No Fascist USA
You don’t have to be an expert on game theory to figure out that the best defense for a liar is to go on the offense and accuse the other side of lying, and so we have the alt right fake news calling the mainstream press: fake news. This kind of thing has been going on among ill-mannered children from time immemorial, and usually it doesn’t work out very well for the liar as some adult comes along and figures out who’s telling the truth and who’s not. This assumes an adult in the room or, in a slightly different context, a respected functioning free press. It is no accident that Authoritarian governments reflexively attack the press. If relativism is taken to an absurdist degree and there is no such thing as facts, truth or agreed upon standards of decency or civility, only opinion, then one opinion is as good as another, and the opinion espoused by government is ultimately the only opinion that matters.
Opposition to such Authoritarianism is unequivocally the battle of our time and last year it was waged on college campuses though various protests against right wing advocates. Widely criticized by the press – liberal, mainstream and right wing alike – for allegedly bumping up against the first amendment right to free speech, many commentators were intent on piling on and condemning the protests as just one more example of the shortcomings of a coddled generation. Such critics would infantilize the protesters by suggesting that college is intended as a four-year debating society, nothing more, nothing less. Surely the debating society analogy is a caricature of college life during the best of times, during times such as these it is irresponsible.
This point of view presupposes that Authoritarianism poses less of an existential threat to America’s well-being than an ill- conceived war 50 years ago, when there is little reason to believe this is true. Yet who among these critics today would argue that the anti-war activists of the 60s and 70s should have stuck to their knitting and ignored the social issues of their day, though it’s obvious that as principled as the cause against the war may have been, there was self-interest involved as well, and it’s fair to say that the first amendment rights of pro-war speakers were never given a second thought.
Insofar as the 1st amendment is concerned, critics of the protesters give short shrift to the right to assemble (i.e. protest) though it deserves no less consideration than the right to free speech. While free speech is certainly a principle cornerstone of freedom and democracy, the notion espoused by the alt right that there are no agreed upon facts and everything is just a matter of political interpretation is not the foundation of democracy, but rather the foundation of totalitarianism. Thus, at the very least, it is ironic for the purveyors of such beliefs to be the benefactors of first amendment protection. But such is not to argue that any speech is immune from first amendment protection; of course, this is not the case. But it is to argue that viewing the actions of student protesters battle against Authoritarianism solely through the lens of the 1st amendment is to miss the forest for the trees.
Authoritarian threat to universities is as real as is to society at large. The right has long jealously viewed elite liberal education with suspicion, and has long sought to cleanse the universities of what they perceive as their liberal bias, even if what they call liberal bias stems largely from the commitment to critical thinking and empirical evidence that is endemic to valid education. While, of course, there is and always has been room for political diversity on college campuses, the notion that fungible political opinion is and of itself is a form of diversity that should be sought by universities on a par with racial or economic diversity is ridiculous.
Student protesters should be lauded, not criticized for their efforts to step outside their narrow self-interests for which they are otherwise widely criticized. Even if their methods have been less than flawless, who among us has not struggled in the effort to find effective means of resisting the normalization of Authoritarianism, and lest we require reminding, need glance no further than the title of this essay to remind ourselves what’s at stake.