said.

The Chalk Trauma Let’s look at a different kind of example. If you have heard of any recent case involving student oversensitivity, you might be familiar with what got dubbed

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From Engaging Diverse Viewpoints: What Is the Campus Climate for Perspective-Taking? ©2010 Association of American Colleges and Universities. Reprinted with permission.

“The Chalkening.” At Emory University, someone wrote the words “trump 2016” in chalk on the sidewalk, and students said they felt like they were under assault and were traumatized by it. One student summed up students’ reaction by saying, “I think it was an act of violence.” Protesting students who wanted to speak with administrators stood outside the administration building chanting, “You are not listening! Come speak to us, we are in pain!”

What concerned me most was the university president saying, in response, that they were going to find out who committed the chalking by looking at footage from a closed-circuit camera, and that if any students were involved, they would go through the conduct violation process. That only lasted until he remembered that students are allowed to chalk at Emory. If you are allowed to chalk “hillary 2016,” you have to be allowed to chalk for the other guy, too.

The Popularity Contest Why is this happening? In 2010, the Association of American Colleges and Universities asked members of the campus community whether it was safe to hold unpopular positions on campus. I do not love their study, the prompt is not precise or clear, but even back in 2010, when I think it was comparatively safer to disagree on college campuses, only 40 percent of incoming freshmen said that they strongly agreed that it was safe to hold unpopular points of view, and, by the time they left, only 30 percent of seniors thought that (see chart). The more exposure students had to the academy, the less likely they

Free Speech on Campus: A Battle of Narratives

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were to think it was safe to disagree. The most pessimistic group? Faculty.

Only 16.7 percent of faculty members strongly agreed with the statement that it was safe to hold unpopular points of view on campus. If you did that survey today, I think the percentage of students and faculty who think it is safe to hold unpopular views would be a lot lower.

I understand the concerns that students have about hurtful or hateful speech, but I do not agree with them. I’m an old-fashioned First Amendment advocate. I find it really concerning and poorly thought out that so many students (43 percent, in fact) believe that schools should disinvite controversial speakers. These students do not seem to understand that many of their own heroes or idols might be considered “offensive” to other students or administrators and could therefore be disinvited under this logic.

There is a clear disconnect between millennials and the rest of America when it comes to attitudes about censoring offensive statements about minorities, for example. It has been shown in all sorts of studies that, even though everybody in America is trained to say “I believe in freedom of speech,” when you actually look a little deeper into millennial attitudes, there is an idea that speech codes are good and that you can have positive censorship. That concerns me a lot.

My Grand Theory of Censorship on Campus Universities have maintained the modern incarnation of speech codes since the late ’80s. At FIRE, we define a “speech code” as any university regulation or policy that prohibits expression that would be protected by the First Amendment in society at large. We rate schools as red, yellow, or green.

If FIRE finds that a university’s policies do not seriously threaten campus expression, that college or university receives a “green light” rating. A greenlight rating does not necessarily indicate that a school actively supports free expression in practice; it simply means that the school’s written policies do not pose a serious threat to free speech. A “yellow light” institution maintains policies that could be interpreted to suppress protected speech or policies that, while clearly restricting freedom of speech, restrict only narrow categories of speech. A “red light” institution is one that has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech or that bars public access to its speech-related policies. Simply, red means the school maintains policies that are laughably unconstitutional for public institutions or that clearly violate the freedom of speech they claim to offer at private ones.

The classic example of a red-light speech code is a ban on “inappropriately directed laughter.” Seriously. Such a code appeared at two different colleges: the University of Connecticut and Drexel University.

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There are many hidden reasons why a lot of these crazier situations happen, and that is the unfortunate intersection between America’s litigiousness—I say that as a lawyer; we sue each other far too much—and the Department of Education guidelines and standards that are in many ways not particularly clear and in other ways extremely troubling. The Department of Education has the power to remove all funding from universities that do not comply with its mandates. That is a death sentence for a lot of universities, so they overreach in order to avoid running afoul of the Department of Education’s whims. It also seems clear that ideology and groupthink play a role, and it would be irresponsible of me not to mention that. However, the overbureaucratization of universities is a prime factor in the situation on campuses today.

There has been a massive increase in the administrative class at universities, and we are paying through the nose for it. The cost for the 100 most expensive schools in the country is between $55,000 and $70,000 a year. To most people, that sounds crazy. But you might assume, at least, that the outrageous cost is for world-class professors. Increasingly, though, that money is going toward administrative costs.

How we end up in the kinds of situations we see on college campuses today is much more complex and multifaceted than the caricatures some people create. What we do to prevent them has to start with a nuanced understanding of all the major factors at play that pose a threat to free speech on campus.

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Greg Lukianoff

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The Idea of “Roots” and the Similarities between Multiculturalism and Right-Wing Populism Göran Adamson “The Communist and the Catholic are not saying the same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things, and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted; but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.”

—George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

My short discussion below is a left-wing critique of diversity and multiculturalism. In this analysis, I owe a lot to George Orwell and his essay Notes on Nationalism. In this essay, Orwell makes a distinction between “positive nationalism” (i.e., “classic” nationalism) and “transferred nationalism.” Transferred nationalism, Orwell maintains, is very similar to positive nationalism. A transferred nationalist, however, does not idealize his own country. Instead, the target of his warm feelings is situated overseas. While a positive nationalist cannot stop boasting about the history, culture, and traditions of his own culture, a transferred nationalist always finds opportunities to praise any other culture and tradition, while holding his own culture in low esteem.

The positive nationalist says: “We are majestic—they are trivial.” The transferred nationalist maintains that cultures overseas are majestic, while “we” are basically uninteresting. Orwell’s concept of transferred nationalism is very similar to what today goes under the name of multiculturalism.

The purpose of this short discussion is to argue that multiculturalism and (transferred) nationalism are very similar. When you boost your own culture or any other, you have an emotional mind-set obsessed with hierarchies— who is right and who is wrong, who should be scorned and ridiculed, and who should be idealized and defended. The multiculturalist and the nationalist, it seems, are not saying the same thing; in a sense, they are saying the opposite things, and each would gladly, to cite Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier, “boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted; but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.” The difference is chiefly a matter of geography. The multiculturalist is aware that any expression of warm feelings toward his own culture is politically dangerous. Therefore, he packs his frustrated desire for roots and nationalist sentiments in a suitcase, embarks on an intercontinental flight, and unpacks it in any country overseas, where he can freely indulge in a nationalist frenzy without the slightest

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risk of being caught. Based on the ideas of George Orwell, then, I will argue that multiculturalism, behind a leftist veneer, actually is a case of old-school nationalism, only not “here” but over “there.”

I have come to understand that this left-wing criticism of diversity is unusual here in the United States. Sadly, all critique of diversity is regrettably dismissed as right-wing populism. As I was writing my book The Trojan Horse: A Leftist Critique of Multiculturalism in the West, I came to realize that “diversity”—as a normative ideology—was present everywhere in Swedish academia. Courses and programs were based on a “multicultural agenda” and speeches by deans were replete with references to diversity. Colleagues kept talking about it, and every single university and college had a so-called “diversity plan.”

This is worth a comment. In 2004, every public institution in Sweden— including academic ones—was commissioned to present diversity plans where the ideology of diversity and multiculturalism was supposed to be cherished and supported. And everybody complied. Not one institution replied by reminding the government that a university was an independent institution and that they would think about it. But perhaps one should not judge Swedish university presidents and deans too harshly, as the report also “recommended” that the most successful universities would share 2.5 billion Swedish kronor over five years to implement their diversity plans. This all occurred during a period of massive and underfinanced expansion of Swedish academia.

As a result, I became intrigued by the idea of diversity and how it was spreading throughout Sweden and the West. I wondered: “Diversity of what?”

Was it of ideas? Of skin color? Of cultures? Religions? Individuals? Did these go well together, or was the relation rather antagonistic? Nobody could give me an answer. Everybody was enthusiastic about diversity, but I was not sure about what, exactly, they were enthusiastic.

Diversity does have a meaning. First, ethnic communities are seen to be homogeneous entities where the individual has gone missing. While multiculturalists could talk for hours about the virtues of the ethnic group, there were never any references to the individual as an autonomous actor. We are witnessing a radical form of collectivism that is at odds with the liberal tradition of individualism and individual rights. Even to conservatives, famous for their collectivism based on myths of the nation, the concrete individual was always an important aspect, as opposed to lofty notions of “abstract man” and “human rights.” The notion of diversity, then, did not apply to ethnic communities. Outside of the frames of the community, it was all about diversity.

Inside of these frames, diversity was suddenly gone.

The more I studied the topic, the less I understood. I came to the conclusion that multiculturalism was not what I was told it was. It was, in fact, the opposite. To me, the image of multiculturalism was a global, academic mirage.

The Idea of “Roots” and the Similarities between Multiculturalism and Right-Wing Populism

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The basic problem with diversity is this: Advocates of diversity are obsessed with roots. There is only one other political group in society equally obsessed with roots: rightwing populists.

Diversity advocates always talk about roots, and belonging, and history, and background, and past wrongs. They talk about “our” suffering, and the need for vengeance. Right-wing populists, nationalists, and others also talk endlessly about roots, and belonging, and history. They are engaged in equally sentimental rhetoric about the depth of “our” tradition, the shallowness of everybody else, and the need to strike back. There is one difference, though: right-wing populists only talk about their own roots, German Blut und Boden, the British Empire, and so on. It is all about “us.” Diversity advocates talk about roots overseas. It is about “their” roots—the roots of the Afghan people or any other distant culture. Here we can see how Orwell’s distinction between positive nationalism and transferred nationalism fits very well into our own late-modern discussion about right-wing populism and multiculturalism.

So, what is the difference between the two? Geography. Here—or over there. Our culture or cultures overseas. The only difference between the diversity advocate and the right-wing populist is geographic.

Why, then, do Donald Trump and his critics at the New York Times disagree? Because they fail to see it from the point of view of a principle. Only by ignoring the principle can they say: “We like our culture, and you don’t like it, so we don’t like you.” They are all insiders, so they do not care about principles. But if you listen to Orwell and try to see it from the point of view of an outsider, they are very much alike. In fact, it becomes clear that their respective approaches to the culture in which they have sunk their personality is practically identical: equally vindictive, equally exaggerated, equally self-eulogizing, and equally pessimistic and sentimental.

The fact that Swedish universities at present are saturated with the rhetoric of diversity is a cause for concern. But the situation would still be tolerable if all of its protagonists knew what diversity and multiculturalism really were about. Sadly, they do not. The ideology of diversity is chiefly being fostered by those who claim to be leftists. The irony, then, is this: the nationalist, deeply conservative ideology of diversity is being defended to the teeth by leftists, that is, by precisely those who ought to attack it, while diversity is being attacked by right-wing populists—in other words, by those who, if they ever gave it a second thought, ought to embrace it.

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Shadowboxing with Identity Politics Judith Shulevitz I am going to say something that may be a little provocative, which is that in this country we do not have an “immigrant problem,” at least not in the way I think that nations in Europe do. I think America is an immigrant problem, or it is the result of attempts to solve an immigrant problem.

I know it does not look like that right now, in the midst of this election.

Donald Trump is threatening to build a wall to keep Mexicans out, and to deport all undocumented immigrants, and to refuse asylum to Syrians and all other Muslims (not all Syrians are Muslims, obviously). Trump is running a classic far-right European populist campaign. He reminds me of—and it is no accident that he is celebrated by—Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen. He is also, of course, appealing in his dog-whistle-like way and in his campaign slogan, “Make American Great Again,” to a very old American fantasy of white supremacy. White supremacy in this country has been more than a fantasy, more than a sense of nostalgia. It has been a reality. It remains a reality, but an attenuated one, because meanwhile, different ethnic groups arrive, are assimilated, become “white,” and enter the middle class—enter the great mass of what are deemed Americans. Despite the continued existence of white supremacy, we are, to use the cliché, a nation of immigrants.

One corollary of my claim that we do not have an immigrant problem is that we do not have a problem with multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is, or ought to be, a descriptive term for a longstanding fact of life in the United States, which is multiethnicity. In America, multiculturalism is not the problem it is in European countries because we have really not had the phenomenon of a single dominant ethnic group being challenged by a single subaltern ethnic group or a small range of subaltern ethnic groups. In the United States, there is no one dominant ethnic group.

In the United States, what takes the place of multiculturalism in the European sense is identity politics. In America, identity politics emerge when people who have been here all along become vocal, when they reclaim their rights in a society that ignored and abused those rights and exploited their lack. I am talking about blacks, women, gays, lesbians, transgender people, the disabled, and all the others who challenge dominant social paradigms. I would include in this list Hispanics, many of whom, as you know, were here before the Anglos.

Over the past half century and more we have seen people becoming conscious of these identities, organizing on behalf of these identities, and demanding recognition and rights for people who see themselves as members of these groups.

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Those who engage in identity politics perceive themselves as subject to a subordination that was a dark and longstanding fact of our collective existence. This is why we have the situation described by Suzanne Nossel and the PEN report of campuses grappling not with a diversity of ethnicities, but with a diversity of identities—the line between these two concepts is often blurred.

The question on American campuses is, how are we going to create a space in which identity groups are given their due, now that they have made their presence felt and their demands known, now that they have taken their place in the American university, which was a very exclusive and monocolored place for a long time? How will we create a space in which these groups can come together in the collective enterprise of learning, growing, and, to use Erica Hunt’s wonderful phrase from yesterday, becoming agents?

I feel sure that we can, but I see formidable obstacles. Here is where my reading of Göran Adamson’s work has been helpful. In his book The Trojan Horse: A Leftist Critique of Multiculturalism in the West, he asks this question: “Multiculturalism has replaced class with culture. What are the consequences?”

Let us Americanize this question and ask: “Identity politics has replaced class with culture. What are the consequences?”

One consequence is salutary. Race and sex in America do have class implications, and they are the categories many of us revert to when we think about class. Racism and sexism have been very important drivers of our economy.

They have created enormous amounts of wealth though slave labor, the continuing travesty of unpaid domestic labor of women, and the underpaid labor of new immigrants and old groups such as Native Americans and Latinos.

The wealth produced by the marginalized has mainly been enjoyed by the nonmarginalized. Our class problem has been a race problem and a sex problem, and it is not incorrect to talk about those as a way of talking about class.

The problem as I see it, however, is that we forget to talk about the economic effects of identity, and we particularly forget to talk about the socioeconomic difficulties of those who are not included in conventional identity politics. In other words, identity politics stops too soon. Allow me to give an example.

I live on a college campus. My husband is a professor—I live a few blocks away from the campus. I teach intermittently, but I am just an adjunct. So I have a view of academia that is that of an outsider. I do not have a deeprooted knowledge and I might be getting some things wrong, and I welcome correction. But it seems to me that excluded from the campus discussion of oppression are the very people to whom Trump has so successfully appealed.

I do not know how many of you saw last week’s piece by Larissa MacFarquhar in the New Yorker about the West Virginia coal miners who are a solid base for Trump. It was a tremendously compassionate portrait of the dispossessed, and it was heartbreaking. I do not hear those people being talked about on this campus. Part of the reason they are so angry is that they feel mocked by

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the larger discourse of identity. Their identity politics is a politics of protest against identity politics.

Because we privilege race, sex, and sexual orientation as categories, we make assumptions about the individuals in our midst. Here is where Adamson’s ideas about the fierce collectivism of the ideology of diversity became useful to me. Like I said, I live on a college campus, and I overhear things. A term I have been hearing a lot lately—and again, correct me if I happened to stumble on it a little late, if it has been around for a long time—is this idea of punching up and punching down. To give a super-crude explanation of this idea, it means that it is okay to speak harshly to people who have the privilege of, say, being white, or male, or in a position of authority, or in possession of a bully pulpit, but it is not okay to punch down at those who do not enjoy the benefits of such things.

The problem here is that when you’re punching up—and I do not know why we are doing so much punching anyway—you are shadowboxing with a category, not with a person. You do not know when you punch up at a white male fellow student—even a white male upper-middle-class fellow student, or professor, or college president, any iteration of any combination of things, but the odor of privilege has to be in there—you do not know whom you are punching at. That person may have worked his way up from extreme poverty. That person may have suffered horrific abuse or deprivation as a child.

That person may have struggled throughout his or her adolescence with his or her sexuality. You have no way of knowing.

The currently privileged markers of identity—skin color, gender, selfpresentation, position, social role—simply do not yield enough information about each individual. So it seems to me that identity fails us as an analytical tool. Like the vulgar Marxist categories of old, it is simply too broad to help us parse what is really going on in complex social interactions such as those that transpire in classrooms, to take one example.

But, you may ask at this point, what about intersectionality? Intersectionality is something that emerged out of critical legal theory. It is a theory that says you cannot think in these broad categories alone; you must take individuals as intersections of different kinds of identities in order to understand their very particular forms of marginalization and oppression. When it came along, I had high hopes that it would improve identity as an analytical tool, make it more subtle. But I have to say, I have been very disappointed. I think intersectionality has wound up being more divisive, more fragmenting, than the old identity politics was, because now we slice and dice people into ever-finer categories, but we are still thinking in very limited categories.

Intersectionality gives lip service, for example, to class, but I do not know how much it gets used in practice. As far as I can tell, socioeconomic status is not on the intersectionalists’ radar screen. I see intersectional alliances being

Shadowboxing with Identity Politics

Judith Shulevitz

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formed by people of color, and feminists, and members of the LGBTQ community, and Palestinian groups, but I do not see alliances being formed with, say, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which is a wonderful group that organizes home care workers, nannies, mostly women of color or of Hispanic descent or from elsewhere in the world. I do not see intersectionalists addressing extreme poverty. Recently, an extraordinary book came out called Two Dollars a Day, by Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer. In it, they describe the life of people in 1.5 million households in America who live on two dollars a day per person. Why are we not talking more about the extremely poor?

Well, for one thing, in this country we have a long tradition of our politicians pitching themselves to the middle class, and an equally long tradition of refusing to acknowledge class at all. America is the land of opportunity, to use a phrase that is one of those microaggressions you are not supposed to utter.

We have internalized an ideology that says everybody can get there, everybody can do it. As you know, there is now less social mobility in America than there is in Europe. But even those who practice identity politics are not in the habit of thinking about social mobility, and I think that is one reason extreme poverty drops off the agenda.

Adamson also talks in his book about multiculturalism fitting into the neoliberal agenda. Identity politics creates the illusion that our heightened awareness of the workings of privilege and power is somehow going to allow the marginalized to lay claim to power. There is an illusion that they are going to be allowed to share in the wealth and well-being created by globalization.

But that is truly an illusion. We are up against forces that will steamroll right over all of our identities very soon. A 2013 study from Oxford University concluded that in two decades or fewer computers will replace humans in nearly half of all occupations. Does anyone know what the biggest single occupation in the United States is? Truck driver. What are you reading about every single day on the front pages of your business sections? Self-driving cars. Truck drivers are going to be out of jobs in five to 10 years. That is a big group of people. Who is next? Anyone watch The Office? Michael Scott is going to be out of a job soon, along with others in middle management. Software does what Michael Scott or the floor supervisor in Walmart does better than they do, or it will in five to 10 years.

The disruption and the privatization of vast sectors of our economy— including public schools, prisons, municipalities, transportation—either have or will devastate unions and strip us of the wages, benefits, and security that once made it possible to move up from the working class to the middle class.

I do not have to list these things; you know them all already. So does Donald Trump. He is deftly exploiting the people who are excluded from our canon of the oppressed because we have stopped talking about them on college campuses and elsewhere. This matters because what goes on on campuses informs social justice activism elsewhere.

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Bernie Sanders was really good at talking about the economically disenfranchised, but he was attacked from the left for his failure to exhibit the proper racial and gender sensitivity. He is, after all, a white Jewish man and an old-time Social Democrat, basically a European-style Social Democrat. I do think he was a little tone-deaf. He does not recognize the degree to which race and sex function as class in America. But he saw what is coming, he sees what is coming, and he knows that we are going to have to work out our differences, and we are going to have to do it fast, before the forces that are going to dispossess us of our jobs and our hope destroy us. These forces are going to use our differences to divide and conquer us. I think they maybe already are, and I think that is the real danger of identity politics.

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I. Arendt’s understanding of the origins of totalitarianism begins with her insight that mass movements are founded upon “atomized, isolated individuals.” The lonely people whom Arendt sees as the adherents of movements are not necessarily the poor or the lower classes. They are the “neutral, politically indifferent people who never join a party and hardly ever go to the polls.”

They are not unintelligent and are rarely motivated by self-interest. Arendt writes that Heinrich Himmler understood these isolated individuals when he “said they were not interested in ‘everyday problems’ but only ‘in ideological questions of importance for decades and centuries, so that the man . . . knows he is working for a great idea which occurs but once in 2,000 years.’” The adherents of movements are not motivated by material interests; they “are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects.”

Movements thrive on the destruction of reality. Because the real world confronts us with challenges and obstructions, reality is uncertain, messy, and unsettling. Movements work to create alternate realities that offer adherents a stable and empowering place in the world. Amidst economic dislocation and the loss of stable identities, the Nazis’ promise of Aryan superiority was stabilizing. Stalin understood that people would easily overlook lies and mass murder if it were in their interest to do so. Above all, movements promise consistency. Movements “conjure up a lying world of consistency which is more adequate to the needs of the human mind than reality itself.”

Simone Weil wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” The modern condition of rootlessness is a foundational experience of totalitarianism; totalitarian movements succeed when they offer rootless people what they most crave: an ideologically consistent world aiming at grand narratives that give meaning to their lives.

By consistently repeating a few key ideas, a manipulative leader provides a sense of rootedness grounded upon a coherent fiction that is, in Arendt’s words, “consistent, comprehensible, and predictable.”

The reason fact-checking is ineffective today—at least in convincing those who are members of movements—is that the mobilized members of a movement are confounded by a world resistant to their wishes and prefer the promise of a consistent alternate world to reality. When Donald Trump says he’s going to build a wall to protect our borders, he is not making a factual statement that an actual wall will actually protect our borders; he is signaling a politically incorrect willingness to put America first. When he says that there was voter fraud or boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, he is not speaking about actual facts, but is insisting that his election was legitimate. As Arendt writes, “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.”

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Leaders of these mass totalitarian movements do not need to believe in the truth of their lies and ideological clichés. The point of their fabrications is not to establish facts, but to create a coherent fictional reality. What a movement demands of its leaders is the articulation of a consistent narrative combined with the ability to abolish the capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction.

The skill that President Trump excels at is his “ability to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose,” the very skill Arendt attributes to the elite within totalitarian movements. Trump possesses an incredible instinct for those words, phrases, and insinuations that give order and sense to the movement. He pokes at racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Islamism, and in doing so allows his supporters to construct coherent narratives about the America Trump will restore to its greatness. He appears as the truth teller, the one who reveals those hidden truths that polite society and the elites refuse to utter. And because political elites are so careful to not offend anyone and have placed so many topics and truths off the table of common conversation, Trump looks like the only person in the country willing to tell the truth.

It is true that facts are being manufactured on all sides today. It is widely reported that Donald Trump called all Mexicans criminals and racists. Most reporters know this is not what the president has said, yet the New York Times repeatedly prints this lie in news articles. In the same way, people speak of Trump’s “Muslim ban” knowing that the president’s executive order did not single out Muslims. It is widely asserted that the president is anti-Semitic, but there is little evidence to support such a conclusion. Those who repeat what they know to be false believe that their understanding expresses a deeper truth, that President Trump is Islamophobic and xenophobic. And Bernie Sanders also mobilized a movement of lonely and rootless cosmopolitans, many of whom sought to stifle dissent and punish deviations from the movement’s ideological center. Much like the movement led by President Trump, the opposition also has characteristics of a reality-denying movement.

There is an important difference, however, between President Trump’s falsifications and those of his critics. Neither Sanders’s nor Trump’s critics in the media have broken free from reality as radically as has President Trump.

They continue to respect that there is an impartial truth. When it is shown to them that they are falsifying facts, they are chastened. They may continue in their untruths, convinced that their fictions are more useful than the facts; they may prefer life in their filter bubbles to the reality of real disagreement.

But they know they are being hypocritical when they exaggerate or bend that truth; they can still be embarrassed and shamed. The New York Times and the mainstream media at least still believe in the ideal of truth.

President Trump, on the other hand, will never admit he is wrong, will never concede a factual error, and he challenges the existence of any authoritative reality. Even when he conceded that President Obama was born in the

Why Arendt Matters: Revisiting The Origins of Totalitarianism

Roger Berkowitz

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United States or when he disavowed David Duke, he did not apologize or admit his errors. In insisting on his ability to establish factual reality, he is denying the authority of the professional class of journalists, government officials, public figures, and reality-centered Americans to present reality. The president’s denial of reality is a kind of self-aggrandizing, self-empowering claim that he is powerful enough, as the mouthpiece of the people, to escape reality.

All movements employ propaganda to buttress their fictional realities. But totalitarian movements, Arendt writes, go beyond propaganda and embrace violence. To claim that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world “is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others.”

And to say that Jews must be eliminated because they are the cause of evil in the world can be proven true only by going about the business of killing Jews.

To say that “no man by the name of Trotsky was ever commander-in-chief of the Red Army” requires power, not just propaganda. And that power to make a lying reality a true reality is the power claimed and actualized by totalitarian governments. Totalitarian movements don’t aim to discredit particular facts; they seek to breed “extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it.”

Such a totalizing claim to be empowered to “fit reality to their lies” is precisely the capacity that Arendt finds in totalitarian movements before they actually attain the power to do so. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and faction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Only those who fully embrace cynicism are free to give their undying loyalty to a leader who promises to grant importance to the purposelessness of human life.

What Arendt shows in Origins is that movements are so dangerous and can be central elements of totalitarianism because they provide the psychological conditions for “total loyalty,” the kind of unquestioned loyalty Trump rightly understands himself to possess amongst his most faithful supporters.

“Such loyalty,” she writes, “can be expected only from the completely isolated human being who, without any other social ties to family, friends, comrades, or even mere acquaintances, derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement.”

II. Sales of The Origins of Totalitarianism have spiked since President Trump’s election, at one point rising 16 times above its usually robust sales. The Hannah Arendt Center that I founded and run has benefitted from an unprecedented

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surge of over 100 new memberships, and our virtual reading group on The Origins of Totalitarianism has more than doubled in size. Writers and pundits have made frequent references to Arendt’s 500-page masterpiece in the pages of the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books. What can Arendt’s book teach us today?

The Origins of Totalitarianism reminds us of the horrific reality and historically unprecedented nature of the totalitarian governments in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. History has seen its share of tyrannical regimes; fascism, insofar as it sought to take over the state, was a variant of tyranny. But totalitarianism, as an expansive movement aiming at world domination, was altogether new. It was closely related to the global aspirations of imperialism and it would have been impossible without the emergence of an ideological racism that could justify mass denaturalizations, mass deportations, and mass killings. Never before, Arendt argues, was there a form of government that so blatantly sought to destroy the dignity of its people.

Totalitarian government is unique in seeking to “kill the juridical person in man” through arbitrary arrests; to “murder . . . the moral person in man” by killing him behind barbed wire and depriving him of a meaningful death; and to annihilate the “uniqueness of the human person” by transforming him into an animal. Unlike past authoritarian regimes, 20th-century totalitarianism had more logically demanding aspirations—to put in place a “system in which men are superfluous.” Totalitarianism begins and ends with the insight that “total power can be achieved and safeguarded only in a world of conditioned reflexes, of marionettes without the slightest trace of spontaneity.” The aim is not simply to rule men, but to rule them from the inside out. In short, totalitarianism aims at “total domination” of the human population.

On the path to total domination, terror is the essence of totalitarian governance. “Terror is lawfulness, if law is the law of the movement of some suprahuman force, Nature or History.” The Soviet Union used terror to actualize Marx’s historical materialism. The Nazis used terror to bring about a social Darwinist vision of the survival of the fittest. Terror destroys the spaces between men and compresses them into a singular mass of ideologically unified beings furiously seeking to actualize a scientifically guaranteed historical or racial law. Thus is terror “the realization of the law of movement; its chief aim is to make it possible for the force of nature or of history to race freely through mankind, unhindered by any spontaneous human action.”

In a system of terror, the concentration and extermination camps are not simply accidental occurrences, but the logical outcomes of a system that insists on the extinction of human freedom and human spontaneity. Over and again Arendt insists that the concentration camps were useless from a utilitarian perspective. The Nazis and Bolsheviks could have killed prisoners and undesirables more easily in fields or villages. The camps were economically

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expensive and a waste of manpower. What the camps provided was training and experimentation in what absolute terror and undefined terror could accomplish: the denial of reality and the breaking of the human spirit.

It is common today to lump together all the various kinds of camps employed by totalitarian and pretotalitarian regimes. But Arendt distinguishes at least three kinds of camps. The refugee camps, used both in totalitarian and in nontotalitarian countries, simply work to keep the “undesirable elements of all sorts—refugees, stateless persons, the asocial and the unemployed”—invisible and out of sight; the labor camps, as they existed in the Soviet Union, combined neglect with the chaos of forced labor to create a Purgatory, a gateway to Hell; and finally, the extermination camps perfected by the Nazis, which sought not only physical extermination but also to reduce living itself to the “greatest possible torment,” opened the gates to Hell. All three types of camps share one goal in common, according to Arendt: “the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of any interest to anybody, as if they were already dead.” The point of these camps is to enact a terror that “enforces oblivion.”

Enforced oblivion is not an uncommon experience in today’s world. There are over 34 million refugees, the vast majority living in temporary and even quasi-permanent refugee camps. Residents of such camps are, increasingly, invisible and superfluous people who exist in contradiction to the principle of “equality before the law.” While these camps are, at first, dangerous only for refugees and stateless peoples, they serve as a dangerous model for how to deal with problematic and superfluous citizens. As Arendt writes, “The clearer the proof of [a state’s] inability to treat stateless people as legal persons and the greater the extension of arbitrary rule by police decree, the more difficult it is for states to resist the temptation to deprive all citizens of legal status and rule them with an omnipotent police.”

The rise of nearly unfettered government surveillance is one extreme example of what an omnipotent police might mean. So too is the fact of mass imprisonment in the United States, where more than one in 100 adults is in prison, one in 32 Americans is under the control of the corrections system, and one in 6 African Americans will spend time behind bars. These prisons and camps are not totalitarian. But they do normalize the enforced oblivion that Arendt argues is one element of totalitarian domination.

III. The Origins of Totalitarianism also alerts us to the dangers of both anti-Semitism and racism when they are weaponized as ideologies. Arendt’s book begins with a 100-page extended essay on “Antisemitism.” Arendt is struck by the discrepancy between the actual unimportance of the Jewish question in the

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world and the fact that the Jewish question set the “whole infernal machine” of totalitarianism in motion. Against those who claim antisemitism was simply propaganda used to sway the masses, she argues that ideological antisemitism proved an essential justification for terror.

The key insight in Arendt’s surprising approach is that antisemitism is a secular 19th-century ideology, and thus unrelated to the long history of religious “Jew-hatred.” Arendt rejects the conventional orthography “anti-Semitism” and writes instead “antisemitism” to indicate the secular and ideological nature of antisemitism that, in practice, had little to do with hatred of actual Jews. The Nazis adopted antisemitism to justify their belief in themselves as a master race fulfilling a prophetic destiny.

Understanding antisemitism as an ideology connects it with racism. Just as Arendt distinguishes ideological antisemitism from Jew-hatred, so does she distinguish ideological racism from what she calls “race-thinking”— “one of the many free opinions” that make judgments based on race. While race-thinking can represent unjust prejudices, it is simply an opinion, an argument—“it never possessed any kind of monopoly over the political life of the respective nations.” Race-thinking, Arendt argues, avoids the ideological racism in which one race is elevated as a master race and another is made into a natural inferior.

Racism, and not race-thinking, plays an essential role first in the justification of imperialism and then in totalitarianism. Imperialist rule requires the justification of violence over another people in the service of ruling them.

Such a justification is possible only on the basis of racism: “Imperialism would have necessitated the invention of racism as the only possible ‘explanation’ and excuse for its deeds.” For Arendt, it is racism, not race-thinking, that is truly dangerous. “There is,” she writes in articulating this distinction, “an abyss between the men of brilliant and facile conceptions and men of brutal deeds.”

Arendt’s linking of racism to imperialism and then to totalitarianism should give pause to those who see in President Trump the beginnings of totalitarianism. While the president has clearly shown a willingness to engage in prejudicial race-thinking, he has studiously avoided the ideological form of racism that could justify the kinds of violent and brutal acts required of totalitarian regimes. On the contrary, the president’s ideological flexibility and pragmatism run counter to the kind of ideological thinking that justifies totalitarian domination.

The one prejudice that the president or at least some of his aides appear willing to weaponize as an ideology is islamophobia—I use a lowercase i in the same way Arendt wrote “antisemitic” with a lowercase s: to indicate that islamophobia is a secular 21st-century ideology. Stephen Bannon has argued that “Islam is not a religion of peace. Islam is a religion of submission. Islam means submission.” But Bannon is not talking about the Islamic religion; his target is not Islam but the demonization of Islam as a means to justify a war

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that would reinvigorate American nationalism. Bannon’s ideology is clear in a 2007 film script, where he writes, “The road to the establishment of an Islamic Republic in the United States starts slowly and subtly with the loss of the will to win.” And in his 2014 speech at the Vatican, where he said, “We are in an outright war against jihadist Islamic fascism.” Bannon’s suggestions that Islam is an inferior religion that needs to be defeated in war for the soul of the West is not about religion; it is an ideological justification for systematic war, expulsion, and worse.

President Trump has rejected Bannon’s formulations about Islam, but only indirectly through a spokesperson. In his speech before Congress in early March, the president referenced the anti-Muslim attack against two Indian Americans alongside attacks on Jewish institutions, saying, “Recent threats targeting Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms.” But the president specifically did not state that the victims of the attack in Kansas City were Indian or that they were thought to be Muslim. Such vague rejections of ideological islamophobia are not adequate.

While the president has not offered anything like a racial, antisemitic, or islamophobic justification for slavery, expulsion, or genocide, his flirtation with those on the alt-right who do make such justifications is supremely dangerous. The distance between an ideology of superiority and inferiority on the one side and mass expulsions and genocide on the other is morally vast but practically narrow. At one point during the campaign President Trump floated and then rejected the idea of a Muslim registry in the United States on national security grounds. What happens after the next terrorist attack?

That President Trump has thus far refused to explicitly condemn ideological and physical attacks against Muslims is perhaps the greatest cause for alarm concerning the totalitarian potential of his movement.

IV. The one ideology that President Trump has promoted is nationalism. Perhaps surprisingly, this is the one ideology Arendt argues is incompatible with totalitarian government. Internally, the nation-state imagines legitimacy to come from popular sovereignty and is based on the equal rights of all citizens, thus frustrating the totalitarian need for unrestrained domination. Externally, nationalism privileges parochial interests over world domination. By seeking to rule a determinate and limited nation-state of equal citizens, nationalism is fundamentally opposed to totalitarianism.

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President Trump’s nationalist movement can resemble the late-19thcentury pan-movements in Europe that Arendt claims were the nearest precursors to Nazism and Bolshevism. One key element of both these pretotalitarian movements is “that they called themselves ‘movements,’ their very name alluding to the profound distrust for all parties that was already widespread in Europe at the turn of the century.” The pan-movements specifically imagined themselves as operating “outside of all parties.” This attitude was based in the “alienation of the masses from government” and, in Britain, their “hatred of and disgust with Parliament.”

What unites the movements is not an interest but a mood: movements “discovered how much more important for mass appeal a general mood was than laid-down outlines and platforms.” The mood movements mobilize is one of constant motion. Arendt tells of Nikolai Berdyaev’s account of a young Soviet man who has traveled to France and complains that there is no freedom in France because nothing there ever changed. Freedom, for the exile from the Communist movement, meant excitement, not being bored. Similarly, the Nazis referred to the Weimar Republic as the Systemzeit—the “time of the system.” The clear implication was that it was “sterile, lacked dynamism, did not ‘move’”; Weimar was followed by their “era of the movement,” a mood of epochal things happening.

The speed of politics today, the anger and recriminations, and the accusations and jokes, are all indicative of what Arendt calls the totalitarian mood, the “perpetual-motion mania of totalitarian movements which can remain in power only so long as they keep moving and set everything around them in motion.” All politicians use social media and seek to make politics fun and exciting. Every politician now runs against the boring mediocrity of Washington politics. But Trump is the only one who has been willing to fully embrace the manic potential of a mood that welcomes destruction, brutality, and character assassination as a welcome respite from the tedium of modern existence.

The president’s recent attacks on President Obama—whom only a month ago he was praising for his class—are only the most recent example of the way President Trump appeals to the mood of an electorate in need of constant distraction, destruction, and entertainment. Trump’s changeability—that we never know when he will shift 180 degrees and attack today who he praised yesterday—reflects the “extraordinary adaptability and absence of continuity” that Arendt argues are the essence of the “specifically totalitarian virus.”

A fundamental contradiction remains, however, between the nationalist and thus limited nature of President Trump’s policies and the constantly changing assignations found in his tweets. On the one hand, the president’s policies can be fit into the nationalist frame. His policies are generally conservative and thus announce a need for limited government and limited power. On the other

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hand, the president’s infinitely confounding tweets recall the anything-butconservative mood of destruction identified with pretotalitarian movements.

Trump’s mania for disruption—not his policies—is reminiscent of the many movements that dominated Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. While two of these ended in totalitarianism, the majority led instead to more typical authoritarian regimes. In our contemporary focus on Nazism and Bolshevism, we frequently forget that nearly every country in Europe was already ruled by democratically elected dictatorships at the outbreak of World War II. The principal exception was the United Kingdom and, across the ocean, the United States. Why is it, Arendt asks, that the breakdown of classes, the contempt for parties and states, and the rise of movements were successful in taking over governments on the continent, but not in the Anglo-American countries?

Arendt’s answer turns to the two-party system in Britain and the United States as distinguished from multiparty democracies that were the norm in continental Europe. In a two-party system each party plans at some point to govern the state, whereas in a multiparty system each party “defines itself consciously as a part of the whole.” On the continent, parties represented partial interests, and to justify those interests were forced to embrace ideologies that interpreted their partisan interests as the general interests of humanity.

In the Anglo-American system, on the other hand, “power as well as the state remain within the grasp of the citizens organized in the party.” Because power is always within reach, there is no need, Arendt writes, for the “indulgence in lofty speculations about Power and State as though they were something beyond human reach, metaphysical entities independent of the will and action of the citizens.” The Anglo-American parties organize citizens first, and party members second. At least this had been true before the 2016 election.

The election of President Trump from both within and without the Republican Party will offer a fascinating test of Arendt’s argument. The question is, will the president act in concert with his party as the governing party of the state as a whole? Or will he seek to seize the state for the advantage of one party above all parties? The president both needs his party to govern by laws and has sought largely to appoint cabinet secretaries from the military and business elites who are determinately outside of the party structure. His contempt for government and the institutions of the state is palpable. And yet, any attempt to rule from above the party and above the state will lead to conflicts with the party that he needs to legislate.

V. Perhaps one of the most underacknowledged elements of totalitarianism identified by Arendt is the rise to political and social power of a corrupt

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business and governing class as well as a class of intellectuals that finds corruption funny rather than outrageous. In a section of The Origins of Totalitarianism subtitled “The Temporary Alliance of the Mob and the Elite,” Arendt describes the original reception in 1928 Berlin of Berthold Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: The play presented gangsters as respectable businessmen and respectable businessmen as gangsters. The irony was somewhat lost when respectable businessmen in the audience considered this a deep insight into the ways of the world and when the mob welcomed it as an artistic sanction of gangsterism. The theme song in the play, “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral” [“First comes the animal-like satisfaction of one’s hunger, then comes morality,” memorably rendered by Marc Blitzstein as “First feed the face, and then talk right and wrong.” —RB], was greeted with frantic applause by exactly everybody, though for different reasons. The mob applauded because it took the statement literally; the bourgeoisie applauded because it had been fooled by its own hypocrisy for so long that it had grown tired of the tension and found deep wisdom in the expression of the banality by which it lived; the elite applauded because the unveiling of hypocrisy was such superior and wonderful fun.

Brecht’s Jeremiah Peachum is a businessman who organizes the beggars of London and takes a cut of their income. Peachum sees himself as a respectable businessman, compared to the gangster Mack the Knife, who marries Peachum’s daughter. And the chief of police is on the take. Brecht hoped to shock by showing the disappearing lines separating respectable professionals and gangsters; instead, Arendt writes, his satirical portrayal of corruption in Weimar society yielded glee.

Arendt is scathing in describing the attraction Brecht’s satire held for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie suffered under the burden of hypocrisy. They had to maintain their respectability while also winning in the hard-nosed world of business. Brecht’s satirical presentation of the immoral business elite was a release; the applause showed that the German bourgeoisie “could no longer be shocked; it welcomed the exposure of its hidden philosophy.”

It is a testament to the extraordinary scope of The Origins of Totalitarianism that Arendt reveals the hidden philosophy of the bourgeoisie 200 pages earlier in a discussion of Thomas Hobbes, “the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim.” Boiled down to its essentials, the Hobbesian philosophy of the bourgeoisie is simple: “if man is actually driven by nothing but his individual interests, desire for power must

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be the fundamental passion of man.” All limits—laws and morals—are bothersome restrictions on the human drive to acquire power.

Hobbes’s idea of man as a power-seeking being finally emerged as reality in the 1870s. In the wake of two deep depressions, markets at home dried up. To keep the engine of the economy going, bourgeois businessmen needed new markets. The answer was imperialism. The bourgeoisie—which had always been apolitical, preferring to focus on business instead of politics—allied itself with governments to secure military backing for its imperialist ventures. In other words, the bourgeoisie entered politics when they needed political support for their imperialist pursuit of money and power.

What Arendt calls the “political emancipation of the bourgeoisie” is the demand that state power secure private investments. It is one thing to make foreign investments; but the bourgeoisie did not want to take risks in their imperialist escapades. “Only when they demanded government protection of their investments . . . did [the bourgeois business class] re-enter the life of the nation.” This led to the rise of a particularly business-oriented vision of “political institutions exclusively as an instrument for the protection of individual property.” In Arendt’s telling, the bourgeoisie’s entry into politics brought with it the brutally cynical claim that politics was about naked power and money.

The naked pursuit of power contradicts the respectability that businessmen desire. Arendt argues that the bourgeois need to accumulate power had long been hidden “by nobler traditions” of respectability and by “that blessed hypocrisy which [François de] La Rochefoucauld called the compliment vice pays to virtue.” But in the late 19th century traditional values had evaporated and the “old truths . . . had become pious banalities.” The pretense of respectability became itself a vice, leading “everyone to discard the uncomfortable mask of hypocrisy and to accept openly the standards of the mob.”

For Arendt, the reception of Brecht’s play makes manifest the embrace by the business and government elite of mob standards.

Even more than the bourgeoisie, it is the elite’s reaction to the exposure of hypocrisy that draws Arendt’s contempt. The cultural embrace of vulgar satire in the 1920s and 1930s, Arendt writes, is confirmation of a “cynical dismissal of respected standards and accepted theories”; the rise of vulgar satire in Weimar Germany—and in our own time—carries with it a “frank admission of the worst and a disregard for all pretenses which were easily mistaken for courage.” In the normalization and comic internalization of “mob attitudes and convictions,” what Arendt calls vulgar satire embraces the pseudohonesty apparent in contemporary figures, from Milo Yiannopoulos to President Trump, who abandon respectability in the name of fighting hypocrisy. It is hard not to wonder what Arendt would think of the wild success of The Sopranos, House of Cards, and The Daily Show—shows in which the self-proclaimed elite celebrate and laugh at the exposure of the obvious hypocrisy of businessmen who are gangsters and politicians who are businessmen.

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The appeal that totalitarianism and fascism can hold for the elite is its claim that society is rotten to the core. It is easy to criticize the excessive nihilist fantasies that respond to the moral corruption of business and government with violent outbursts of “Drain the swamp!” and “Dismantle the system!” We need, Arendt reminds us, to remember “how justified disgust can be in a society wholly permeated with the ideological outlook and moral standards of the bourgeoisie.”

One reason that Milo Yiannopoulos and President Trump are so popular is that their unmasking of political and cultural corruption has a grain of truth.

What the unmaskers too often forget is that every one of us wears a mask that conceals a dark cabinet of hidden vices behind our public personas. A world populated by people unmasked, their secrets exposed, would be one where all immorality is shameless and all claims to respectability are hypocritical. But shame and hypocrisy are essential human drives. The rage against hypocrisy is a rage against civilized life. The danger in totalitarian movements is that the elite’s justified moral disgust at hypocrisy is translated into a carnival of destruction that is just so much fun.

VI. Arendt added a final chapter called “Ideology and Terror” to the second and subsequent editions of The Origins of Totalitarianism. “It may even be,” Arendt writes, “that the true predicaments of our time will assume their authentic form—though not necessarily the cruelest—only when totalitarianism has become a thing of the past.” Totalitarianism, she suggests, is “no mere threat from the outside” of Western civilization. On the contrary, “the entirely new and unprecedented forms of totalitarian organization” rest upon a new “basic experience” of modern life that underlies and makes totalitarianism and potentially other and related forms of government not only possible but also likely. The basic experience underlying totalitarianism, the experience that continues today to make it likely that totalitarianism remains a constant concern, is loneliness, an alienation from political, social, and cultural life.

“What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” Arendt argues, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the evergrowing masses of our century.”

Loneliness is the feeling of being “deserted by all human companionship”; it is “the experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is among the most radical and desperate experiences of man.” As a modern phenomenon, loneliness is visible in what Robert Putnam calls the loss of social capital.

Americans of all classes and all political persuasions report having fewer close friends than ever before; many say they have no one they can confide in or count upon in an emergency.

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Putnam has also shown that loneliness increases in proportion to the diversity of the community in which one lives, suggesting that our cosmopolitan ideal may further the social ennui that is the fundamental element of totalitarianism. Social media only further feeds loneliness. The well-documented social media filter bubble is an effect and cause of the need that lonely people have for logically consistent fictional worlds. None of this is to say that we should abandon cosmopolitanism or social media. But it is to suggest that we need to take seriously the way modern society breeds loneliness and rootlessness.

Arendt argues that the lonely individual craves and needs the “ice-cold reasoning” of coherent logical fantasies that appear “like a last support in a world where nobody is reliable and nothing can be relied upon.” There can be substantial space for private and social freedom under authoritarian regimes.

But totalitarianism demands that its subjects abandon even nonpolitical and social bonds such as family ties and cultural interests. A community of chess players, Arendt writes, cannot be tolerated in a totalitarian state because the players, protected from loneliness by their bonds, do not experience the lonely person’s “feeling of being expendable”; that feeling of superfluousness is what prepares man for totalitarian domination. Only the lonely man “derives his sense of having a place in the world only from his belonging to a movement.”

If totalitarianism is “organized loneliness,” the fundamental loneliness of modern life means that totalitarianism is hardly a phenomenon of the past.

Adaptive totalitarianisms may be less cruel than the 20th-century totalitarianisms—as we have been conditioned to reject the inhuman cruelty of the Nazi and Soviet regimes—but they may be just as totalizing. Which is why Arendt insists that “the politically most important yardstick for judging events in our time” is simply this: “whether they serve totalitarian domination or not.”

So how do we judge whether we are witnessing a rising totalitarianism?

As Immanuel Kant understood, there are no rules for reflective judgments; the only criteria for a political judgment is, like an aesthetic judgment, that it claims to be and comes to be seen to be true. It is altogether too early to judge whether President Trump heralds a coming totalitarian rule.

If it is too early to judge, it is not too early to be wary. Arendt warns us against getting caught up in “sophistic-dialectical interpretations of politics which are all based on the superstition that something good might result from evil.”

Totalitarianism invalidates “all obsolete political differentiations from right to left.” Efforts to draw lessons from the Holocaust and concentration camps will likely remain ineffective. Human beings have an “inherent tendency to run away from the experience” of the past, so that remembrance of concentration camps seems incredible and thus powerless. Just as the experience of war does not prevent wars, “dwelling on [the] horrors” of past totalitarianisms, Arendt argues, will not inoculate us from future totalitarianisms.

One potentially reliable way to prevent a return of totalitarianism, Arendt writes, is fear. It is enough to contemplate the horrors of the past. “Only the

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fearful imagination,” the constant “thinking about horrors” that may arise, can dissolve political differences and remind us all just how much is at stake.

It is possible to think that something good may come from a Trump presidency. It is conceivable that in providing a shock to a sclerotic and corrupt political system President Trump could help reinvigorate American democracy. There is a temptation to use the fact of President Trump’s political disruption for one’s own purposes. But Arendt’s inquiry into the elements of totalitarian domination teaches us we must never let go of the fear of totalitarian government.

Another defense against totalitarianism—one that Arendt hints at in The Origins of Totalitarianism but only fully develops 12 years later in On Revolution— is the rejuvenation of local governance. Since all democratic governance is susceptible to totalitarian as well as tyrannical impulses, the great danger in democracy is a unified sovereignty. What Arendt understood is that “the great and, in the long run, perhaps the greatest American innovation in politics as such was the consistent abolition of sovereignty within the body politic of the republic, the insight that in the realm of human affairs sovereignty and tyranny are the same.” That is why Arendt regrets the failure of a proposal Jefferson had put forth for breaking counties into wards and having each ward act as a miniature self-government. On the model of town council government, the wards would offer a space for all Americans to engage in the act of free self-government. Only such local, contradictory, and pluralistic power centers offer both practice in self-government and a protection against tyranny and totalitarian government.

At a time when the United States government increasingly resembles a sovereign nation-state, the danger of totalitarianism at home is greater than ever. Alienation from government is widespread and bipartisan, amongst the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. Even mainstream Americans are despondent about a government that is corrupt, sclerotic, and impervious to citizen control. A unified and sovereign government combined with a disempowered citizenry poses the greatest danger of totalitarianism. The best way to protect ourselves is, perhaps, to turn back to our roots in local self-government. We cannot turn back the clock. But we might begin to engage in the activity of politics and the multiplication of local power structures that can resist the totalizing impulses of sovereign states. In doing so, we would seek to rediscover the Jeffersonian project of local self-government that Arendt calls the lost treasure of the American Revolution.

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When Words Cease to Matter Marianne Constable This essay is reprinted from the Hannah Arendt Center’s Medium page and was originally published on November 19, 2016.

As we struggle to understand the shock of the 2016 presidential election, we realize how deeply language, on which productive debate depends, has been abused. Words matter. As so aptly and ironically put in Melania Trump’s plagiarized words at the Republican National Convention, “Your word is your bond.” The gravest problem at this moment, then, lies not in the hate- and fear-mongering racism and misogyny that critics accuse the Republican candidate of engaging in, although these are indeed frightening for many. It lies in the willingness of the president-elect himself and of others to disregard things he has actually said. Such disregard of language goes beyond lying and giving offense. It ruptures the possibility of a meaningful political sphere.

Dialogue and discussion, including civil disagreement, depend on words. All become impossible when words cease to matter.

Deliberate disregard of language poses a worse danger to political discussion and to the public realm than do ignorance and lies. Ignorance can be met with education. Falsehood and deception can be called out as illusion; they can be challenged in the name of what actually appears to be. Even insults can be acknowledged and addressed. When, by contrast, speakers and hearers routinely disavow or neglect the utterances that they hear or make, they cast words adrift, and language no longer shows us a shared or common world in which to take our bearings.

Such indeed is the situation in the United States in the days of disorientation, unease, and unrest following the election of Donald Trump as president.

Regardless of what kind of president Trump turns out to be, or of the policies he puts in place, the rhetoric of this election season has shaken our faith in the possibility of meaningful public exchange. This is not because persons are afraid to speak, although some will be. Nor is it because mainstream media has missed or mischaracterized the story, although it has. Our faith is shaken because to deny one’s words is to disregard what is. When this disregard coincides with more talk than ever before, the upshot is mistrust in the possibility of genuine public exchange.

••• Trump’s factual misstatements are legion, as fact-checkers have been quick to point out. But the difficulties with Trump’s utterances involve more than the occasional lie. Hannah Arendt reminds us that lies are no stranger to 98

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politics: lying is a form of action, and politics is the realm of speech and action. Catastrophe comes when lying becomes routine and fact can no longer be distinguished from falsehood. When this happens, what words say no longer matters. Whether or not Trump’s lies are any more responsible for the current catastrophe than are the lies of others, his words leave us at sea.

Even if Trump’s platform, as the most charitable account would have it, can be understood as an “opening bid” for negotiations, we are left wondering just what this bid is. What are his opinions? Which, if any, of his slogans and sound bites matter? How do his claims—of tax cuts and growing infrastructure—cohere? What are his plans to make the United States—clearly not the two continents of “America”—great again? How do all sides sift through the conflicting utterances around his campaign to find the answer?

Why is it that now, in the aftermath of the election, so many of us are trying to do so?

What are Trump’s views about the environment, for instance? Would he really do away with the Environmental Protection Agency? How does he plan to create jobs? Exactly what health care policies will he pursue? What are his foreign relations priorities? What is his position on women’s rights? Websites, from the right and the left, offer quotations left and right. From these can be gleaned no more than some possible policies favoring business and an animus against Washington, D.C. (Check out the nonpartisan ontheissues.org.)

In 1999, Trump declared himself to be “pro-choice.” In 2011, he proclaimed himself “pro-life,” attributing his flip to stories he had heard. After beginning his run for president, he admitted that he had changed his mind for the purpose of the nomination. He has shifted from claiming that women should be punished for abortions, to announcing that their doctors should be punished for carrying them out, to maintaining that after he appoints a pro-life Supreme Court justice, Roe v. Wade will be overturned and the issue will be left to individual states.

These inconsistencies and many other arguably premature or unthought public announcements—on Obama’s nationality, immigration, government reform, gun laws, and the Middle East—indicate that one cannot trust him to mean what he says. Public disorientation—and perhaps even Trump’s own— at the result of the election cannot be blamed entirely on the press or its polling data then. Television and newspapers have studiously relayed and glossed only his own mixed messages, including his enthusiastic and contradictory tweets for attention.

At least some Trump supporters (Muslims for Trump, Women for Trump) have asserted that one cannot take issue with some of Trump’s more offensive remarks precisely because he doesn’t really mean what he says. Some of these supporters claim to be victimized by being identified, by opponents, with the offensive views articulated in or implied by his statements. Such ostensible defenses hardly restore confidence in public discourse.

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Other supporters, and Trump himself, deny the very fact that he has said things that we have heard him say. When Trump says “X” and later adds not only “I never meant X” but also “I never said ‘X,’” fact-checkers work over the issue of whether Trump actually said “X.” His disavowal of having said “X” raises a more crucial issue than what was or was not said, though. When what one hears is denied, and the denials continue no matter the facts, the issue becomes one of disregard and not simply disavowal. One can no longer believe one’s ears. No wonder that at least half of the country is reeling. We have entered very shaky ground when we cannot rely on our hearing and speech.

Trump’s readiness to dismiss what words say in favor of what they do only makes things worse. Asked whether he regrets any of the incendiary rhetoric of his campaign, he retorted, “No, I won.” It appears that, for him, utterances, which are ostensibly “speech acts,” no longer speak, but only act. Unmoored from what they say, they serve as instruments with which to bulldoze his way through the game.

The public dismissal both of what words say and of any commitment to words as saying leaves us speechless. Literally. At a time when more is being said through a greater variety of media than ever before, it appears that anything can be said and everything can be unsaid. Hence nothing that is said matters. Or perhaps it is only that one cannot tell the difference between what matters and what doesn’t. No matter. The point is that one cannot debate opinions with a person who disregards the very fact of their own statements of opinion. One never knows what further undermining of speech awaits. In such tenuous terrain, words cannot bind. We are deprived of the capacity for political speech with those—or as those—for whom words do not matter.

Upon his victory, Trump mouthed the words that it was time to set divisions aside. It is time for him to put his money where his mouth is. He tells the public, those who can no longer believe their ears, that the week’s protests against him are occurring “because they don’t know me.” Perhaps so. But it is precisely his words and their failure to distinguish fact from falsehood that have made him impossible to know as a political figure, as a speaker and actor in public. His disregard for his own words has contributed to making public speech impossible to trust.

This week’s protests manifest the queasiness in which the evacuation of meaning from speech throws us all. Trump’s challenge now is to show, through his deeds, what he has not shown through his speech—indeed, what his utterances have completely thrown into question—that his word is his bond. The task confronting the next leader of the United States must be to affirm that we share—and that he shares with us—a common world in which are respected the conventions of language that make mutual hearing and speech possible. The alternative is a frightening void in which there is no room to say, in words that one can count on to be heard, “I disagree.”

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When, at the 2016 convention, Melania Trump claimed, in stolen words, that her parents had “impressed on me the values that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say and keep your promise; that you treat people with respect,” she referred only to herself, and she left out two important phrases. She did not steal enough. When Michelle Obama spoke during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, she had explained that “we,” she and Barack, were raised with certain values: “that you work hard for what you want in life; that your word is your bond and you do what you say you’re going to do; that you treat people with dignity and respect.” She had also added, “even if you don’t know them, and even if you don’t agree with them.” Let us hope that the Donald Trump whom we don’t know finds a way to agree and to commit to a world in which words matter.

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Speculative Thoughts on President Trump Leon Botstein This essay is reprinted from the Hannah Arendt Center’s Medium Page and was originally published on November 19, 2016.

The accession to the presidency by Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton’s lead in the popular vote notwithstanding, most likely has many overlapping causes, I am sure. And I am allergic to postmortem wisdom. My father, a distinguished and pioneering oncologist, used to say, with irony, that the most reliable diagnostic instrument would be a “retro-spectoscope.” I am more concerned with what can be done and should be done now.

I had a nagging fear for many weeks that Trump could win. Yet it seemed implausible. I watched the debates with our undergraduates at Bard. They were less taken by Clinton than horrified by Trump. I was attending a visiting committee meeting at MIT the morning after the election and returned to Bard, where on Friday Mark Danner, who was covering the campaign for the NYRB, and I held an open, live-streamed, two-hour Q and A on the election for the college community. So I witnessed two campuses in the immediate aftermath.

So for what it is worth, I have these speculative thoughts on the coming Trump presidency.

1. The Trump presidency is the consequence of the dominant culture of selfishness and greed that has flourished in this country for decades, ever since the Reagan 1980s. In my view, even the collapse of communism helped discredit any value system capable of competing with an Ayn Rand–style individualism focused on individual comfort and advantage and therefore money and wealth, all without an ethic of reciprocal obligation. Trump is the ideal symbol — the very essence of an American culture that holds that wealth, no matter how it is acquired, is the only proper measure of human success and superiority. Kim Kardashian– style superstardom and fame are close runners-up, but they too result in wealth. In the eyes of the electorate — particularly those without more than a high school education — Trump, falsely, of course, is the embodiment of the American dream, redefined not as the opportunity to demonstrate merit in a competitive context but to triumph by bullying and defying norms.

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One of the unintended consequences of the end of communism is the vacuum of any plausible value system that is not about wealth and megafame. The rise in executive pay and the prominence of the so-called 1 percent have eroded any pride in middle-class status, and in modest virtues such as character, service, and learning.

In a culture that justifies the notion that if one were truly smart, one would be rich, who else should be president other than a Trump, who passed himself off as a successful, tough entrepreneur? The consequences of radical inequality are cultural as well as material.

Voluntary conformism—the absence of desire to use freedom—is one such consequence. And it is linked with the absence of curiosity and the resistance to rational argument and rules of evidence.

This in turns leads to the negative construct of “elitism.”

2. We have systematically eroded any sense of shared citizenship.

We prize subordinate identities—by race, gender, sexual preference, ethnicity, and religion—all at the expense of a common notion of the citizen in a free society. We are unable to link a benefit to one group to the betterment of others. What goes along with that is an oppositional attitude to government as a necessary evil; the public sector is seen as an asset or a virtue. As a consequence, there is a decline in the quality of public servants, elected and appointed. Anyone with a career in the public sector is seen as inferior to someone in the private sector. So Trump’s having never served as a public servant, and having never paid his taxes, was seen as a badge of honor.

3. We privilege private happiness at the expense of the underlying philosophical meaning of the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, in which happiness was understood as a reciprocal, social, and not merely private right. The Clintons’ evident love of money undercut their claim to being motivated by higher values. In this sense, Hillary Clinton’s using her career in public positions for private gain—to amass wealth (otherwise unexceptional)—made her moralistic effort to contrast herself with Trump seem hypocritical. Government service is now seen at best as a route to lucrative private employment.

Trump, by never having served, was exempted from this source of mistrust, ironically.

4. The election revealed the decades-long flight by the elites from public service and professions—including politics, the clergy,

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and the schoolhouse—that has robbed government, at all levels, of much-needed talent. Add to this the overextension of legal reasoning. Our public life has become dominated by lawyers, lawsuits, and adversarial remedies. The delivery of services by government and the not-for-profit sector cannot be framed and shaped by an overriding concern for legal consequences.

5. The Trump success is a result of a culture of self-absorption encouraged by technology. The addiction to smartphones, to texting, and to the Internet has cultivated a turn away from any plausible notion of public space. People drive and walk without looking around them, and do not engage with strangers. This fuels silos of fragmented groups who no longer recognize a common public realm. We have created for ourselves an Internetbased echo chamber defined by algorithms of taste. Even concern for the environment and climate change has ceased to inspire a sense of a shared destiny and space that can justify a politics of negotiation, compromise, and alliances.

6. Modern media has blurred the legitimate distinctions between fact and fiction. Subjective “narratives” including outright lies command the same respect as facts and arguments based on evidence.

7. The aesthetics of vulgarity have triumphed, not only in the visual sense but also in the use of language. Trump was effective because his speech and manner were intentionally vulgar.

Clinton was mundane and colorless. Style, of the worst kind, became attractive and substance was buried in pure gray. The language of public policy has become intolerably dense, dull, and indirect. There is no shred of beauty or subtlety in speech.

8. The absence of vision. Clinton, for example, might have gone back to where she started in 1992 and responded to the flawed compromise of Obamacare with a plan for broad, single-payer national health insurance. In general, she articulated no commanding vision of what she would do — apart from reversing the damage done by the Supreme Court. She indeed offered too much of “more of the same.” She relied on being the lesser of evils. And thankfully, she still won the popular vote.

9. The election also revealed the consequences of how bad the American school system is. The trend since Reagan has been

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toward privatization and standardization—both deleterious to any proper common schooling, particularly in civic education.

This is the result of bad education policies since Reagan and through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years.

These are my preliminary thoughts about factors that transcend race, class, and gender. I offer them as speculative provocations, not verities.

But the priority is to think about what should be done now. Unless we include a strategy that addresses aspirations and values—norms and ideals in the culture—we can expect more of the same. At the core of this view is the need to find ways to honor excellence, and therefore aspects of the “elite” that are, on the one hand, not in opposition to political egalitarianism, equal rights, and social justice, and also not mere fodder for snobbery. There have to be virtues we cherish for individuals, society, and the nation that are neither moral absolutes derived from religion nor metrical measures of wealth.

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of language would be likely to cause one? The whole problem is there. It is in the interest of freedom, that is, of a free society, that our guardians (in the Platonic sense) be fearless rather than fearful of consequences. Our guardians should not be worriers, which it is the very nature of a censor to be. If we are going to picture our common life in terms of Holmes’s metaphor rather than worry over what may be dangerous in utterance and what not, it would make sense to legislate for a proper number of exits, stairways, fire escapes, extinguishers, asbestos curtains, and so on. That, too, is a metaphor, evidently, and I will leave it to you to decide what sort of legislation would harmonize with the maximum freedom of expression.

Arguments for more control (i.e., less freedom) at present are not so concerned with the possible menace of physical violence—rioting—as with psychic violence emanating from films, comics, television. This is a parental sort of attitude. It is felt that the populace, particularly its younger and less literate members, is being poisoned by the media. In much the same way as, with more reason, people imagine they are being poisoned by radiation, acid rain, nuclear waste, food additives, chemical fertilizers, sprays. Often the same people have both preoccupations at the same time and belong to groups that have vowed to “do something” remedial. I notice only one difference. Those who worry about the environment as a pollutant are worried about the effects on themselves—as well as on others, including the whole race—while those who worry about the media are not thinking about the effect on themselves, only on others, the young, the poor, the black. The conviction that the violence in the media leads to crime is shared by the Far Right, the Right, and by a great many liberal leftists, above all, those with a psychiatric outlook. Many of the latter call for some form of censorship, “enlightened” or otherwise. Always for the protection the of weak. And it is natural, I suppose, that a religious man, an adherent of one of the fundamentalist sects, would not view his TV set as full of danger to himself but only to those less blessed—the lesser breeds without the law. In the same way, porn on the screen, or in girlie and homoerotic magazines, is frowned on by some liberals as a source of crime. (The first case of this I remember was the Moor murders in England, where one of the mass killers actually confessed to having been murderously excited by pornography. This was discussed on television, and out of the case emerged a sort of pop moralist, Mrs. Mary Whitehouse, who set herself up as the good fairy of British TV watchers.) But no liberal, naturally, would fear that the nightly TV he watched might make him crime-prone or have any injurious effect whatever, though I have noticed some brain damage in friends that seems to derive from too regular watching of the MacNeil–Lehrer show.

In any case, assuming that the critics are right and that there is a correlation between porn and mass murder for thrills, between TV violence and street crime, nobody has proposed a remedy that would be efficacious and acceptable to larger numbers, to say nothing of civil libertarians. Most Americans,

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probably most people in the West, have been schooled in the belief that freedom is a sign of political health even if it is accompanied by certain dangers for the more immature part of the population. To guard against those dangers while maintaining freedom would seem to be the ideal to strive for in framing our laws and regulations. Having your cake and eating it: freedom and security. That there are contradictions, inherent in our natures, between your freedom and mine has not gone unnoticed: freedom for the lamb, Blake said, is not the same as freedom for the lion. Do we want a bold society geared toward the lion’s freedom or a mild, timid society based on the lamb’s fear of being eaten? I suspect that the great periods in our history—the Age of Exploration, the Renaissance—ages of expansion—have been times of the lion’s cruel freedom, while we, at least the conscientious among us, are bleating through the time of the lamb.

In any case, the prevailing belief among us still holds that freedom is healthy, however hedged about and limited by restrictions. Freedom as the equivalent, virtual synonym of health, not only as upheld in the Bill of Rights but also in the private sphere. I suppose that in current psychiatry inhibitions are still regarded as bad, repression is bad; the goal of psychoanalysis and, more modestly, of psychiatry, is to undo the wrappings, like grave clothes, like a winding sheet, that bind the free spirit. There is a good deal of Rousseau, if not in Freud, then in post-Freudian doctrine. But if the claims of society are recognized by the happily cured patient, then freedom of spirit is not very often translated into liberty of behavior, always capable of injuring others. I call your attention to the fact that in English we have two words, freedom and liberty, which are not precisely synonyms. One is Anglo-Saxon and somehow folkish, related to such terms as frank, open, and so on; the other is Latin and pertains to law, in other words, what can be legislated and codified, embodied in constitutions and declarations of rights. Liberty is freedom formalized. And also formulated. You are dealing with liberty, rather than freedom, when you can cite a numbered article in a code.

Among the enemies of freedom, a new species has appeared in recent years. That is, a kind of Jesuit or casuist, posing as freedom’s best friend (Judge Bork). Jesuits, historically, have lined up on the other side, that of orthodoxy, of intellectual suppleness combining with political rigidity. I was pleased the other day when teaching Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to a class, to come upon the following, in a scene that takes place among candidates for monkhood in a seminary. Julien Sorel, a new pupil, has just uttered a few words of historical criticism of the scriptures. “‘To what does this endless reasoning about the Holy Scriptures lead,’ thought the Abbe Pirard, ‘if not to free inquiry [underlined in text]; that is to say, the most dreadful Protestantism?’”

The old abbe has already reflected to himself on the “fatal tendency towards Protestantism” embodied in the Jansenists of the church. But to return to today, there are no more Jansenists but plenty of casuists, some no doubt

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sincere in the concern for souls they express. I am thinking of writers who, like George Steiner, fervently argue that censorship is good for art.

They would admit that freedom of inquiry is a prerequisite for scientific progress. But that is science, and what is true for science, they believe, is not true for art and letters. Examples from the Russian 19th century permit them to show, without too much difficulty, that the arts profit from the constraints imposed by censorship. Under the tsar, when so much utterance was forbidden, the writer was obliged to use a veiled language to express his thoughts—through a seemingly harmless surface, the reader, trained by the times, was able to penetrate to an inner, concealed meaning invisible to the censor. The necessity of this practice, which came to be termed Aesopian language (i.e., fabled utterance), imparted a density, an ambiguity, a doubleness, to those great Russian fictions that is found in no other literature, something cryptic, figurative, “deep”—magical speech. We find this enigmatic quality in Dostoyevsky, in Gogol (Dead Souls, The Inspector General, The Nose, The Overcoat), perhaps a bit in Pushkin, but the absence of it in Tolstoy, so fearless of the censor, does not make him the lesser artist. Still, there is some truth in the argument; many instances can be brought forward, not only from past tyrannies and despotisms but also from our own time, to prove that humanity owes some sort of debt of gratitude to the censor.

For our own time the argument is slightly altered to fit the circumstances of the Soviets today, where getting around the censorship is the least of the difficulties encountered by an author bent on telling the truth. The chief of these is staying alive, the staying out of the asylum, out of the camps and prisons, avoiding forced emigration, finding some work and housing. There is nothing “Aesopian” that I can find in The Gulag Archipelago, or in The First Circle or The Cancer Ward. Scarcely even in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Nadezhda Mandelstam did not resort to Aesopian language to write her memoirs. The more classical case, I guess, was Pasternak; Dr. Zhivago is full of cryptic utterance, though not cryptic enough for the authorities.

Nonetheless, a distinction is drawn by a critic like Steiner between Soviet literature and our own, and the distinction is not favorable to ours. Steiner means dissident Soviet literature, written in emigration for the most part; he regards dissident Soviet literature as a product of the system as much so as official literature, maybe more. I think he is right here and right in placing a high value on the work of the dissidents in and outside of Russia. I agree that they are better, on the whole, than “our” writers, whomever you want to name; let us admit that Lenin in Zurich, say (one of Solzhenitsyn’s weakest), is incomparably better than Ancient Evenings.

The reason given for this state of things is our greater permissiveness, to put it coarsely, the lack of gulags strewn about the scene. You can write anything, say anything, in America (and in France, England, Germany, Sweden, and so on); the worst that can happen is that somebody will sue you for libel

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or that nobody will buy your books. But there are other ways of making a living for a writer: foundations, teaching, publishing jobs. Censorship, far from being a hardship, is positively coveted, since it puts a book in the news.

The effect—or is it the cause?—of this vast permissiveness is that nobody cares what you say.

There is a difference. In the Soviet Union (and in some of the bloc countries), somebody cares profoundly. The authorities care, the Writers’ Union cares, the Party, the MVD [the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs], and because of that the public cares. It rushes to buy out your first big printing; if the censor won’t pass you, it hurries to buy you in samizdat. In the enormous silence produced by official repression and fear, one can hear a pin drop.

Your word rings loud and clear. Everyone is straining to hear; no need to raise your voice. A whisper will be picked up by all those extended antennae.

Nothing can be more different from our situation. Nobody is listening; not even the media people, whose business it is to pay attention; sometimes they go through the motions of cocking an ear, but there is too much noise, and if you shout you will only make things worse. The Western artist may come to envy the Eastern artist and idly dream of being jailed for his crime of opinion.

How peaceful it would be—no telephones—how still, and beyond the wall a fellow detainee could eagerly tap out in Morse or prisoners’ cipher his half of a conversation.

Well, it is true. Beyond the curtain, they are writing for a mighty audience and we are writing for nobody with the exception of our poets, who at least are writing for each other and so have no call to envy Yevtushenko; a wish to change places with him would condemn one to having to write his poetry.

Our poets are better than theirs, at any rate, than the present generation, but that is because somebody reads them, somebody out there is listening—the censor in the bosom of their rival poets.

Yes, it is true. We have a hollow freedom, or so it feels to us. But what is to be done? Not even George Steiner can petition Attorney General Meese to ban books for American literature’s sake, ban books to demonstrate their social importance in an unfree society. If Meese were to listen to the argument, he would never yield to its blandishments, suspecting a liberal trap to present him as an enemy of freedom. We shall just have to struggle on, accepting our lot, and dimly hope to be banned someday, somewhere, in a fundamentalist small-town library. Maybe some kind of friend could write an anonymous letter, signaling the presence of our book on the shelves.

But let us be serious. No literary person in the West honestly desires to change places with his Soviet counterpart. Such utterances reflect a mood of dejection; our freedom may seem a burden that we would be glad to transfer to other shoulders. Our cherished freedom of inquiry, publication, and so on, can at low moments be seen as the villain, the irresponsible sorcerer’s apprentice behind the awful loss of control of our mind’s products that is the

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theme of these last centuries: you start with something innocent, such as the doctrine of evolution, and before you know it you have nukes and, if that was not enough, genetic engineering. Once the mind is allowed to poke its nose into nature’s affairs, there is no stopping it and no conceivable screening of results, so that we could keep penicillin and reduced infant mortality—the good side—and reject the rest, such as cloning—awful word. Free inquiry has brought us to the point where we are now, and one cannot deny that there were warning voices; antivivisectionists—do you remember?—opponents of vaccination. Maybe cranks, of every persuasion, such as the John Birch League, determined refusers of chlorine in the water supply.

And yet, if we are going to be serious, we are bound to accept at least the benign effects of scientific progress (read “free inquiry”), that is, to accept the scientific progress we live with in the form, say, of pasteurization without even being aware of it. As for the rest of the package—Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl—that is past remedy. To halt scientific inquiry at this point would be to shut the barn door after the cow was gone, and nobody, not even the most exalted nuclear disarmer, proposes it.

I myself have never been a great friend of science, at least not of applied science; I could do without airplanes and even automobiles, providing trains and horses were restored to us. I do without Cuisinarts, gelatoios, word processors, credit cards, happy to be without them. For just here, in this practical domain, our freedom, our vaunted abundance, takes on the sinister (to me) appearance of compulsion and scarcity. And I resist. You would be surprised (unless you too have resisted) to find out how hard it is. The word processor, for example. People, young and old, keep trying to convert me to using a word processor; it is for my own good, they tell me.

I will see if I only try. It is like being surrounded by a religious movement, calling on me to join them and be saved. The pressure becomes wearisome, always the same arguments, and finally they start coming from one’s own family—a treacherous breach of my defenses. Some morning—Christmas or a birthday—I will find the egregious word processor tied up in pink ribbons in its hood on my desk. Even if I am spared that (“My dear, how can I thank you?”), I will lose the battle, if I live long enough, by simple force of attrition. It will be impossible to buy a new manual typewriter of the kind I like. Already my last two have had to be secondhand. And how long will workmen repair old manual typewriters? When I called the typewriter man last September to fix my three old Hermes machines—a Baby, a Rocket, and a big desk portable—his wife said that he would be at the junior high school all week putting their word processors in shape. No time anymore for my job. Let us not talk of microfilm replacing books in libraries. If I tell you that it is possible to rent a car without a credit card, you will doubt me. But it is true—you can—but even to tell about it is like recounting some long, complicated history of medieval adventures.

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The element of compulsion, of harsh necessity, coiled in the innards of our contemporary freedom is most evident when action is involved, even such a simple action as purchasing a typewriter, renting a car, casting your ballot in an election for a candidate of your choice. Attempting such actions, you find you are bucking a tide. Like somebody trying to get out of a crowded subway car when everyone else is trying to get in.

Performing such actions, during which a considerable part of our lives is spent, we may chance to discover, if we run afoul of the machinery, that it is an apparent freedom we have been enjoying. A freedom that, on the whole, we have ascribed to scientific progress as it has liberated us from onerous necessity. Thus the equation of science with freedom on the one hand and with progress on the other has been, as I said, pretty much taken for granted in the West. Freedom is recognized as useful, very good for science if for nothing else.

This is true, evidently. Yet it is true, I think, of a special kind of freedom, a funny kind of freedom, which is tied to the processes of discovery and invention. Here it is obvious that freedom of inquiry is useful in facilitating exchanges of data and information, in a sort of pooling, in other words, for human knowledge seen as a group undertaking. The utility of this kind of freedom has a kinship with what the 18th century called “free thinking.” As defined by Webster, a freethinker is “one that forms opinions on the basis of reason independently of authority.” And, “esp. one who doubts or denies religious dogma.” As dogma can be an obstacle barring the way to scientific conclusion (e.g., that man is descended from an ancestor he shares with monkeys, or that the sun turns around the earth), so free thinking, immoral or not, is clearly the adjunct of scientific discovery. Hence, I repeat, it is good for something, from the manufacture of vacuum cleaners to the theory of relativity, with its chain of consequences, which in retrospect are seen as necessary, that is, by no means free.

Now, the freedom I am going to propose to you is the opposite of all that.

What I have called in the title “Useless Freedom.” It is not good for anything; it exists of itself and for itself. Having no products, it cannot even bring happiness, though a brush with it, a brief flashing vision of it, can give a sense of joy or splendor, such as in Wordsworth’s “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” referring to the French Revolution, of which it could be said that no good came of it in the immediate and not much in the long run. This pure and useless freedom may be an intimation of immortality, a touch of the eternal.

It is an ideal quality like beauty or justice, which we can never see incarnate in a wholly just act but which we recognize through knowledge of its opposite— injustice—and through bits and pieces of itself. We know it without having wholly possessed it.

To know freedom, to sense its presence, is probably not a group experience. It is something one senses most keenly when alone, in a room in the

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woods. Tolstoy, in the last chapters of War and Peace, when trying to analyze the queer relation between free will and necessity (which is the whole subject of his book), concludes that man’s will is most free when he is alone in a room relieved of constraints imposed by the mere presence of others, and the freedom his will has in that circumstance is limited to the power to decide whether to raise his arm or not.

A derisory sort of freedom, you could say, not worth having, not good for anything but the simplest acts. But this freedom, in my view, is the ultimate value, like beauty, which we know without possessing. It is the same as being alive, which simply is, of and for itself. For this reason I would count freedom as the very highest value, since it does not serve anything, no ulterior end, no purpose. We should live with it to the limit of our possibility, never relinquish it voluntarily as the result of some sort of bargaining, interior or social.

We must not let ourselves be intimidated by the dangers, real and imaginary, freedom presents; if liberty says anything, it says “Live dangerously.� I am sure that if you examine freedom, somewhere near it or woven into it, strand by strand, you will find courage.

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Contributors Göran Adamson is visiting associate professor at the Centre for European Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and senior lecturer in sociology at University West in Sweden. He is the author of The Trojan Horse: A Leftist Critique of Multiculturalism in the West.

Roger Berkowitz is associate professor of political studies and human rights at Bard College and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities. He is the author of The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition and coeditor of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics and Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Hannah Arendt’s “Denktagebuch.”

Leon Botstein has been president of Bard College since 1975; he also holds the Leon Levy Professorship in the Arts and Humanities at the College. He is chairman of the board of the Central European University, a board member of the Open Society Foundations, music director of the American Symphony Orchestra (since 1992), and author of Jefferson’s Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture.

Marianne Constable is professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several books and articles on law and language, including Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts.

William Deresiewicz is the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life. A frequent speaker on college campuses, Deresiewicz taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008. He is a contributing writer for the Nation and a contributing editor for the American Scholar; his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Harper’s, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, awarded by the National Book Critics Circle (2012), and the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture’s Hiett Prize in the Humanities (2013).

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels The Mare; Veronica, which was nominated for the 2005 National Book Award, National Critic’s Circle Award, and LA Times Book Award; and Two Girls, Fat and Thin. She is also the author of the story collections Bad Behavior; Because They Wanted To, which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1998; and Don’t Cry. Gaitskill’s stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, The Best

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American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction and a Cullman Research Fellowship at the New York Public Library.

Janet Halley is Royall Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. She holds a Ph.D. in English literature from UCLA and a J.D. from Yale Law School.

She formerly taught at Stanford Law School, the Buchmann School of Law at Tel Aviv University, and in the law department of the American University in Cairo. Halley is the author of Don’t: A Reader’s Guide to the Military’s AntiGay Policy and Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism. She is coeditor (with Wendy Brown) of Left Legalism / Left Critique and (with Andrew Parker) After Sex? New Writing since Queer Theory. She is also the editor of a collection of essays entitled Critical Directions in Comparative Family Law, published as a special issue of the American Journal of Comparative Law in 2010; and author of “What Is Family Law? A Genealogy,” published by the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities in 2013. Her current book projects are The Family/ Market Distinction: A Genealogy and Critique and Rape in Armed Conflict: Assessing the Feminist Vision and Its Law. Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right before the Eyes, and A Day and Its Approximates. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, the Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, and In the American Tree. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, she is coeditor of an anthology of new writing by black women, Letters to the Future, forthcoming from Kore Press. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of the Duke University / University of Cape Town Center for Leadership and Public Policy. She is currently Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing at Long Island University.

Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom from Speech. He is also coauthor of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus and (with Jonathan Haidt) the September 2015 Atlantic cover story ”The Coddling of the American Mind.”

He has testified before both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives about free speech issues on America’s campuses.

Mary McCarthy was an American essayist and novelist. A personal friend of Hannah Arendt, she was Arendt’s literary executor. McCarthy taught at Bard College between 1946 and 1947 and again between 1986 and her death in 1989.

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Uday Mehta is distinguished professor of political science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of The Anxiety of Freedom: Imagination and Individuality in the Political Thought of John Locke and Liberalism and Empire, for which the American Political Association awarded him the 2001 J. David Greenstone Book Award for best book in history and theory. In 2002, Mehta received the prestigious Carnegie Scholars prize, given to “scholars of exceptional creativity.” His forthcoming book is titled A Different Vision: Gandhi’s Critique of Political Rationality.

Deroy Murdock is a Fox News contributor; a former media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University; and a senior fellow with the Atlas Network.

Judith Shulevitz is an essayist and editor who has helped found or relaunch several magazines, including Lingua Franca, New York Magazine, and Slate.

Currently a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, she has served as editor of Lingua Franca, founding cultural editor and columnist at Slate, deputy editor and columnist for New York Magazine, columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and a senior writer and editor at the New Republic. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker, among other publications, and she is the author of the memoir The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time.

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About Bard College Founded in 1860, Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, is an independent, residential, coeducational college offering a four-year B.A. program in the liberal arts and sciences and a five-year B.A./B.S. degree in economics and finance. The Bard College Conservatory of Music offers a fiveyear program in which students pursue a dual degree—a B.Music and a B.A. in a field other than music. Bard offers M.Music degrees in conjunction with the Conservatory and The Orchestra Now, and at Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Bard and its affiliated institutions also grant the following degrees: A.A. at Bard High School Early College, a public school with campuses in New York City, Cleveland, Baltimore, and Newark, New Jersey; A.A. and B.A. at Bard College at Simon’s Rock: The Early College, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and through the Bard Prison Initiative at six correctional institutions in New York State; M.A. in curatorial studies, M.S. in economic theory and policy, and M.S. in environmental policy and in climate science and policy at the Annandale campus; M.F.A. and M.A.T. at multiple campuses; M.B.A. in sustainability in New York City; and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture at the Bard Graduate Center in Manhattan. Internationally, Bard confers dual B.A. and M.A. degrees at the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, St. Petersburg State University, Russia (Smolny College); dual B.A. and M.A.T. degrees at Al-Quds University in East Jerusalem; and dual B.A. degrees at American University of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and Bard College Berlin: A Liberal Arts University.

Bard offers nearly 50 academic programs in four divisions. Total enrollment for Bard College and its affiliates is approximately 6,000 students. The undergraduate College has an enrollment of approximately 1,900 and a student-to-faculty ratio of 10:1. In 2016, Bard acquired the Montgomery Place estate, bringing the size of the campus to nearly 1,000 acres. For more information about Bard College, visit bard.edu.