Complicity
Kudos to Dave Barry for being very funny over Independence Day. I mean, very funny. Barry usually gets a chuckle or two out of me but I’ve never found him to be a regular source of gut busters until now. It’s really top-notch comedic gold and if you want to laugh I recommend you read it, because I’m not going to give you much to laugh about.
I could make jokes about those large institutions of which I am a part and which have completely failed us in the current crisis. But at the moment I feel mainly disgust and sadness. The surrender of Harvard last week to the extortionist tactics of Trump and his band of toadies feels like a major defeat; the kind of thing American higher ed might forever look at as its Waterloo, and the really aggravating thing is that most schools weren’t even on the field. Some two hundred universities signed a letter backing Havard. The only one here in Georgia that I’m aware of was the tiny Agnes Scott College. All the others tucked their tails between their legs and spent a lot of time looking at their shoes or congratulating themselves for being too smart to be harmed by the Rapist in Chief. They will reap the whirlwind.
I’m sure it’s difficult running a large organization in which tens of thousands of people have a stake, and I’m sure it’s particularly difficult to put that organization in the path of an autocratic steamroller. But if you run such a body and you can’t do that, maybe you’re the wrong person for the job. To run and hide in the hopes that the storm may pass is moral turpitude. What is happening is not an act of God; it’s an authoritarian takeover, and if you have professed principles which run counter to that, this is the time to defend them. And without institutional opposition, what hope can the rest of us have?
The abdication of moral responsibility has been for me a far harder pill to swallow than the gullibility or unseriousness or even the festering hatred that seethes in the hearts of so many of my countrymen. People are people and, to paraphrase George Carlin, half of them are below average. It is the people in positions of responsibility that baffle me. I studied the Holocaust in the fifth grade. I read Bradbury in middle school and Orwell and Huxley in high school. I learned about American history from the Jamestown colony through the Civil War, both World Wars and the Civil Rights movement. It was never not a story of the principles enshrined, if imperfectly, in the Constitution. Indeed, so much of the history of this country has been a project of correcting the flaws of its original design.
I suppose it’s a product of having grown up in one of the most stable, prosperous, and peaceful periods in human history that I should have developed the idea that these principles had grown to form a steel barrier between our democracy and the howling storm outside. That we were invulnerable; that reverence for liberty and tolerance and a relatively gentle society constituted an impermeable bedrock. And even when the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich began to encourage the growth of weeds around the buttresses of the nation, I still believed that the bulk of the educated elite had read the same things I had and had taken the same lessons.
Clearly, that was false. And here we are, barreling down the waterslide of history with all of its familiar turns and terrors. The ablation of higher ed from the conversation is indeed almost behind us, many having chosen to submit in advance of any threats (Georgia universities began dismantling their DEI programs at the behest of the talking ham in the Chancellor’s office almost two years ago). This is not a historical aberration: almost ten percent of German universities published, unprovoked, declarations of loyalty to Hitler within the first few months of his rise to power. One particularly egregious moral void involved the medical department of Berlin University (later Humboldt University), which had preemptively fired all of its Jewish staff by April 1 of 1933, just two months after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, even though the law ordering this action nationwide didn’t go into effect until a week later.
Now admittedly, it is more likely, given the history of anti-Semetic thought in Germany, at least as far as I understand it from Daniel Goldhagen, that many university staff and faculty were quite sympathetic to the Nazi movement, and were thus complicit in a way that American university staff and faculty are perhaps not. It is equally possible that I am merely blind to the moral vacuity of many of my American brethren. In either case, as John Stuart Mill famously stated, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” This quote has been much mangled over the centuries before arriving at John F. Kennedy’s simpler formulation that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Kennedy attributed this to Edmund Burke, but to my mind Burke’s statement is superior, as it gets to the heart of the failure of American higher ed, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
Association. That was the path, just as it has always been for those seeking to stop authoritarian movements. In How Democracies Die, Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt highlight a couple of cases in which countries seemingly bound for autocracy—Belgium in the 1930s is a prime example—saw the formation of political fronts consisting of all those parties which viewed their democratic backsliding as a greater danger than whatever near-term political issues were at stake in those days. In unity there is great power against avaricious and hateful movements. Conversely, wallowing in one’s own perceived brilliance for having temporarily stayed the roving eye of fascism even as unrealized allies go to their doom—well, pyrrhic victories are definitionally of no more value than defeats. We all become unpitied sacrifices.
As July strains toward August, barely six months into the Trump era, we, the United States, have constructed an actual honest to God concentration camp, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz—a collection of tents surrounded by razor wire, plopped in the middle of an inhospitable Florida swamp infested not only with alligators but with a far more effective killer: mosquitoes. The temperatures sit day after day in the high 90s, and the dripping wet air is nearly unbreathable. Into each tent is packed 32 inmates, all sharing a single water source—a toilet. People revel in this cruelty; showing up to take photos in front of the camp sign, buying hats and t-shirts, acts of wanton depravity we have long used to distinguish the bad guys from the good in movies and TV shows.
We aren’t actively gassing or shooting the inmates of this camp, but one should remember that they didn’t gas people in Dachau either. The camps in Germany were merely a place to house people, well away from the courts, until they could be shipped off to black holes in other countries, where they could be exterminated out of the view of German citizens. We, in fact, started with shipping people—illegally—to prisons in other countries where they are literally tortured. How many have died already? How many more will die?
Against that backdrop, patting oneself on the back for avoiding the ire of the Trump administration seems grotesque, a bureaucratic version of Jewish collaborators in camps and ghettos seeking to save their own skin by sacrificing those around them. It’s anyone’s guess what will happen next—sometimes it seems that the unpopularity of Trump’s program will be his undoing. But it’s not a matter that can be left to chance.
“Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable....” said local hero Martin Luther King, Jr, “Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”
To that notion I would pair another, from Kurt Vonnegut, "We are never as modern, as far ahead of the past as we like to think we are."
