The NYT put together a video about three Yale professors--two historians and philosopher Jason Stanley--who are leaving Trump's America to go to the University of Toronto. I had repeatedly urged Jason to take the Toronto job, because of the direction this country is going, and because he himself had elicited abuse from Trump's "communications" hatchet man Steve Cheung, a rather bad sign). Towards the end of the video, Professor Stanley makes a particularly striking remark: "You know you're living in a fascist society when you're constantly going over in your head the reasons why you're safe." As he concludes, we want to live in a society where we all know we're safe! IIn the U.S., we do not.
Talk of deporting U.S. citizens, as well as arrests of permanent residents for lawful political speech, does indeed make one wonder ("well, I'm not a criminal [or am I in the eye of the Trumpistas?], U.S. citizens have not [yet!] been targted for lawful political speech" etc.). A colleague elsewhere told me awhile back that when I didn't post for a few days a couple of months ago, he started to wonder if.... I'm quite sure I'm lowdown on the hit lists, but the reality is that in a political environment like this almost every civilized person has to wonder about their safety.
Proving that he doesn't know the relevant facts or didn't make it to the end of the video, Benjamin Wittes offers this commentary on the video by the three Yale professors (I intersperse a few comments):
To hear them tell the story...they are evading arrest.
Which would be all very well and good were the situation remotely as bad for tenured professors as they seem to think. But the Hannah Arendt chic they have going on is really weird coming from some of the world’s most privileged intellectuals. These people have the ultimate job protection from a university with an endowment that would make a hedge fund blush.
Apparently Mr. Wittes missed that Columbia University threw an entire department under the bus because of pressure from the Trumpistas. He is apparently also unaware of the long list of tenure-stream professors who lost their jobs for political reasons, from the McCarthy Era to the present (and including at Yale, if one goes back to the late 1960s and early 1970s).
There are people in this country who face real dangers. Video clips of some of them run through the Yale Three’s video oped. None of those people is positioned remotely like Snyder, Shore, or Stanley. Does Jason Stanley really imagine that his work is so important that the Trump administration is going to come after him for it? I can’t tell you whom Stephen Miller is gunning for next, but I doubt very much he’s thinking too hard about the author of “How Fascism Works” and “Erasing History.” Not throwing shade on these books, but please.
Here Mr. Wittes reveals he has no idea of the relevant context, including the fact that Trump's communications director has attacked Jason personally. That's not a good sign. Jason appears on television, Trump's only medium; if he stuck to writing books, he would be a lot safer! As they say about investments, past performance is not a guide to the future, but the general trend with the Trumpistas is inflation of the criteria for persecution (first it was only to be criminal illegal immigrants, now it's any and all illegal immigrations, now it's lawful permanent residents with the wrong political views, etc.).
These are the people who should be out there doing stuff, taking risks so that others who actually have real vulnerabilities don’t have to. They should be leading from the positions of incredible safety they occupy. If they don’t want to do that, fine, no judgment. As I say, we should all live where we want. But making videos congratulating yourself for abandoning the United States is just thumbing your nose at the people you leave behind in situations of much greater risk than you ever had.
I am curious about the interpretation of the video as "self-congratulatory": they are giving their reasons, of which the paramount ones are fear for the future, including the future for their children. And the relevance of this for the NYT is as a wake-up call to everyone else.
I put my money where my mouth is on this point. I don’t have tenure. The political environment scares me too. And I’m as vain as the next guy who writes in public. Yet I try to remember that those videos of Rumeysa Öztürk being abducted off the street and the Venezuelan prisoners at our rent-a-gulag (both of which show up in the Times video) aren’t about me. And I try to use my position of relative safety—I’m a citizen, I’m a public figure, I’m white, and I have resources—to be loud. And I have tried to continue being so—in much more legally confrontational ways than Yale professors tend to. And no, the police have not come. Nobody has told me I can’t do the things I do. Because the risk of our current political decay isn’t borne by people like me. It’s what the kids call “privilege,” and it conveys a certain obligation.
Mr. Wittes here confirms Jason's final point: the political situation is so pathological that commentators are now explaining why they're safe, even if others are not.
Longtime readers know I have had many disagreements with Jason, but those are trivial by comparison to the seriousness of the current political moment. One can quibble about "labels" (fascists, authoritarian, etc.), but it doesn't matter: the Trumpistas are not normal political actors, except perhaps by the standards of the Jim Crow South when it came to Blacks (the clearest precedent for fascist/authoritarian politics and law enforcement in U.S. history of the last century). As I said at the start, I urged Jason to take the Toronto job, given how exposed he is. If I were his lawyer, and being a generally prudent person, I would have discouraged him from making this video, given some of the malevolent authoritarian hatchet men in Washington DC. But I think he is right to go. And I am sure he is not the only one thinking about going.
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