The Return of ‘Mostly Peaceful’

By Becket Adams

Sunday, April 28, 2024

 

The American news media are here once again to tell you that you aren’t hearing what you’re hearing and seeing what you’re seeing.

 

Sure, you may see a bunch of pro-Hamas activists on American campuses, wearing keffiyehs and frothing at the mouth for a “worldwide intifada.” And, sure, the demonstrations enjoy endorsements from Hamas and the Supreme Leader of Iran.

 

But rest assured that these crypto-pogroms are “largely” or “mostly peaceful,” according to our vaunted Fourth Estate.

 

At the Washington Post, campus rallies in which activists daydream aloud about the extermination of Israel are characterized merely as “antiwar demonstrations.”

 

“At Columbia, the Protests Continued, With Dancing and Pizza,” read the headline of an April 19 New York Times article.

 

“At a moment when some campuses are aflame with student activism over the Palestinian cause — the kind that has disrupted award ceremonies, student dinners and classes — college administrators are dealing with the questions that Columbia considered this week: Will more stringent tactics quell protests? Or fuel them?” the Times asked.

 

The report goes on to cite “academic freedom experts” — that’s a fun business card — who believe it sets a dangerous precedent for Columbia University administrators to break up a pro-Hamas encampment that cropped up this month on campus and send the trespassing students packing. Not in a million years would the Times or its “experts” question the wisdom of Columbia or Harvard in deciding to forcibly remove, say, a pro–Ku Klux Klan rally, one replete with slogans cheering for the murder of Jews, Catholics, and blacks, from university grounds. Yet we are asked to consider seriously the notion that it might set a dangerous precedent for academic freedom for campus administrators to ask for the police to remove students cosplaying as Hamas terrorists.

 

Ah! No more Death-to-the-Jews rallies! Can academic freedom survive this?

 

At CNN, New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro balked when conservative author Jonah Goldberg accused the Columbia demonstrators of being pro-terrorist.

 

“Columbia chose to bring police to clear the encampment — that inflamed the situation to where you’re now seeing these protests spread to Yale, to New York University, and beyond,” Garcia-Navarro said, interrupting Goldberg. “Many people have said that the action of bringing police into a group of people who are already feeling that they are sort of representative of the oppressed — who are inspired by what happened with George Floyd in 2020 and seeing what is happening in Gaza, that that has really only acted as a catalyst here.”

 

At CBS News, morning-show host Gayle King bemoaned that some “apparently antisemitic incidents” have overshadowed “peaceful protests.”

 

Speaking of which, there is no shortage of media coverage referring to the campus protests as “largely peaceful” or “mostly peaceful.”

 

And speaking of “largely” and “mostly,” largely absent from the coverage are mentions of the demonstrators’ threatening and antisemitic rhetoric and behavior: calls for the slaughter of Jews (“Oh Hamas, oh loved one, strike strike Tel Aviv!”), the destruction of Israel (“From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab,” which is an actual call for genocide), and “Death to America.” The coverage insisting upon the peacefulness of the anti-Israel activists has far outweighed the coverage of the Jewish faculty member who was blocked from entering the campus or of students forced to avoid campus out of fears for their safety. Absent from the coverage is a serious, somber accounting of the events — the ever-present threat of physical violence — that prompted Columbia administrators to move the university to mostly hybrid classes on its main campus until the end of the semester.

 

It’s as if we’re simply supposed to ignore that last weekend, near Columbia University, an anti-Israel protester screamed at pro-Israel demonstrators to “Go back to Poland!” and “Go back to Belarus!” Or that on April 19, just outside of Columbia, an anti-Israel demonstrator promised more slaughters in the style of October 7.

 

“Never forget the 7th of October,” the protester screamed. “That will happen not one more time, not five more times, not 10, not 100, not 1,000, but 10,000 times! The 7th of October is going to be every day for you!”

 

On April 20, protesters at Columbia held signs that included messages such as “Fight for worldwide Intifada.” Student demonstrators nationwide have also been heard chanting, “Globalize the intifada,” “There is only one solution: intifada revolution,” “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too,” “Say it loud, say it clear; we don’t want no Zionists here,” and “Free our prisoners, free them all; Zionism will fall.”

 

One of the enrolled student leaders behind the Columbia encampment, Khymani James, posted a video to social media recently, arguing that “Zionists don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

 

“Be glad — be grateful — that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists,” said James. “I’ve never murdered anyone in my life, and I hope to keep it that way. . . . I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”

 

An April 24 New York Times article quoted James by name, referring to him simply as a “student protest leader,” to note that he had claimed victory after Columbia backed off its plan to have law enforcement break up the campus’s pro-Hamas shantytown. The Times article makes no mention of James’s fantasies of murdering Jews, er, Zionists.

 

The same day as the publication of that Times article, outside of Columbia’s gate, an anti-Israel demonstrator shouted, “We don’t want no two states; we want all of it.”

 

Remember, these are “antiwar demonstrations,” according to the Washington Post.

 

In late October, at George Washington University, students used a projector to cover the wall of a campus building with the message “GLORY TO OUR MARTYRS,” a reference to the terrorists who died on October 7. The general tone and tenor of these demonstrations have been precisely in this vein since the attack. If anything, it has only worsened. Last week, at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), violent clashes broke out between pro-Hamas activists and police.

 

The blatant antisemitism has gotten so bad, in fact, that even anti-Israel Democratic Representative Cori Bush felt compelled to posit a convoluted theory involving outside saboteurs.

 

“As a Ferguson activist,” she said, “I know what it’s like to have agitators infiltrate our movement, manipulate the press, [and] fuel the suppression of dissent by public officials [and] law enforcement. We must reject these tactics to silence anti-war activists demanding divestment from genocide.”

 

Saboteurs? Perhaps. Perhaps the antisemitism and threats to Jewish students are acts of sabotage meant to discredit the “anti-war” demonstrators. Or perhaps the best explanation for what we’re seeing and hearing now on major U.S. campuses is the simplest one: The antisemitism is the point.

 

You can see it. I can see it. The only people who don’t seem to see it are the same people who told you the anti-police riots of 2020, which caused an estimated $1 billion-plus in damages, were “fiery but mostly peaceful.”

The Fierce Urgency of Tao

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, April 26, 2024

 

Imagine you have a pair of X-ray glasses, like they used to sell in the back of comic books. 

 

Now imagine they worked. 

 

Now, imagine they worked even better than the ads suggested. Not only could you see through that girl’s sweater, you could see through the girl, to the wall of your classroom behind her. And the glasses could see through that, too; into the next classroom, and the next. Through the outer wall, and through the building next door, and the one after that until you were seeing through the hills, forests, mountains, the curve of the earth, the moon and the planets beyond. Your glasses could see through everything until you saw the nothingness of space beyond. 

 

In short, seeing through everything means seeing nothing. Your X-ray glasses are no better than a blindfold. 

 

This idea is not original to me. It’s one of the great insights of C.S. Lewis, who writes in The Abolition of Man: 

 

“You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

 

Lewis believed that some things are simply—or complicatedly, but discoverably—true. There is an order, a reality, a moral universe outside of ourselves that is true because it is real, and it is real because it is true. “This conception in all its forms, Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike,” Lewis said, “I shall henceforth refer to for brevity simply as ‘the Tao.’”  

 

For the Abrahamic faiths, one way to glean an appreciation of the Tao is to imagine how God sees us and our actions. God has a better pair of X-ray glasses that can see through whatever He wants to see through to see the truth—or Truth—of the matter. As I wrote in Suicide of the West, the whole concept of “God-fearing” is wildly underappreciated. “The notion that God is watching you even when others are not is probably the most powerful civilizing force in all of human history. Good character is often defined as what you do when no one is watching.” Well, if you think God is watching and speaking to you through conscience—or through what Adam Smith called “the impartial spectator” within us—you’re going to think twice about your actions. Or at the least it will give you a strong incentive to think twice. 

 

Believing there is something outside of you, judging you by an external ethical or moral standard, gives you a standard to think about yourself that is outside yourself. I love Lewis’ illustration of the point: “I myself do not enjoy the society of small children: because I speak from within the Tao I recognize this as a defect in myself—just as a man may have to recognize that he is tone deaf or colour blind.” In just one sentence, Lewis admits an honest truth of his own faults while illuminating a deeper truth about the world.  

 

What got me thinking about this is I planned to write about the broader pedagogical wrong turn that has gotten all of these universities in trouble. George Packer has an excellent essay in The Atlantic on precisely that. And while focusing narrowly on Columbia and the role of its 1968 protest makes sense for the story he wants to tell, I think that story is merely a chapter in a much older story. Indeed, his story of what happened in 1968 at Columbia leaves out examples that, I think, tell the broader story of the 1960s better. The birth of the Berkeley Free Speech movement in 1964, for instance, is arguably the wellspring from which Columbia ’68 was born. And the Guns on Campus Crisis at Cornell in 1968-69 is a better example of the surrender of elite universities to intimidation and threats of violence. 

 

But revisiting The Abolition of Man reminded me that none of this started in the 1960s. (I shouldn’t need to be reminded of that given that this is the arguably the central point of Suicide of the West.) The ’60s were definitely a highwater mark in the eternal battle between the Enlightenment and the counter-enlightenment. The campus revolts did indeed mark the capture of these institutions by counter-enlightenment thought. But they were nonetheless mere fronts in an older and larger war. 

 

The tyranny of feelings.

 

Let’s return to The Abolition of Man, one of the greatest books of the 20^th century. It’s often forgotten that the book begins as a critique of education. On the first page, Lewis recounts a textbook’s treatment of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s visit to a waterfall in which the Romantic poet overhears two tourists admiring the falls. One calls the waterfall “pretty,” the other says it’s “sublime.” I don’t want to get in the weeds, but the gist of Lewis’ critique of the textbook’s treatment of this scene is that Lewis believed that the educational establishment was teaching children that there is nothing intrinsic about the waterfall—whether pretty or sublime: It’s just a thing, and our feelings about it are all that matters. There is nothing outside ourselves that matters, our feelings do all of the work. “Meaning”—aesthetic, moral, religious—is something we bring to the otherwise meaningless reality around us. There is no Tao, just a contest of tastes. 

 

This is, in miniature, perhaps the central debate of modernity. It plays itself out not just in the realm of aesthetics and art criticism, but in virtually every sphere of intellectual, political, cultural, and philosophical debate. 

 

Let’s stay on art. It’s a subject I know preciously little about, but I know enough to know that the art world has these debates all the time. In 1961, Piero Manzoni produced 90 tins of his own feces, and resparked a tiresome—and old—argument about whether art has to be conventionally beautiful or whether it merely needs to express feelings about, well, something. If it expresses these feelings cleverly or authentically, if it makes a “statement,” “speaks truth to power,” then it’s art.  

 

It should be no surprise that in a world without objective standards, “feelings” become the standard of truth and meaning. How many campus controversies boil down to the fashionable view that you cannot argue with feelings? Feel oppressed? You’re oppressed. Feel angry? Well, perception is reality. Authentic feelings are invincible in any argument where the rules are rigged to enthrone feelings as the sovereign of the realm. 

 

Authenticity, being “true” to oneself, is one of the central values of those on one side of the contest of tastes. Does the art speak to one’s “personal truth”? Is it sincere? As Édouard Manet said in 1867, “The artist does not say today, ‘Come and see faultless work,’ but ‘Come and see sincere work.’” Inherent to this view is that the only truth worth discovering and celebrating is the truth found within ourselves. The flip side of this view, central to Manzoni’s cans of crap, is that the conventions and values of the larger society are worthy of only critique or mockery. You see, Manzoni “saw through” the inauthenticity, the nothingness, not just of the “art world” but of the world itself.  

 

But, again, contests of tastes are really about contests of power. Who decides what’s art? Who decides whether something speaks truth to power? These debates can have a Mobius strip logic to them. The ability to declare who is “powerful”—and therefore deserving of ridicule, protest, mockery, “truth-speaking”—is itself a form of power. The critics who praised 90 tins of excrement as art were exercising power, while prattling about speaking truth to it. 

 

Packer writes about white student radicals who occupied a building at Stanford a week after the ’68 Columbia revolt:

 

To them, the university was not a community dedicated to independent inquiry but a nexus of competing interest groups where power, not ideas, ruled. They rejected the very possibility of a disinterested pursuit of truth. In an imaginary dialogue between a student and a professor, a member of the Stanford chapter of Students for a Democratic Society wrote: “Rights and privacy and these kinds of freedom are irrelevant—you old guys got to get it through your heads that to fight the whole corrupt System POWER is the only answer.”

 

Nietzsche has a similar project. He arguably gave birth to nihilism, but he was not a nihilist per se. He believed that the “death” of God left a void, a nothingness, in His wake. And the void required men of will to fill it with something else. And what is will but feelings put into action? These great men were akin to artists, creative supermen whose artistic medium was civilization itself. 

 

Nietzsche’s project, however, was a great act of philosophical question-begging, for it assumed there was no Tao in the first place. The “Nietzschean ethic can be accepted only if we are ready to scrap traditional morals as a mere error and then to put ourselves in a position where we can find no ground for any value judgements at all,” Lewis writes. “It is the difference between a man who says to us: ‘You like your vegetables moderately fresh; why not grow your own and have them perfectly fresh?’ and a man who says, ‘Throw away that loaf and try eating bricks and centipedes instead.”

 

This idea that reality—or human nature, or society—is a canvas upon which you can draw whatever you like, or a lump of clay you can shape however you please, wasn’t just the stuff of artists and philosophers. Indeed, Nietzsche was a kind of Typhoid Mary who carried the contagion into the empirical realm. He was a forerunner of philosophical pragmatism, which set about to downgrade the definition of truth to a kind of practical tool. The pragmatist’s razor, Louis Menand’s phrase, was wielded by pragmatists like John Dewey “to slice to pieces what he regarded as the paper problems of traditional metaphysics.” This of course begs another question, that metaphysics—the science of the Tao—is an irrelevancy in the first place. 

 

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the legendary Supreme Court justice, was a fellow traveler of the pragmatists and one of the great champions of seeing through everything to the point where everything was just a contest of power in a Tao-less universe of uncaring physical forces. “I can’t help preferring champagne to ditch water—I doubt if the universe does.” For Holmes and other pragmatists, the Tao was a fantasy, a myth agreed upon, to get through the long dark night of a meaningless universe. 

 

In a letter to the pragmatic philosopher William James, Holmes admitted “all I mean by truth is what I can’t help thinking [is true].” In another letter to a friend, he said, “All I mean by truth is the path I have to travel.” In a letter to the historian Lewis Einstein, he asserted that “Man is like any other organism, shaping himself to his environment so wholly that after he has taken the shape if you try to change it you alter his life.” He added, “All of which is all right and fully justifies us in doing what we can’t help doing and trying to make the world into the kind of world that we think we should like; but it hardly warrants our talking much about absolute truth.” While James talked about the cash value of truth, Holmes believed that truth was whatever one was willing to fight for. “You respect the rights of man—,” he wrote to the socialist intellectual Harold Laski. “I don’t, except those things a given crowd will fight for—which vary from religion to the price of a glass of beer. I also would fight for some things—but instead of saying that they ought to be I merely say they are part of the kind of world that I like—or should like.”

 

In short, truth was merely the laurel won by men fighting in a contest of will. 

 

This view runs through the history of the West like a cold river cutting a path through the liberal and moral breakwaters of our civilization. This was the way Carl Schmitt, the admittedly brilliant “crown jurist” of the Third Reich. For Schmitt, quite popular in some corners of the left for a long time and newly popular in some corners of the illiberal right, everything was about power. “The exception is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything. In the exception the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.” For Schmitt, the whole concept of “humanity” is nothing more than a liberal democratic “ideological instrument of imperialist expansion.” All politics—all of it—is nothing more than a contest of power between us and them, friend and enemy. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”

 

It was this worldview that inspired Julien Benda to write his wonderful, if rambly, Treason of the Intellectuals. Everywhere Benda looked, he saw intellectuals reducing all of politics to contests of will and power. “Our age,” he famously observed, “is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.”  More to the point, Benda argued that the intellectuals 

 

“teach man that his desires are moral insofar as they tend to secure his existence at the expense of an environment which disputes it. In particular they teach him that his species is sacred insofar as it is able to assert its existence at the expense of the surrounding world. In other words, the old morality told Man that he is divine to the extent that he becomes one with the universe; the new morality tells him that he is divine to the extent that he is in opposition to it. The former exhorted him not to set himself in Nature “like an empire within an empire”; the latter exhorts him to say with the fallen angels of Holy Writ, “We desire now to feel conscious of ourselves in ourselves, and not in God.” The former, like the master of the Contemplations, said: “Believe, but not in ourselves”; the latter replies with Nietzsche and Maurras: “Believe, and believe in ourselves, only ourselves.”

 

Socrates believed in the Tao; his amoralist critic Callicles scoffed at the idea that nature favors anything other than strength, believing that strength makes truth, might makes right. “The educators of the human mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates,” Benda observed, “a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political upheavals.” The intellectuals, as a class, reject the pursuit of knowledge as a good unto itself. Nietzsche, Sorel, and the other lodestars of his age, scorn “the man of study” in an unapologetic indulgence of the “desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values of action.” This corruption of the intellectual pursuit of truth, beauty, knowledge, the Tao, did not stay in the universities and salons, it spilled out into the newspapers and parliaments, thanks to scribbler-activist intellectuals, many largely forgotten. (Who talks of Georges Sorel, Charles Peguy, Richard Ely, EA Ross, Charles Maurras or Gabriele D’Annunzio, and their like anymore?) 

 

But some—with names like Lenin, Trotsky, and Mussolini—managed to write their names more indelibly in the history books with blood. But they all moved whole nations toward the abattoir. “In all the great States today,” Benda wrote, “I observe that not only the world of industry and big business but a considerable number of small tradesmen, small bourgeois, doctors, lawyers, and even writers and artists, and working men too, feel that for the sake of the prosperity of their own occupations it is essential for them to belong to a powerful group which can make itself feared.”

 

I find this stuff fascinating and could go on playing connect the dots, I fear at book length, along these lines. But I should try to bring this in for a landing. The intellectuals of the 1960s, named-checked in the current bout of introspection—Marcuse, Foucault, Fanon, et al—were not nearly so original or creative as their fans claim. They merely took the old Nietzschean schtick and updated it for the “post-colonial age.” Their arguments, stripped of jargon and agenda, featured the same glorification of will and strength, the same rebellion against rules and systems, the same insistence that politics was merely a contest of power and control, the same project of organizing hatred. These thinkers “saw through” everything that is good and just—not perfect, but better than all of the alternatives—about liberal institutions and principles and just saw “power.” And what they wanted was power. The obsession with power flattens all distinctions, between power justly and unjustly applied, between tolerance and intolerance, between good and evil. In contests of power, the only prize is the seizure of it. And such contests are always zero-sum.

 

The pro-Hamas mobs, like Hamas, believe that compromise is surrender to oppression. There can be no two-state solution, no acknowledgement that Hamas is evil because, after all, evil is a Tao-word. The only acceptable use of the word is as a political weapon, to justify the use of objectively evil means toward desired ends. They cannot admit that Israel hews to a moral standard, however imperfectly,  in its conduct of a defensive war, because that would not only concede that Hamas doesn’t hew to any standards at all, it would concede that such (Western, Judeo-Christian) standards meaningfully exist or have any legitimacy. They prefer to “see through” Israel’s actions and focus on the power alone, ignoring or denying Israel’s attempt to use it responsibly.  Hamas, however, does indeed have a corrupt Islamist conception of the Tao, they do believe they are doing God’s will. But their nihilist friends in the West do not. All they understand is the Schmittian friend-enemy vision of power. And since Hamas is a friend, its enemies are their enemies. This is the only way to explain the darkly hilarious effusion of groups like “Queers for Palestine.” 

 

Packer writes:

 

“The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

 

I agree with Packer, of course. But none of this started in ’68. And it won’t end in ’24. This is a constant battle. Because the real battle line runs through the human heart. C.S. Lewis believed that educators should illuminate the Tao. But Lewis lamented that the educators had ceased to be illuminators of the good, preferring the power to be “conditioners” of whatever they deemed to be the good. “The Conditioners, then, are to choose what kind of artificial Tao they will, for their own good reasons, produce in the Human race.”

 

The good news is that such efforts fail. The crooked timber of humanity is not a medium for artists to make whatever they want. The bad news is that the effort to create new men—Soviet Man, Aryan Man, Woke Person, whatever—often creates deformities and “men without chests.” And men without chests see no reason to value anything other than power. I’ll give the last word to Lewis. 

 

“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”

The Torment of the Class of 2024

By Noah Rothman

Friday, April 26, 2024

 

The University of Southern California did not have to cancel its primary commencement ceremony this year for the graduating class of 2024. It was not inevitable that the anti-Israel protests convulsing elite universities across the country would foreclose on the commemoration students spent four years eagerly anticipating. The university gave up on its students because the alternative — policing its campus, restoring order, and demonstrating where the real authority lays — was too hard. Cowardly bureaucratic inertia consigned USC’s students to a muted celebration of this class’s achievements, but they should be used to that by now. After all, cowardly bureaucratic inertia had already robbed them of the classic college experience.

 

As was the case at so many other prestigious colleges and universities, the class of 2024 spent the summer before freshman orientation anticipating an in-person learning experience following the ruination of their senior year in high school. But it was not to be. The freshman who entered USC in 2020 discovered in July of that year that their school, too, had rescinded its plan to welcome students back to campus in the fall.

 

“We are now recommending all undergraduates take their courses online and reconsider living on or close to campus this semester,” the school’s message to incoming students read. The disappointment was palpable. But most students likely assumed that pandemic-related restrictions on campus activities would gradually ease over time. Rather, they become even more restrictive.

 

At the outset of the class of 2024’s sophomore year, students who didn’t want to continue with remote learning were invited back to campus. But those who took advantage of the opportunity had to observe a range of hypochondriacal best practices. They were compelled to remain masked, indoors and outdoors, at all times. They had to maintain six feet of distance from all other individuals at the few communal gatherings the school would permit. Onerous Covid testing and self-isolation protocols for the potentially exposed were strictly enforced. “All eating and drinking must take place outdoors,” a letter from one USC law school dean read. “Students are encouraged to take brief breaks from the classroom if they need to hydrate.” Students were encouraged to hector their colleagues who were “not compliant” with these guidelines, deputizing the student body and drafting them into campaign of espionage and moral blackmail against their peers.

 

By the spring of 2022, USC lifted its indoor masking requirement for most facilities — pending the verification of individual “vaccination status or a recent test result as required by the City of Los Angeles.” But as the preservation of the school’s hybridized (e.g., remote) learning programs suggested, the school had not suddenly come to terms with the moderate relative risk posed by the pathogen. Masking was still encouraged and widely observed by a generation of safety-conscious students well into 2023.

 

It was around that same time that USC experienced the early symptoms of the plague of antisemitism that has now descended across the collegiate landscape. In 2022, the Department of Education opened an investigation into USC on behalf of a matriculant who resigned from student government after experiencing unrelenting harassment for her “perceived ethnic Jewish identity.” She was branded “a Zionist” by her more zealously anti-Israel colleagues, and she accused the school of failing to “take prompt and effective steps” to address the hostile environment it cultivated. The school did not take the investigation seriously.

 

At least, that’s what we can glean from its 2023 decision to suspend a professor whom students accused of bias when he allegedly stepped on “a printed list of Palestinians killed in Israeli airstrikes” amid an event hosted by the “worldwide ‘Shut it Down for Palestine’ movement.” The professor’s fate was sealed after he was shown on video supporting Israeli efforts to neutralize Hamas terrorists on the battlefield — a discomfiting level of comfort with anti-terrorist military activity that just did not belong on USC’s campus.

 

In the interim, the school was rocked by a series of scandals. A former USC dean pleaded guilty to the charge that she awarded a scholarship and a teaching job to the son of a local politician who promised to direct a multi-million dollar contract to USC in exchange for the dispensation. A group of former USC students alleged in a lawsuit that USC conspired to mislead students about the quality of its educational programs by providing doctored data to US News & World Report. Ten fraternities associated with USC severed ties with the school after it imposed a series of rules on Greek life on campus designed to impose discipline on the unruly outfits.

 

For three years, USC managed to make student life as uncomfortable as possible, all while sustaining blow after blow to the school’s reputation and simultaneously cracking down on the institutions that maintain some level of spontaneity to campus life. And now, in their fourth and final academic year, the class of 2024 has spent most of it enduring the endless disruptions associated with the protests against Israel that erupted just days after its civilians were massacred, raped, and burned alive by Hamas terrorists. Last week, for want of any resolve to reimpose order on their campus, USC administrators closed the school “until further notice.” Their cowardice culminated in the minimalist graduation ceremony that will have to suffice for this tormented class of young adults.

 

For the parents who forked over an average of $95,000-per-year to see their children attend this once esteemed university, the experience they purchased their children has almost certainly been unrewarding. Moreover, the ordeal endured by USC’s students is probably familiar to so many members of the class of 2024 across the country. The unimaginative timidity on regular display from USC’s non-faculty administrators stole from an entire generation the college years their elders enjoyed. Students and parents alike must be asking themselves, what was it all for? Was it worth it?

Our Institutions Exist to Oppose Trump, Right?

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, April 28, 2024

 

The Supreme Court has let us down. The highest court in the land is now a tawdry instrument of Trumpism.

 

Such is the progressive line in the wake of last week’s oral arguments over Trump’s immunity claim.

 

In a headline, Slate deemed the arguments “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us.” Salon huffed, “SCOTUS majority abandons conservative principles to mount bizarre defense of Trump’s immunity claim.” One headline at the Atlantic warned of “The Trumpification of the Supreme Court,” while another maintained, “Trump Is Getting What He Wants.”

 

The first thing to say about this is that, as a technical matter, all indications are that Trump isn’t going to get what he wants; the Court showed little indication that it is going to accept his sweeping claim of immunity.

 

But the Court took the underlying issues seriously and might — perish the thought — hand down a nuanced ruling and thus delay the proceedings in the J6 case.

 

It’s entirely fair to disagree with the drift of the questioning from most of the conservative justices. Trump’s enemies will never leave it at that, though. At the first whiff that the case might not go the way they want, their reaction is to question the legitimacy of the Court as such.

 

Yet again, they are demonstrating that they are committed to our institutions exactly to the extent they serve their interests, and no further.

 

“Pretending that these matters concern the powers of the presidency more broadly,” Adam  Serwer writes at the Atlantic, “is merely the path the justices sympathetic to Trump have chosen to take in order to rationalize protecting the man they would prefer to be the next president.”

 

This accusation is preposterous in several different respects. One, the Court could have done Trump’s bidding in other consequential cases, most importantly the Texas challenge to the 2020 election results, and didn’t. Two, a finding of some form of criminal immunity wouldn’t come out of nowhere but would constitute an extension of the Court’s 1982 ruling in Nixon v. Fitzgerald that the president enjoys immunity from civil liability for his official acts. Finally, the issues involved are genuinely complex — this post by Jack Goldsmith a couple of days before the oral arguments was a detailed rundown of the myriad difficulties.

 

All of this is ignored or dismissed by Serwer, of course — why acknowledge complications if you can pound the table instead?

 

He concludes of the conservative justices, “One way or another, they will have to choose between Trumpism and democracy. They’ve given the public little reason to believe that they will choose any differently than the majority of their colleagues in the Republican Party.”

 

This, also, is insipid. It’s quite possible to believe that a president has some form of immunity for official acts without agreeing with anything else Trump says or does. And democracy is not hanging in the balance depending on where the Court draws the line on the immunity question. If the only meaningful check on a president’s conduct in office is tenuous prosecutions pursued by his successor’s administration years after he leaves office, our system has already effectively collapsed.

 

Writing in a similar vein, the tag team for the ages of Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate remark that “many court watchers held out hope that Thursday morning’s oral arguments were to be the moment for the nine justices of the Supreme Court to finally indicate their readiness to take on Trump, Trumpism, illiberalism, and slouching fascism.”

 

As if the Court had crafted the question before it: “Whether, and if so to what extent, this Court should bow down before fascism, slouching or otherwise.”

 

Of course, rather than striking a blow against slouching — or, for that matter, upright — fascism, the Court sounded as if it was grappling with complex questions that it hadn’t confronted before and would affect the institution of the presidency going forward.

 

The progressives outraged by the Court aren’t just driven by partisanship, but a shortsighted partisanship. They are apparently oblivious to the fact that President Biden could be out of office in less than a year and in the sights of a Trump Justice Department. Wouldn’t it be good to have a clear road map for these kinds of cases before then? Or do the progressives trust implicitly in the judgment of Trump’s future attorney general on such matters?

 

Also writing in the Atlantic, Ron Brownstein focuses on another facet of a potential Trump second term. “Even a decision that allows Trump to delay any further criminal trials until after the election,” he writes, “could look relatively small next to the consequences of a ruling that causes him to conclude that, if he wins again, the Supreme Court would lack the will to restrain him.”

 

In less florid language than Lithwick and Stern, this also assumes that the issue in the case is standing up to Trump rather than attempting to think through the correct standard for everyone. In other words, by this way of thinking, the Court isn’t political enough — it should be tailoring its work to how it affects one presidential candidate.

 

Also, there’s no evidence that the standard the conservative justices have ever adopted in any case involving Trump is how it affects his interests or whether it will please or anger him. So this isn’t a matter of the “will to restrain him.”

 

At least conceding the possibility of good intentions on the part of the Court, Jamelle Bouie writes at the New York Times, “Whether motivated by sincere belief or partisanship or a myopic desire to weigh in on a case involving the former president, the Supreme Court has directly intervened in the 2024 presidential election in a way that deprives the electorate of critical information or gives it less time to grapple with what might happen in a federal courtroom.”

 

What is this direct intervention in the 2024 election? It’s not arbitrarily deciding how the political conventions will be conducted, or what can appear in advertisements, or where the candidates can travel; it is issuing an opinion in a legal case with major constitutional implications.

 

It’s not the Court’s fault that this case is in the middle of a presidential election. Jack Smith put it there, and the Democrats want it there to damage Trump politically. There’s no doubt that it’d be better to have the immunity case — or any politically sensitive case before the Supreme Court — decided in circumstances where no one knows the immediate political consequences. But that’s not possible here.

 

If the J6 trial is delayed, the election will presumably happen with Trump only having faced a New York criminal prosecution and not a federal one. Given that neither a former president nor a current presidential candidate has ever stood trial before, that would seem plenty. As for, as Bouie put it, the electorate’s being denied “critical information” if the trial doesn’t take place, what information would this be? We all know what happened on January 6 and in its run-up and aftermath. Voters are presumably already taking all this into account.

 

What they won’t find out is whether Trump is found guilty by a D.C. jury of charges relying on Jack Smith’s adventurous legal interpretations, which may be vulnerable on appeal. Is this really critical to deciding whether Trump will be president again? And if Trump is tried and acquitted (or convicted and wins on appeal), where will he go to get back the time, resources, and energy spent sitting in a D.C. courthouse, in addition to a New York courthouse, in the midst of a presidential campaign?

 

Of course, there’s no way to get them back. That, and the potential of a conviction harming Trump’s campaign, are part of the reason that progressives are desperate for the J6 trial to take place prior to the election. And they believe that it’s the obligation of the Court to go along. Anything less proves its worthlessness and corruption.

The System Is … Working?

By Nick Catoggio

Thursday, April 25, 2024

 

“THE SYSTEM IS WORKING THE WAY IT’S SUPPOSED TO.”

 

I was taken aback when one of my colleagues posted that Wednesday evening in the Dispatch Slack channel, and not just because you don’t see all-caps used in that forum every day. (Except when I’m in a froth about Trump. Which, come to think of it, is every day.) It stopped me in my tracks because it’s not a sentiment one hears anymore about our political system.

 

Ever. Anywhere.

 

We live in a country where those who say America is headed in the wrong direction have greatly outnumbered those who say otherwise for the past 15 years. Popular belief that the “system” isn’t working is so broad and deep among American voters that their own representatives are prone to making dark jokes about it. A few days ago, frustrated by the looming passage of new military aid for Israel, Bernie Sanders mocked his colleagues in the Senate for the fact that its approval rating had risen recently from 10 percent to a gaudy 14. “The Congress is completely out of touch with where the American people are,” he claimed, exaggerating a bit—but only a bit.

 

As I write this, an attorney is arguing with a straight face before the U.S. Supreme Court that, absent impeachment, a president should be able to have a political rival assassinated or order the military to organize a coup without fear of criminal prosecution. That attorney’s client is currently the favorite to win the coming election in national polling.

 

No system that would elevate Donald Trump to the presidency once, let alone twice, is “working.” 

 

Yet, having said all that, I think my colleague was correct.

 

That’s because the comment in question wasn’t made about “the system” generally, it was made specifically about the state of abortion politics in the United States. And you know what?

 

The system is working with respect to abortion.

 

***

 

It’s a truism that, in a democracy, the majority is supposed to get its way most of the time.

 

Truisms aren’t supposed to be controversial, but that one is.

 

Both sides agree with it in principle but out the window it goes whenever a popular bill offered by the opposing party hits the floor in Congress. For all the caterwauling Democrats have done under Biden about eliminating the filibuster, we know exactly what they’ll do next year if a Republican-controlled Senate proposes, say, the mass deportation of all illegal immigrants.

 

The fact that a majority of Americans now favor mass deportation will be neither here nor there.

 

Flouting the will of the majority is a both-sides thing but the two sides aren’t equally motivated to do it, as one might expect when one party reliably loses the popular vote in national presidential elections. The GOP has a more “complicated” relationship with the justness of majority rule nowadays than Democrats do, which is why one occasionally hears Republicans insisting that “we’re a republic, not a democracy” when we are in fact, and quite obviously, both.

 

“We’re a republic, not a democracy” is their way of asserting that America’s system of government has no obligation —certainly not legally or politically, and not even morally—to carry out the will of the majority. A representative’s duties are to his constituents; if those constituents want him to use every lever of power available to him to thwart the majority unto eternity, that’s what he should do.

 

The consequences for public faith in the American government be damned.

 

It’s no coincidence that “we’re a republic, not a democracy” gained traction as a talking point around the time of the 2020 election, when even (what passes for) august members of the GOP pushed the idea. Convince yourself that the majority isn’t morally entitled to get its way on legislation—ever—and soon you’ll be convincing yourself that it isn’t morally entitled to get its way in elections, either.

 

A democracy beset by that attitude can’t last. When a system that purports to govern in accordance with the will of the many (subject to constitutional limitations) normalizes obstruction by the few, the many are destined to wonder what they’re getting out of it and why they should stick with it. The system isn’t working.

 

But it is working on the hottest culture-war issue in America.

 

What inspired my colleague’s Slack comment was the news that Arizona’s House of Representatives had voted to repeal the near-total abortion ban that was enacted there in 1864 and recently restored by the Arizona Supreme Court. Several attempts to overturn the ban had failed in recent weeks but this time three Republican legislators flipped and joined Democrats to pass it narrowly. If the bill clears the state Senate and is signed by the Democratic governor, a middle-ground 15-week abortion ban will replace the old law.

 

Which is what’s “supposed” to happen, no? Strict abortion bans like the 1864 statute are favored by very few Americans; laws that permit terminations during the first trimester of pregnancy are supported by many. The three Republicans who flipped did so either because they feared being on the wrong side of popular opinion in their next election or because, as a moral matter, they believed the people deserved to be governed by the legal regime they preferred. Whichever it is, the will of the majority prevailed.

 

“The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting,” Justice Alito wrote for the court in the Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade, quoting Antonin Scalia. “That is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand.”

 

That’s exactly what’s been happening since 2022. The system is working.

 

It’s working outside of Arizona, too. Witness the ongoing evolution on the subject of abortion at the top of the Republican Party.

 

Staunch pro-lifers can and should disdain Donald Trump for trying to wash his hands of the abortion wars, but there’s no question that he’s responding rationally to the political incentives that democracy has created for him. His legacy as the president who got rid of Roe is a major liability for him and that liability would be compounded if he pledged to use federal power to restrict abortions in blue states upon returning to office. So he’s opted to try to neutralize the issue by taking a federalist approach, insisting that the responsibility for making law on this subject properly belongs to the states.

 

That’s the correct position constitutionally, in my opinion. And it happens to be the position on abortion that’s favored by the national majority, making it the smart play electorally.

 

And not just for him. Given Trump’s enormous influence over right-wing opinion, his neutrality on the issue frees other politicians in his party to be more responsive to majority preferences on abortion. In Arizona, Kari Lake moved with head-spinning speed to capitalize on Trump’s conversion by coming out against the 1864 ban. In Florida, Rick Scott decided that he preferred the old 15-week ban to the new, and much stricter, six-week one.

 

Both are now more aligned with majority opinion than they were previously. The system is working.

 

It’s not working for everyone, of course. Pro-lifers are rightly irritated to see figures like Lake sounding not just like federalists on abortion but like out-and-out pro-choicers. And if the system were working at top efficiency, we’d expect to see Democrats retreating from their preference for legal abortion up until the moment of crowning to something more like a middle-ground, 15-week ban themselves.

 

Perhaps that’ll come once the dust around strict abortion bans settles. For now, however, it’s enough to note that one party has moved quickly and conspicuously toward popular opinion in a brief period of time on what had been, until recently, a litmus-test of the utmost ideological rigor. That’s the power of democracy in action.

 

***

 

Because Congress is a ludicrous circus, it’s easy to miss the fact that the system has been working there lately too.

 

Sometimes. Sort of.

 

I use the term “working” loosely. We’ve seen one House speaker liquidated this term already and may yet see another. Members are using the word “scumbags” in nationally televised interviews to describe colleagues—from the same party.

 

It’s not great. But if by “working” we mean that American government is overcoming objections from powerful interests to pass laws that reflect the preferences of the majority, then it’s been working OK lately. Not perfectly, but not as bad as popular opinion would have you believe.

 

The endless stinkface from post-liberal Republicans over aid to Ukraine is a threat to Mike Johnson’s ability to govern long-term, but he has the consolation of knowing that most Americans don’t share their opinion. Fifty-three percent favor more aid to Kyiv at last check and the number is higher if you combine those who think we’re giving “the right amount” with those who believe we’re not doing enough. Johnson’s transformation on the issue seems to have been driven by genuine moral conviction but I’m guessing it wasn’t lost on him—or on Donald Trump—with an election six months away and a slender House majority at risk that he was also doing the popular thing.

 

Or that, had the GOP blocked the aid and Ukraine’s defense collapsed, some fickle voters who claim that we’re doing too much right now would have swung around with alacrity toward believing that we didn’t do enough.

 

How about the TikTok ban that passed the House? That was another risky one for Johnson, as both Trump and some of his more influential toadies online have come out against it. But support for a ban (unless the platform is sold to an American company) seems to be growing: Last month a CNBC poll found the public split 47-31 in favor while another survey put the number at 54-32. Once again, the speaker overcame the opposition of powerful populists on his own side to move popular legislation.

 

The fact that Johnson and his predecessor, Kevin McCarthy, were able to easily avoid a government shutdown and a debt-ceiling crisis, respectively, is another example of the system working. It doesn’t work well, admittedly—witness how many times the can was kicked on funding the government before a long-term deal was reached—but a conference as restive and nihilist as the House GOP seemed primed at the start of the term to force a crisis in one or both scenarios.

 

Didn’t happen. The national majority’s anxiety over brinkmanship forced Republicans to swallow hard and do the right thing against their better judgment. The system worked.

 

So why is it that so many Americans are convinced the system doesn’t work?

 

That’s a complicated question but I suspect the answer begins with the fact that government’s failures over the last 25 years have been really big, enough so to make any single legislative vindication of the popular will feel trivial by comparison. 9/11, Iraq, the financial crisis and Great Recession, deindustrialization and the opioid epidemic, a raging pandemic and the expert class’ hapless attempts to manage it, a coup plot and attempted putsch at the Capitol, the collapse of Afghanistan, and most recently a rate of inflation not seen in decades: It’s a lot.

 

It’s a lot. Congrats to Mike Johnson on the TikTok bill and all, but when the average person imagines what it looks like when democratic government is “working,” I suspect he or she imagines a system that responds nimbly and effectively in solving major problems, not just one that dutifully follows whatever the popular will happens to be on the latest ticky-tack issue at a given moment in time.

 

The fact that retail politics in America is increasingly conducted online also drives the sense that the system doesn’t work. Those motivated to seek out political engagement are likely to be aggrieved for one reason or another; naturally, they gravitate to political resources that feed that sense of grievance. It wasn’t so easy to find those resources before the Internet. It’s really easy now.

 

There’s a lot of money to be made in catering to such people and therefore intense competitive pressure not to be outflanked on grievance-mongering—which means there’s no incentive to highlight the system’s successes. Many Americans in 2024 can and do subsist on an endless diet of online propaganda that reassures them their grievances are justified in every particular and that the governing class isn’t merely indifferent to their suffering but is actively scheming to make it worse.

 

A drumbest of major government failures and a media ecosystem that encourages disaffection and paranoia for fun and profit: That’s a recipe for unshakable suspicion that the system doesn’t work and ultimately civic disaster. Look no further than the fact that an honest-to-goodness buffoon ran for president in 2016 babbling that “the system is rigged” and we actually elected him.

 

And yet, I think the post-Roe abortion debate has broken through all of this cynicism to some degree. My guess is that most Americans—devout pro-lifers not included—would agree with my Dispatch colleague that the system has been working unusually well on that subject lately.

 

Partly that’s because everyone already has an opinion about abortion, and typically a firm one. There’s no uncertainty about the issue as there might be with something as complex and unfamiliar as TikTok or the Ukraine war. Americans know the stakes.

 

Partly it’s because the country tried to “solve” the abortion issue for 50 years by letting the judiciary ride herd on it and in that case the system plainly did not work. The pro-life movement didn’t disappear after the Supreme Court proclaimed from the mountaintop that a right to terminate one’s pregnancy kinda sorta exists in the Constitution. On the contrary. The fact that the issue was “live” politically but “dead” electorally since the early 1970s let both parties dig in on extreme, unworkable positions and left the dispute in perpetual limbo.

 

And partly it’s because the moral dilemma of when life begins is so intractable that there’s no way to resolve it more elegantly than by letting the public vote it out and having the chips fall where they may. No one cares, or should care, what Chief Justice John Roberts thinks of the matter; the closest we’re going to get to a morally authoritative judgment on the question is the collective wisdom of the great and good American people.

 

The same American people that elected Donald Trump. And are poised to do so again.

 

Put all of that together and it feels like the system is working with respect to abortion. The stakes of the public debate are clear, we’re gradually moving toward legislative outcomes that align with majority preferences, and we’re resolving (sort of) a moral dispute that’s bedeviled American politics for generations. In an age as populist as this one, that’s as close as we’ll get to a political solution that’s broadly viewed as legitimate.

Menace and Cringe

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, April 24, 2024

 

Donald Trump has protest envy.

 

On Tuesday he addressed the press outside the courtroom where his criminal trial is being held. Why, he wondered, was New York City being so aggressive in keeping his supporters away from the courthouse while pro-Palestinian protesters uptown at Columbia University had their run of the place?

 

There are a few possible answers.

 

One is that security is and should be extraordinarily tight around a once and (God help us) future president at a moment as fraught as his trial, when his whereabouts are known to all and political passions are running hot. Another is that the last time he called for his supporters to gather and “peacefully” protest an alleged injustice being committed against him, it … did not go well. Go figure that the city might take precautions to prevent goons in MAGA hats from trying to break into the courtroom and hang the judge like they almost did Mike Pence.

 

The reality, however, is that—as usual—what Trump is claiming isn’t true.

 

A park right across the street from the courthouse has been set aside for his fans to demonstrate. Despite his best efforts to turn Lower Manhattan into a circus, they simply haven’t shown up. Last Friday, with the trial set to begin on Monday, his campaign sent out a fundraising email warning that there were “72 hours until all hell breaks loose.” Three days later, Trump himself urged his supporters to flex their political muscle in a post on Truth Social: “GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY!”

 

Crickets.

 

Maybe MAGA diehards have learned to avoid protests since January 6, either because they fear prosecution or because they’ve been convinced that any rally of Trumpists with the potential for mayhem must be a false-flag operation organized by the Deep State. Or it may be a simpler matter of Trump’s base skewing much older than the average demonstrator at Columbia: Skipping out on class to protest is one thing, skipping out on paid employment to do so is quite another.

 

Or, perhaps, more Republicans than we realize are so checked out from Trump’s trials that his cries for support are falling on deaf ears. Their favorite news outlets aren’t covering the subject intensively, probably calculating that news of his criminal jeopardy hurts him more than it helps him now that the general election campaign has begun. The whole point of right-wing media at this point is to gatekeep information to serve Trump’s needs; the wrinkle this time is that Trump himself doesn’t seem to agree with their assessment of what his needs are.

 

Whatever the reason that his supporters aren’t showing up for him, their absence appears to have given him a terrible case of protest envy.

 

But it shouldn’t. He should be grateful that they’re not emulating the scene at Columbia. Because, as almost always happens when countercultural movements get restless, what’s happening there and at other universities across the nation is plainly doing the underlying cause more harm than good.

 

***

 

The MAGA movement doesn’t overlap much with the campus Palestinian movement (yet) but they have this much in common: They’re each prone to menacing their opponents … and each prone to extreme levels of cringe.

 

Get on the wrong side of either and you might find yourself threatened with death. It’s just that, in some cases, the cause of death is likely to be the intense vicarious embarrassment you feel on their behalf.

 

The entire Trump era in Republican politics has been a mix of menace and cringe. The supreme example is the 2020 post-election period, which simultaneously presented the greatest threat to the American constitutional order since the Civil War and played out like a comedy of errors by a gaggle of idiots convinced that some sort of Chavista conspiracy had led to the rigging of the country’s voting machines.

 

When I think of that period, I think of rioters swinging at cops outside the Capitol on January 6—and of Rudy Giuliani inexplicably calling a press conference at a landscaping company or addressing the media with hair dye running down his face.

 

Menace and cringe. Trump himself is the personification of it. When he hawks a Bible for the low, low price of $60 a pop, you worry about him weaponizing religion for his political ends. But you also laugh and groan that this irrepressible lifelong huckster still can’t say no to making a quick buck, this time on the backs of his fans’ earnest Christian devotion. Ditto for when his evangelical supporters treat him as some sort of divine savior, replete with prophecies about his return to power. How can you laugh at something that ominous? How can you not laugh at something that cringe?

 

Every popular demagogue will be a blend of the two, I think. The cult of personality that builds around their charisma will inevitably turn menacing toward detractors, which is frightening. But because they’ve been warped by narcissism and the encouragement of yes-men, they tend to come off as ridiculous in their personal affect. Even the less histrionic among them, like Vladimir Putin, can’t resist cringeworthy orchestrated spectacles of his physical prowess.

 

The Hamas apologists at Columbia don’t belong to a cult of personality, but their movement is also brimming with menace and cringe.

 

The “menace” part has been amply covered online this week, including by my colleagues at The Morning Dispatch. Jewish students hearing shouts of “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you!” and “Go back to Poland!” might understandably suspect that the “anti-war” faction in their midst isn’t as “anti” as it claims to be. And how could it be? The umbrella groups responsible for pro-Palestinian campus protests have been explicit about their eliminationist ambitions toward Israel. These people, so incensed by the supposed “genocide” that’s taking place, aren’t calling for coexistence between the two sides; they’re demanding the by-any-means-necessary replacement of one by the other.

 

“Palestine must be free from the river to the sea” is many things—but it ain’t subtle. 

 

Progressives will tell you that the degree of menace caused by the protests has been exaggerated by Israel’s supporters, possibly to distract from the carnage in Gaza. But the people closest to the action sure do seem to be taking it seriously. Columbia has switched to hybrid learning for the end of the semester to assure everyone’s safety; a rabbi on campus went as far as to encourage Jewish students to go home and stay home until things have calmed down. The NYPD temporarily established a “large presence” around the campus.

 

The menace from these protests is real. But the vibe is also so, so cringe.

 

I mean, really:

The spectacle of Ivy League twerps cosplaying as jihadists is so deeply embarrassing that I wonder if the worst punishment these people could face will be having to suffer through the occasional reminder in future years of what they got up to while they were at Columbia.

 

Many of the protest tactics seen this week are familiar and all the more humiliating for being so. The “tent city” encampment by the aggrieved and unbathed recalls the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 and the “CHAZ” fiasco in Seattle in 2020. The “human chains” being formed to keep interlopers out of the occupied space (“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!”) is reminiscent of the Mizzou protests of 2015. A movement that’s serious about convincing the average Joe to take it and its cause seriously would not seek to claim “turf” for itself and then attempt to exclude others from it, as doing so is disruptive and menacing—but it’s also ultra-cringe, as it reeks of juvenile utopian LARPing. What red-blooded American doesn’t instinctively roll their eyes right out of their head at a scene of malcontent college brats setting up their own little commune?

 

And not just any commune but a commune dedicated to celebrating Hamas’ cause. When a writer at The Atlantic visited Columbia and asked one protester what she thought would happen to the Jews of Israel if she and her comrades ever got their “from the river to the sea” wish, she replied, “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.” Which is remarkably menacing in its callousness.

 

But also so cringe that I can’t read it without blushing.

 

The ultimate symbol of menace and cringe at Columbia right now is the face mask that many protesters are wearing. The COVID pandemic is long over and the demonstrations are happening outdoors, so there’s no need for health precautions. Rather, the masks serve as a sort of tribal totem of “safety” that the left embraced four years ago: “It’s about collective safety, and it’s also about connecting this COVID neglect to the very issues that we’re marching on the DNC for,” one organizer told Semafor about the practice.

 

But the masks are also useful for the same reason masks have always been useful to outlaws and rebels. They help disguise the wearer’s identity.

 

Wearing a mask outdoors in 2024 to prevent COVID-19 transmission in the name of “collective safety” is the dictionary definition of cringe. Wearing it because you don’t want to be held accountable by the authorities for actions that you might deserve to be held accountable for is menacing.

 

And here’s the thing about menace and cringe: As persuasion tactics, they’re not very effective, are they?

 

***

 

That’s a trick question of sorts. Neither Trump’s movement nor the Hamas fan club at Columbia is trying to persuade anyone.

 

Trump is so disinclined toward persuasion that he won’t even reach out to disgruntled voters in his own party. Instead, his lackeys in the populist establishment vow to “eradicate” them from the GOP.

 

Many pro-Palestinian activists are so disinclined toward persuasion that they embrace tactics that they surely must realize will alienate many more people than they attract. To quote Democratic Sen. John Fetterman, “If you show up in a Starbucks with a bullhorn and start yelling at people, that doesn’t make you noble—it just makes you an a–hole.”

 

Both movements are fundamentally countercultural and so their tactics tend toward disruption and insurrection, not persuasion. They hope to smash and ultimately replace the systems they oppose, which leaves them prone to menacing their opponents. Those opponents can’t be reasoned with, many would tell you, and so more aggressive forms of pressure are needed to force political change.

 

Countercultural political movements will always incline toward menace, I think, unless they explicitly renounce it as a tactic. The American civil rights movement of the 1960s famously renounced violence in the belief that doing so would gain it the moral high ground and ultimately the sympathy of undecideds against segregationist forces that would—and did—resort to menace to try to stop it.

 

But the civil rights movement wasn’t truly countercultural. Its goal was to build support among the wider public and work within the political system to pass laws that would protect the rights of African Americans, not to smash the system entirely. As passionate as it was about its cause, I wouldn’t call it romantic: It was coldly strategic about its means and ends and demanded self-discipline from its supporters.

 

Trump’s movement and the Hamas campus movement are romantic movements. They attract people who find inspiration in undoing their enemies, not winning them over. They each work within the system to a degree: Trump ran for elected office, of course, and pro-Palestinian progressives are keen for Joe Biden to know that they won’t be voting for him this fall. But the “go back to Poland!” crowd isn’t ultimately interested in negotiating with Israel about the borders of a Palestinian state, just like Trump isn’t ultimately interested in serving a lame-duck second term in which he gets nothing done.

 

Both seem open to what we might call “extraordinary measures” to advance their agendas in a way that the civil rights movement was not, which is menacing.

 

It also guarantees that they’ll attract supporters whom we might politely call … cringe.

 

College activists are inherently cringe. Their political passions grossly outstrip their knowledge of the world and their youthful idealism encourages them to equate radicalism with personal virtue. Unless you sympathize deeply with their cause, it’s impossible to take them seriously. They’re romantic fools with too much time on their hands; most of them will leave their college activism behind as just another “phase” they went through.

 

But all of that makes them obvious recruits for the radical chic of the “from the river to the sea” crowd.

 

Trump’s movement attracts a different sort of cringe. By definition, a countercultural populist movement will appeal to an unusual degree to the fringes of society. And the more it depends on that fringe for political support, the more that fringe will expect the movement to take seriously some of their fringier norms and beliefs.

 

Hysterical anti-vaxxism, QAnon, knee-jerk conspiracy-theorizing about every political setback: Each of these is exceedingly cringe but it was inevitable that Trump’s movement would be filthy with all of it. His politics and personal style promised a dramatic break with the way government has traditionally been conducted in America and disaffected fringers were drawn to that promise. Marjorie Taylor Greene is the ne plus ultra of the phenomenon, having gone from a kook on Facebook to a member of Congress in a few short years without shedding most of her kooky beliefs. No one in government is more cringeworthy, yet few hold more sway over grassroots Republican opinion.

 

If you doubt the degree to which cringe has infected Trump’s GOP, pour a stiff drink and watch this:

It’s no coincidence, I think, that when Tucker Carlson isn’t busy musing about aliens he’s one of the more sinister nationalist demagogues in media. His political cause writ large is to convince the American right that enemies of the Western liberal order, not its champions, rightly deserve their sympathy. That’s why he’s forever running interference for Putinist Russia and, of late, accusing the Jewish state of persecuting Christians. He’s an apologist for some of the most menacing people on the planet.

 

But don’t forget that Tucker’s also the guy who did segments about testicle tanning in his old gig at Fox. This is what it means to go all-in on countercultural politics: When you resolve to challenge the conventional wisdom about everything, you end up challenging the conventional wisdom about … everything. And before you know it, you’re mumbling about aliens under the sea and hooking your scrotum up to a UV light.

 

Which is some serious cringe.

 

And so we’re left with the split screen in Manhattan, where the story of a makeshift shanty town erected by snot-nosed Jew-baiters is playing out alongside the saga of a coup-plotting cult leader who can’t convince his disciples to take a day off work and protest for him. Extremely disturbing—and laughably silly. That’s our politics all around now.