Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Murdoch, patriarch of the Fox News [sic] misinformation empire, fails in effort to change his trust

Hopeful, since Fox News has contributed so much to making America ungovernable and unlivable.  (See the discussion here, esp. pages 908-918.)

"Schedule F": Trump's plan to eviscerate civil service job protections for government employees

Here's a good explainer--if Trump fires 50,000 government employees (and he may fire more), it will not only wreak economic havoc in the Washington, DC metro area, it should impair the ability of government to function competently.  That may be one of the points, of course, although I assume Trump's main motivation is to have the government populated with Trump loyalists.  But since "Trump loyalist" and "competent professional" are not categories that overlap a lot, this bodes ill for the quality of federal services.

The three most alarming Trump Cabinet picks (so far)

Two obvious ones have gotten much attention:  Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Kash Patel for FBI Director.  Both evince a fascistic or authoritarian temperament and ambitions.  Putting either in charge of people with guns and authorized violence would be very dangerous in the extreme.  Ironically, as of this writing, Hegseth seems likely to be rejected not for being a Christian nationalist and authoritarian, but for being a sexist and a drunk.  I'll take that if that's the reason.  That may allow attention to shift to Patel, who is quite unhinged.

At least as dangerous, but in a different way, is the prospect of an ignoramus like RFK Jr. becoming Secretary of Health & Human Services.  Public health is the kind of social good it's easy to take for granted, until it's gone.  RFK will accelerate declining uptake for vaccines, and promises to direct research funding away from infection diseases--God forbid there's another pandemic.  Fortunately--at least for those in civilized states--the states still set legal requirements for mandatory vaccinations, but even if Illinois has 21st-century public health policies, it will be a problem if neighboring Missouri or Iowa do not.  Viruses don't respect state lines.

Unless the U.S. is very lucky, the next four years could see massive outbreaks of infectious disease, with no coherent federal response; political arrests and prosecutions (maybe murders?); and a politicized military occupying Democratic cities in search of immigrants and "preserving law and order."

"The right-wingification of UT Austin"

Alarming developments that, if they continue, will make it harder to sustain a top philosophy department.

How not to be popular with your colleagues in English

Write things like this:

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

I think this turn from teaching and scholarship to political activism is much worse in some fields, like English, than in many others, but, alas, the worst offenders may have poisoned the public understanding of the universities.  "Disciplines" (it's not clear they are scholarly disciplines) that fit Professor Clune's characterization do not belong in the Humboldtian university.  See, e.g.  (And recall some of the nincompoops quoted here, all communications and English faculty.)

NYT account of how the Congressional assault on Universities last Spring...

...led the schools to crack down on lawful political expression that House Republicans did not like.  Universities were running scared before Trump's election; imagine what next year will bring.

UPDATE:  Dr. Roger Albin at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor writes:

Thanks for posting the NYT piece on the crackdown on protests at universities. While I agree with much of what was written, I think this piece neglects an important component. The pro-Palestinian protest movement had many of the features of a typical undergraduate fad.  Participants graduate, fervor diminishes once away from campus, and much of the impetus dissapates.  In addition, what I observed here was a good deal of immature conduct. This was not the disciplined Civil Rights movement. To a considerable extent, our University administrators gave the protestors enough rope to hang themselves and the protesters did enough stupid stuff to make shutting them down fairly easy. 

An amusing polemic about the academy by an ex-academic whose specialty is...

...pissing on academia.  Some of it, admittedly, is self-serving and stupid, but some of it has enough truth in it to be amusing.  For example:

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

Clearly some truth to this, though this stuff is mostly confined to the feebler parts of the humanities and social sciences [sic], plus of course the schools of education and social work, and the various "studies" programs.  It has made inroads, sadly, into philosophy over the quarter-century, as we have had occasion to document on many occasions.

Trump's nominee for Secretary of Defense is a fairly open religious authoritarian

This is not normal.

How Trump can attack higher education: a guide

The Trump Administration will have four main weapons, one that will target wealthy private universities, the others that will affect all colleges and universities to varying degrees.   They are (1) taxing endowments; (2) adding conditions to eligibility for federal funding; (3) investigating universities for Title VI and other civil rights violations (e.g., using race in employment decisions), with possible Justice Department action and loss of federal funding; and (4) changing accreditation standards.  Some of (2) will be tied to (1), so I'll treat those together, although access to federally funded student loans and federal research funding is implicated under the others as well.

Targetting private, secular universities with large endowments

(1)  Endowment Tax.  The 2017 Trump tax cuts already introduced a tax of 1.4% on net investment income from endowments for schools with at least 500 tuition-paying students and assets valued at over $500,000 per student.  This affected only about three dozen schools, although with more moving into that category every year.  The two main lines of attack here would involve increasing the tax rate and/or expanding the number of schools affected by the tax.   So, for example, Ohio Republican Representative David Joyce has introduced a bill that would raise the endowment tax to 10% while lowering the threshold for taxation to endowments valued at only $250,000 per student.  (Georgia Republican Drew Ferguson proposed a bill excluding non-US citizens/permanent residents from the "per student" calculation!)  Perhaps most notably Senator (soon to be Vice-President) J.D. Vance introduced a bill that increases the endowment tax to 35% for private, secular institutions with at least $10 billion (which conveniently exempts Notre Dame, the only non-secular private institution which is that rich). 

And it gets worse:  Senator Tom Cotton and a California Republican in the House have introduce the "Woke Endowment Security Tax" which imposes a one-time tax of 6% on the entire 2022 assessed value of endowments at secular, private institutions worth at least $12.2 billion.  This kindly exempts the University of Chicago, but targets at least Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Penn, Northwestern, Columbia, and Washington University in St. Louis (Sen. Cotton's office says it will also affect Cornell, but I'm not sure where those numbers are coming from).  On this proposal, Yale would have to make a one-time payment of about $2.5 billion to the federal government.   Even Yale would find that difficult to pay without a firesale of assets, I expect.

What is a certainty is that the endowment tax will go up, and it will probably be applied to more schools.   For the super wealthy (like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, MIT) this will have minimal effects; for the rich but less wealthy (like Northwestern, Chicago, Cornell, Johns Hopkins etc.) this will have tangible effects on budgets and perhaps academic programs.  (In 2017, Congress also toyed with taxing educational benefits offered by universities to faculty and staff; that failed then, but I wouldn't be surprised if came back now.)

Historian Mazower on European fascism and its aftermath...

...and how that history marks an important difference between the U.S. and Europe.  Historians like Timothy Snyder have given the profession a bad reputation in many intellectual circles with their crude simplifications; Professor Mazower's nuanced analysis should help redeem that reputation!

 

Steven Walt on Chomsky and U.S. foreign policy

Mostly laudatory, as one would expect from a realist.  On the other hand, a standing weakness of internationa relations realism is its failure to investigate the "elite" who decide the nation's "interest."  Chomsky can be right about the role the capitalist elite in America play in defining the nation's interests, while a different elite determined Soviet foreign policy.  Walt's piece is, in any case, worth a read.

Things are getting very bad, very fast

In my election post-mortem post, I wrote:

With a solid Republican majority in the Senate, Trump is likely to face no obstacles to nominating the most craven loyalists to key Cabinet positions. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services? Mike Flynn as Secretary of Defense or CIA Director? John Yoo as Attorney General? Steve Bannon or Elon Musk as Secretary of the Treasury? Sean Hannity as Secretary of State? This could get very weird, and very fascist, very fast.

I thought some of these were jokes, but I was wrong.  He is nominating the abysmally dumb and ignorant RFK Jr. to be Secretary of HHS, and he has nominated a Fox TV host not as Secretary of State, but Secretary of Defense.   And then there's Matt Gaetz for AG, quite possibly the least qualified nominee he could find apart from my dog (admittedly, she did not finish law school, but she has more character).  Of course, we're not done yet.  It's possible he's throwing as much shit at the wall as possible and waiting to see what will stick.  It's also possible, and more likely, that he will use a scheme like this one (being denounced ed at The National Review of all places) to bypass the Senate altogether.  We're about to find out how craven and cowardly these Republicans are:  if they cave in the face of such a scheme, then we're entering disaster territory.

Trump is really coming for the universities

At least he didn't mention firing tenured faculty, but the idea that accreditation will be contingent on schools "defending" the American tradition and Western civilization is an invitation to a purge.   This won't happen overnight, but it could easily happen in the next three or four years.   Anyone with more details and information about these plans, please post links in the comments.  Will Chris Rufo be the next Secretary of Education? 

ADDENDUM:   I should note that if "defending" the American tradition and Western Civilization means requiring faculty to take a loyalty oath, then it is no different, legally, than the unlawful diversity statements in wide use at many schools--and, oh boy, the AAUP really screwed us all with their defense of the latter which, as I noted, opens the door for Trump.  There will be both First Amendment challenges to any such accreditation standards, and, at the private universities, breach of contract challenges.

Funniest line about the election: "The Motherfucker is back"

Here: 

To wake up the morning after Election Day was to understand the appeal of oblivion. Regaining consciousness meant assuming the crushing weight of the darkest knowledge. The Motherfucker is back.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard,” wrote American journalist H.L. Mencken in 1916. 

The rest is not worth reading, since like most of the post-election prattle it assumes, against evidence, that most voters had knowledge and well-formed preferences.

Trump sycophant Stefanik shipped off to the U.N....

...which means she won't be harassing college Presidents with her lies and innuendo during the next House sessions, thankfully.

Trump's cabinet picks, redux

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--UPDATED

Informative overview of some of the names being floated (some we mentioned the other day, many less ridiculous, and some even more egregious).  The most striking thing is how many come out of the Republican establishment that predates Trump, including his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles.  That may prove salutary.  The prospect of the corrupt Ken Paxton as Attorney General, however, is appalling, and it's possible that might even be too much for some Republican Senators.  Some of the Treasury Secretary possibilities are fairly normal members of the ruling class, who at least understand the literal monetary value of not crashing the system; some others are cranks, like Larry Kudlow.  What we do not yet know is to what extent Republican Senators will force Trump to pull back from the crazies and corrupt. 

UPDATE:  Longtime reader Roger Albin, a neurologist at the University of Michigan, writes with some very interesting observations:

It’s likely the Trump administration will see a version of what historians of the Nazi state described as “working towards the Fuhrer.”  Trump is a notoriously poor manager but his chaotic style allows him to pit subordinates against each other and avoid taking responsibility.  The Trump administation will be a polycracy, much more so than the usual Presidential administrations, with factions competing for his attention and approval.  As with the Nazis, this is likely to lead to a race to moral bottom when competing for Trump’s favor.  What I suspect is his more than incipient dementia will likely exacerbate this process. 

J.D. Vance on the universities

Here's the infamous speech.   Zieg Heil baby!

(Thanks to Rob Kar for the pointer.)

Right now, it looks like the Republicans will retain control of the House...

...which means Trump will have total control of Congress.  This will be, to put it mildly, a dangerous situation.  Perhaps enough of the remaining House races will break for the Democrats, but it seems less likely now.

Robert Paul Wolff on the election

He correctly puts the emphasis on class politics.

Election post-mortem 2024

Maybe this should be titled "America post-mortem"?  Trump, and Republicans more generally, won decisively:  Trump looks on track to win the popular vote, and perhaps to sweep all the swing states as well. 

The first bad sign came early Tuesday evening, when it became clear that Trump was winning Florida by a very substantial margin (we knew he would win Florida, but the vote tallies were, as I said on Twitter, "ominous")--a 13% margin in the end.  That was a harbinger of the "red wave" to come.  To make matters worse, the Republicans retook the Senate with at least 52 votes, and perhaps more, depending on how the close races in Nevada and Pennsylvania, especially, play out (it looks, as of this writing, like the Democrats may have squeaked through in the Wisconsin and Michigan Senate races).  A symptom of the "red wave" is the fact that the excellent Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, an actual pro-labor Democrat, lost to a Trump-annointed right-wing crazy.   Even Trump's losses in "blue" states like New York and Illinois were not by the margins one would have expected.   As of this writing, we don't know if the Republicans also won the House of Representatives:  indications are that the Democrats will recapture the House, and anyone concerned about abortion rights in particular, better hope they do!

So what does this all mean?   The most plausible explanation was summed up well by someone on Twitter:  "Spoken to plenty of Latino Trump voters, and many basically said: 'The economy sucked for me under Biden. Covid shutdowns, inflation, housing costs going up. Entonces—he's fired. Time for something new.' Sometimes it's not more deep than that."   As we noted a couple of weeks ago, quoting the historian Adam Tooze, "If we focus only on food and energy, the price shock of 2021-2 was worse than that in 1973. It is second only to the Iran-crisis shock of 1979, the crisis that put paid to what little chance Jimmy Carter had of reelection in 1980."    Add to that the "magical" correlation-is-causation thinking of the typical clueless voter (economy was better under Trump, therefore Trump caused it, therefore he will cause it again), and this is the outcome.

That means all the chatter about Trump's obvious mental and physical decline, his terrible campaign, his lack of a "ground game," the fact that most of his prior Administration thinks he is "unfit," Harris's "joyful" campaign, Republican "weirdness" etc.---all of it meant nothing.  The whole event was another vindication of Achen and Bartels' Democracy for Realists.  At least we may hope never to hear from that quack Allan Lichtman again (see #7)!

Software malfunction in Pennsylvania county delays voting, poll hours extended

A typical problem, a sensible response, but, of course, the monster child will seize on stuff like this to sow confusion and violence if he doesn't win Pennsylvania.

A funny reminder from Facebook

12 years ago, before the 2012 election, I posed the question:  "If Obama wins, will the Republican Party become more or less insane?"  We now know the answer:  way more insane!  Not that this was cause and effect...

Here's another question:  if Harris wins tomorrow, will the Republican Party keep on its "let's get crazier and more fascist" trajectory?  Probably!

Why are Democrats having such a "hard time beating Trump"?

That's the question posed by the official publication of the prudent wing of the ruling class, i.e., The New York Times.  I'll return to the NYT article in a moment, but a rather different answer is found in this paper that philosopher Gordon Barnes called to my attention:  globalization has been good for both the prudent and imprudent wings of the ruling class; it has not been so good for millions of working class people in the U.S.

But back to the NYT:

The Democrats’ challenge appears to be part of a broader trend of political struggles for ruling parties across the developed world. Voters appear eager for change when they get the chance. The ruling parties in Britain, Germany, Italy, Australia and most recently Japan all faced electoral setbacks or lost power. Mr. Trump himself lost four years ago. France and Canada might well join the list.

"Roadmap to the official count in the 2024 Election"

A useful resource from NYU's Brennan Center.  Of all the grotesque deformations of politics and national life since Trump came on the scene, the idea that there is a problem with election integrity may be the most outrageous and the most dangerous.

Meanwhile, as this NYT guide makes clear, we may not know the outcome of the election until the end of the week, if we're lucky!

Is America "too big for fascism"?

That's the thesis of this essay, which is worth a look.   I've noted before that American federalism--the traditional control of state Governors over health and safety in their jurisdiciton--was a bulwark against Trump's incompetence the first time around.   The author of the preceding essay may be right that academics and journalists "barely seem to understand how their country functions," but I am not reassured by the author's own understanding:

Consider public education, from kindergarten through grade twelve. Any American fascist worth his bright red tie would be able to subdue the schools and begin to teach MAGAdemics, or at least get all those pesky liberal books banned—all of them, because fascism doesn’t demand anything less. In the United States, there are nearly 14,000 separate public school districts with more than 94,000 elected board members. Some of the larger counties, like the battleground of Loudoun in Virginia, have a single board. Others are carved up into so many exhausting and segregated duchies that consensus can never be achieved. On Long Island, among two counties, there are 125 public school districts. A child in Hempstead and a child in Garden City, growing up a short drive from one another, will have radically different educational experiences; they will effectively live, racially and sociologically, in different countries. Either way, whether the school board is wealthy and white or poor and Black, it is designed, for better and often for worse, to resist the encroachment of any federal power. There is no such thing as a centralized education system in America. Beyond doling out cash [bold added], the Department of Education does little in this country. Our educational sprawl is Hapsburgian, with no single monarch able to dictate its direction for very long. Moms for Liberty or anything Trump-adjacent can no better cow a Democrat-dominated school board than a liberal politician can suddenly get a district in Mississippi or Alabama to stop banning Gender Queer.

Fascists already burning ballots in Oregon and Washington

Fortunately, fascists are stupid, so they are burning ballots in states that won't vote for the fascist anyway.  But this is certainly an ominous development.  

(I do want to acknowledge what a longtime reader said to me recently, which was very true, namely, that fascism would represent an intellectual improvement for Trump, who is a man strictly of resentments.   But Trump's psychological disturbance--his narcissisim, his lack of empathy, his need for adulation--makes him an instinctive fascist, as it were.)

(Thanks to Charles Bakker for the pointer.)

UPDATE:  Reader Alan Aronson writes: "The corner of Washington where the arson took place was in a Democratic area of a Republican-majority congressional district that a Democrat won last cycle in an upset" (see, e.g.).  Alas, these fascists may have been more targetted in their goal.

 

Reasons for pessimism, reasons for optimism

On the pessimism side, the familiar confusion of correlation with causation:

For many Donald Trump supporters, it is a simple matter of dollars and cents.

Late this summer, I left my home in New York City to talk to dozens of working-class people in the South, the Midwest and the West. I had no agenda except to hear what they were saying and try to understand the world from their point of view. I interviewed hairdressers and retired sawmill workers, bakers, truck drivers, laundromat managers, pit barbecue cooks, casino card dealers and even a former professional rodeo rider.

The most common term people used to describe the economy was “horrible.” A close second was, “It sucks"....

Everyone wanted better material conditions for themselves and their families, and everyone was struggling to obtain them. Some didn’t want to talk about politics. Others felt so ignored by politicians that they have disengaged from the process altogether. Everyone who offered an opinion was for Mr. Trump....

The worst inflation and the fastest rise in interest rates since the early 1980s — to well-off people, these are headlines. To working people, they are fundamental challenges to their daily lives. Working people worry much more about payday than they do Jan. 6.

Fair enough: But why turn to a lying, abusive billionaire to help them solve their economic problems? Their explanation is simple. Times were good when Trump was president. Now eggs cost nearly three times what they did four years ago, the rate on a car loan is more than 50 percent higher, and some companies are cutting hours. Mr. Trump, they think, is the candidate to turn things around.

NYT columnist David French confirms the Achen & Bartels theory of democracy

French, an evangelical Christian and a "Never Trump" Republican, writes:

Community is more powerful than ideology. If you came of age politically during the Reagan Revolution, you thought of the Republican Party as fundamentally and essentially ideological. We were the party of limited government, social conservatism and a strong national defense, and these ideological lines were ruthlessly enforced. Even after Reagan left office, ideological heresy against Reaganism was punished with the dreaded label “RINO” — Republican in name only....The story we told ourselves behind closed doors was the story we told in public — the Republican Party was a party of ideas and those ideas defined the party....

Trump has changed the equation entirely. He’s a big-government, isolationist libertine who — despite nominating half the justices who helped overturn Roe — has made the G.O.P. platform more pro-choice than it’s been in almost 50 years. Not only has he not been punished for this ideological transformation, but devotion to him is the new Republican loyalty test.

 

Don’t think for a moment this is because he won an intelligent ideological argument. When he gained a critical mass of support, millions of Republicans faced a stark choice: ideology or community?

 

....I thought ideology defined the community, but the community existed regardless of the ideology, and breaking with the community was the far graver sin.

 

And so Republicans could cling to their ideas and face the wrath of their neighbors, or they could conform, keep their friends and comfort themselves with the notion that no matter what Trump did or said, at least he wasn’t a Democrat.

Political ads this season--where to find them

If, like me, you're not in a swing state, you are missing all the political ads for Harris and Trump.  You can find them here (scroll down to "latest political ads").  They don't make for pleasant viewing, but you can satisfy your morbid curiosity if you want!

"Arizona Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and Progressive Democrats and Community Leaders Statement on Presidential Election"

This is worth reading, especially by those benighted folks who think that the atrocities in Gaza are a reason to let Trump win; an excerpt:

In our view, it is crystal clear that allowing the fascist Donald Trump to become President again would be the worst possible outcome for the Palestinian people. A Trump win would be an extreme danger to Muslims in our country, all immigrants, and the American pro-Palestine movement. It would be an existential threat to our democracy and our whole planet.

When we think of Trump in power again, we recall that even a genocide can get much worse. Trump just said that Netanhahu must “go further” in Gaza while criticizing Biden for “trying to hold him back.” His biggest donor, Miriam Adelson, who demanded in 2016 that Trump move the US embassy to Jerusalem if elected –– which he then did –– is now telling Trump to allow Israel to annex the entire West Bank. Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich, and the entire far right in Israel want Trump to win and grant Israel total free reign. We cannot give them what they want.

Trump must be defeated. The only way to defeat him is to elect Kamala Harris.

Voting for Harris is not a personal endorsement of her or of the policy decisions of the administration in which she served. It’s an assessment of the best possible option to continue fighting for an end to the genocide, a free Palestine, and all else that we hold dear.

More reasons to fear a second Trump term

Authoritarian political parties get better at undermining democratic institutions the second time around.

Trump and the rhetoric of fascists

Some useful examples (although Stalin was a tyrant, he was not a fascist, but the author has a bee in her bonnett on that subject).

When even Mitch McConnell thinks you're "despicable"...

...you probably are.

If the monster child wins....

...this will be why.  From economic historian Adam Tooze:  "If we focus only on food and energy, the price shock of 2021-2 was worse than that in 1973. It is second only to the Iran-crisis shock of 1979, the crisis that put paid to what little chance Jimmy Carter had of reelection in 1980."  The only hope is that it was 2021-22, and not 2023-24.  But still...

Here's a good reason to ignore the polls...

...from Ezra Klein at the NYT:

Back in 2016, Harry Enten, then at FiveThirtyEight, calculated the final polling error in every presidential election between 1968 and 2012. On average, the polls missed by two percentage points. In 2016, an American Association for Public Opinion Research postmortem found that the average error of the national polls was 2.2 points, but the polls of individual states were off by 5.1 points. In 2020, the national polls were off by 4.5 points and the state-level polls missed, again, by 5.1 points....

As of Oct. 10, The New York Times’s polling average had Kamala Harris leading Trump by three points nationally. That’s tight, but the seven swing states are tighter: Neither candidate is leading by more than two points in any of them.

Imagine the polls perform better in 2024 than they did in either 2016 or 2020: They’re off, remarkably, by merely two points in the swing states. Huzzah! That would be consistent with Harris winning every swing state. It would also be consistent with Trump winning every swing state. This is not some outlandish scenario. According to Nate Silver’s election model, the most likely electoral outcome “is Harris sweeping all seven swing states. And the next most likely is Trump sweeping all seven.”

Which is all to say: The polls can’t tell you the way in which they’re going to be wrong, nor by how much. But that’s what matters now.

Given what's at stake, this is quite insane, but that's where we are in this benighted country.

The impending Trump disaster

As things stand now, Trump may legitimately win the election next month; he will definitely win if the polls are again under-estimating his support as they did in 2016 and 2020.*  If he does, it will be because every visit to the supermarket is a reminder about inflation, which, combined with the "correlation is causation" principle of the ignorant, will lead to Republican votes.  

A second Trump term will be a disaster in many ways.  We have already noted the threat to the universities, but that is just the tip of the iceberg.  Public health, already weak (recall the Covid fiasco in this benighted country), will likely be destroyed: expect the return of measles, whooping cough, maybe even polio.  His tariff obsession, if enacted, would wreck the economy.   The endless corruption we have already seen will return with a vengeance (literally!). And then there is the endless vicious craziness he riles up, from the ugly attacks on Haitians in Ohio, to conspiracy theories involving metereologists!  A country can't function with this nuttines being regularly inflamed by the unhinged President.  Of course, he isn't just unhinged, he's a "fascist to the core" in the words of the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley.  That may make itself felt when he begins rounding up "immigrants" in concentration camps, which will be costly, inhumane, and have very bad spillover economic effects.  Or when he sends the military into New York and Chicago to "control" crime and illegal immigration.

AAUP is now irrelevant to the fight for academic freedom

Oh how the mighty have fallen; Committee A of the AAUP used to be a reliable defender of academic freedom, but since its capture by the enemies of academic freedom, it has been going downhill fast.   The latest absurd statement in defense of "diversity statements" reflects pretty clearly the influence of UC Davis law professor Brian Soucek (a member of Committee A), whose mistaken views we have discussed many times before (see especially).   Let me quote the appropriately scathing comments of Professor Tyler Harper (Bates College) from Twitter:

The AAUP statement insisting that mandatory DEI statements are compatible with academic freedom—and not political litmus tests—is ridiculous. DEI is not a neutral framework dropped from the sky, it’s an ideology about which reasonable people—including people of color—disagree.  I have benefited from and support affirmative action, and there are some things that fall under the rubric of DEI that I agree with. But pretending that DEI is not a political perspective or framework—when only people of one political persuasion support DEI—is a flagrant lie.  Evaluating a professor’s teaching with respect to their adherence to a DEI framework is a clear violation of academic freedom. DEI is not some bland affirmation that diversity is important and all people deserve accessible education. It’s a specific set of ideas.

Professor Harper adds:  "Recent events should have made clear that professors, particularly those of us on the left, must defend academic freedom without compromise, even when we disagree with how others use that freedom. When academic freedom is softened, we are always the ones who end up losing."

The Republican war on higher education, version 2.0

Here's what's coming down the pike, and it may be a catastrophe for higher education in America:

Top Republicans are threatening to pull billions of dollars of federal funding from some of the most prestigious universities in the US, stripping them of official accreditation to punish them for allowing pro-Palestinian protests on their campuses.

The Guardian has reviewed a video recording of a meeting in Washington last week between House majority leader Steve Scalise and the powerful pro-Israel lobby group the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). In it, Scalise outlined how he planned to unleash a massive attack against universities that fail to squash criticism of Israel.

The offensive, which would be coordinated with the White House should Donald Trump win the presidential race in November, could even threaten the existence of universities, Scalise warned. He talked about revoking accreditation, the system by which higher education institutions are approved and to which the bulk of federal funds are tied.

“Your accreditation is on the line,” Scalise said. “You’re not playing games any more, or else you’re not a school any more"....

Philosopher Michael Huemer vs. Internet blowhard Ben Shapiro on voting for Trump

This is pretty funny, especially the final bit:

Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is still planning on voting Trump, even though he knows that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. Shapiro explained that there is no cause for concern because “the guard rails held”, and Trump can’t do the same thing again since he’s not eligible to run again after his second term.

Let me tell you how I view this. Say you’re on a bus ride on a winding mountain road. You see the driver suddenly swing the wheel to the right, trying to send the bus over the cliff. Fortunately, the guard rail on the side of the road holds, and the bus bounces back onto the road. The bus driver does this repeatedly during the drive, but every time, the guard rail holds the bus back.

When you finally get off the bus, one of your fellow passengers declares that this was an excellent bus driver. He proposes hiring this driver to drive the same group to another city.

“What are you, out of your f—ing mind?” you reply. “He tried to drive us off a cliff!”

“Oh that,” says the other passenger. “The guard rail held, so what’s the big deal? Don’t worry, this next drive won’t go by a cliff. Since the rest of his driving performance was fine, we should hire him.”

That guy is Ben Shapiro.

Department of Education's OCR creates massive exception for faculty's contractual right to academic freedom

We mentioned not long ago the firing of an anti-Zionist tenured professor at Muehlenberg College, and now the Office of Civil Rights report on the case is public.  It contains two pieces of information of significance. 

First, OCR says there were "repeated reports in a single semester regarding a professor’s classroom statements and social media posts that created a potential hostile environment for Jewish students."  Faculty have no right under AAUP standards to utilize classroom time for political statements unrelated to their subject-matter.  If, as CHE reports and the OCR implies, Professor Finkelstein did that, she could be sanctioned for it.  The OCR report also says that "the college received...allegations, which the college confirmed, that the professor had entered the Hillel space on campus, photographed a student fundraising display for 'the various war efforts in Israel' and posted denigrating comments on Instagram regarding the students."   This also seems to me unprotected behavior:  students have a reasonable expectation that their lawful political speech on campus will not be photographed by faculty for purposes of extramural denigration of them.

Much more alarming, however, is that the OCR has now put its imprint on the proposition that there is a "Title VI obligation to take steps reasonably calculated to redress any hostile environment related to shared ancestry affecting the education program or activity, if one exists, even if the conduct occurs on private social media and involves political speech. Students had reported significant anxiety and fear resulting from the professor’s comments in class and on social media that impacted their access to education" (emphasis added).  The idea that the lawful extramural speech in private about political topics can form the basis for sanctioning a faculty member is a massive infringement on the existing contractual rights of academic freedom under AAUP standards.  The fact that students reporting "anxiety and fear" based on "comments...on social media" can be a factor a college may consider in imposing sanctions is not just a "weaponizing" of Title VI, it turns Title VI into a nuclear warhead directed at otherwise lawful political speech by faculty.

The military's obligations to the U.S. President

An interesting perspective from philosopher Graham Parsons, a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  (You'll note his by-line notes specifically that he is not speaking for the Academy or the militiary.)  I hope Professor Parsons's view has some influence.

Why is this race so close? There is no mystery

The "undecided" or "waivering" voters have no idea what's going on and do not understand cause and effect.  Consider this from the latest NYT polls showing an essential tie in the key Northern battleground states:

The polling results fit a recurring theme with voters in battleground states: Many tend to believe that Mr. Trump’s time in office helped people like them, and they worry that Ms. Harris’s policies would hurt people like them.

For these voters, economic correlation is causation:  if the economy was good under Trump, Trump caused it.  In fact, Trump's policies were not good for people of average income, but to know that you'd have to know something about his actual policies (e.g., his tax cuts).  (Interestingly, voters give Trump a pass on the pandemic:  they know he didn't cause that.  On the other hand, they apparently don't know how badly he handled it, but, again, that would require actually paying attention to his malign influence on health policy.)  (Achen and Bartels in Democracy for Realists discuss various cases in which correlation is treated as causation by voters, including some pretty bizarre ones.) 

Conversely, because substantial inflation occurred under Biden, he caused it:  correlation is causation and thus responsibility.  The role of the pandemic and the disruption in supply chains in producing inflation is a consideration unavailable to the ignorant.

The problem for Harris is that every time voters walk into the supermarket they are reminded that prices of most stuff they buy is 15-20% higher than under Trump.   (I'm not an especially alert shopper, but even I am astonished at times.)  As the NYT also reports, "As for the issues that matter most to swing voters, pocketbook economics is No. 1 by far." There's just no way around that, and it may be enough to return the monster child to office.  Harris's pitches to the prudent wing of the capitalist class won't change this.

Rousseau on Trump's lies about Haitan immigrants...

...with some help from political theorist David Lay Williams.

Talk about election interference

Does anyone doubt that Netanyahu picked this moment to escalate a war with Hezbollah in Lebanon (and, by proxy, Iran) in order to try to help Trump? The clueless voters who decide elections will pick up something about a conflagration in the Mideast, and will think, "We need a tough guy in office [not a mere woman!]."  With Trump in office again, Israel will have an even greener light to engage in mass murder wherever and whenever it wants.

Trump-Harris debate last night, and the polls

I watched a little last night, and a bit more today.   Harris was, of course, lightyears better than Biden, and she did make some good points.  But the monster child was not as bad as the gloating on social media would have led one to think (of course, the gloating is partisan, although even some Trump loytalists have admitted Trump lost).  He, in fact, hammered Harris on some real vulnerabilities (e.g., she has no policies), and some of her responses were substantively pretty feeble.  When she hammered him for his crazy tariff ideas, he replied, correctly, that Biden-Harris have left the China tariffs in place.  She never responded to that point.  I can only conclude that the gloating is a result of how despicable Trump is, and what a relief it is to have a moderately competent "debater" on the stage, rather than Mr. feeble-minded.  (Putting his psychological health to one side, the monster child is clearly not as cognitively feeble as Biden:  he is quick on his feet, and quick to lie on point.)

I gather as time went on, Trump became more unhinged, but the fact that Harris scored what seem to anyone sapient good points doesn't mean the election will be anything but obscenely close.

"Authoritarians...are only too aware that universities are primary sites of critique and dissent"

Certainly true in recent decades, although at other times universities have been complicit in tyranny, rather than sites of resistance.  If Trump wins (which is still a very live possibility), he has various tools at his disposal to undermine even the wealthy private universities, ranging from withholding federal aid on (fake) grounds that universities are discriminating against Jews, to taxing university endowments, to conditioning federal aid on maintaining artifically low tuition.  

Hitler's 1932 campaign

In his most successful campaign, Hitler didn't run on Jew hatred, or Lebensraum, he ran on a promise to heal the economic despair of the Great Depression (which he actually did, but that's another matter):

("Our last hope:  Hitler.")

Trump is no Hitler, despite certain affinities:  unlike Hitler, for example, Trump has no core ideology.  And the significant inflation of the last few years (which is dramatic and visible to every voter every time they go to the supermarket) falls far short of the crisis of global capitalism that was the Great Depression.  Yet our election is still a toss-up, although at least the Democrats have a chance now.  But throwing gold-plated bones to the ruling class is not the path to Democratic victory.  Sherrod Brown, an actual pro-worker Democrat, is going to win re-election to the Senate in "deep red" Ohio, a state Trump is forecast to win by 5-10 points.  What a shame Brown isn't heading the national ticket.

Is it a "problem" that there are so few political "conservatives" in the American academy?

Most contributors to the interesting CHE symposium seem to agree it is, which by my lights is tantamount to admitting that they don't think their academic fields are Wissenschaften.  My essay takes a rather different approach:

That someone is a “conservative” is as relevant to a faculty appointment as the fact that they prefer the Rolling Stones to the Beatles, or rock climbing to chess. Political tastes deserve as much consideration as other personal characteristics when it comes to hiring scholars, which is to say, they deserve none. (Indeed, to consider political tastes at all is illegal at public universities, one of the problems with “diversity” statements.) I’ll return, below, to the possible exceptions to the preceding, but the rule is clear enough.

The Humboldtian ideal of the university, to which we in the U.S. are self-consciously heirs, is one in which the only subjects taught are those that are “scientific” (wissenschaftlich), in the German sense of that term. Scientific fields involve rigorous and teachable methods for investigating and acquiring knowledge about their subject matters. In the Humboldtian university of the 19th century — when Germany was the world leader in almost every academic discipline — Wissenschaft included not only the natural sciences, but history, classics, and many other “human” (or social) sciences. Max Weber’s plea for “value neutrality” in the human sciences was made against this background: A scientific method, Weber argued, is not a politically partisan method.

These days there is a tendency, especially in the feebler parts of the academy, to scoff at the Weber/Humboldt ideal, which draws a bright line between science and politics. This is a mistake, even if the relationship between partisan political values and Wissenschaft is more complex than Weber allowed. Political and moral values, for example, can influence the choice of what to study with scientific methods: Should a scholar investigate the role of the capitalist class in Hitler’s seizure of power, or the relationship between race and intelligence? Political and moral values may also affect tolerance for the weakness of supposedly scientific methods (think of the methodological intransigence of neoclassical macroeconomics despite decades of predictive failures)....

Reforming those defective scientific disciplines is difficult, given academic freedom, but it should not be done in terms of parochial and highly context-sensitive "conservative" and "liberal" categories.  As Mark Lilla, a humanities professor at Columbia, candidly admits:

Today genuine conservatives who fit within the long tradition of thought that includes Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Michael Oakeshott are increasingly rare birds. Conservatism, in the old sense, has not changed. Rather, Republican politicians, many think tanks, and right-leaning young people who live online have abandoned the tradition and embraced instead Trumpian populism and far-right reactionary influencers who recycle many old fascist ideas.

It's true that fascists are underrepresented in the academy.  Is that a problem to be fixed?

Killing hostages is *also* a war crime

Worth remembering that Israel does not have a complete monopoly on them in Gaza.  Hostage families are, correctly, also pointing the finger at Netanyahu, the worst leader in the history of Israel, who deserves to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell.

Trump can still win this election (lawfully)

Those who are big consumers of "election news" and "polls"--which probably includes many readers of this blog--probably have the sense that Harris is going to win this election.   God knows (if S/He existed, that is) I hope the monster child is defeated, and Harris/Walz prevail.   But the reality is that this is very, very far from a sure thing.  The NYT "poll tracker," whose averages are weighted towards polls with more reliable track records, shows Harris leading Trump by just two points nationally, and shows her leading by similarly small margins, or just tied, in all the key battleground states.  2020 polls badly underestimated Trump's support, despite having been burned in 2016 for the same problem.  Are they now accurate?  I have no confidence they are, especially if the underlying problem (as many suspect) is that more Trump voters don't respond to polls.  In 2020, the gold standard NYT/Siena poll had Biden up by 14 points nationally right before the election; Biden's actual margin of victory was 4.5%.  All the good TikTok vibes for Harris are nice and happy, but they don't mean much, since TikTok is not, shall we say, representative of the population at large.  I'd be a lot more comfortable if Harris's margin were more like 5-6%, rather than 2%.   The fact that it is still close is, by itself, appalling, but telling about the pathological condition of the United States.