In 2001, a radical Vietnam-era student, David Horowitz, decided to start stirring up trouble on campus again. A few years earlier, several scholars and activists began arguing that the United States should pay reparations to the descendants of slaves. Horowitz, whose politics had taken a sharp rightward turn since the 1960s, thought this was a terrible idea. So he contacted several college newspapers, seeking to place a full-page ad, during Black History Month, titled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Are a Bad Idea – and Also Racist.”
The ad, adapted from a Salon column he had published the previous year, seemed designed to stir up passions on the campuses where it ran. In it, Horowitz views reparations as “another extravagant handout that is only necessary because some blacks cannot seem to place the ladder of opportunity within the reach of others”; argued that “the demand for reparations is yet another attack on America, led by racial separatists and the political left”; ” and asked the question: “What about the debt that black people owe to America?”
Horowitz’s inflammatory arguments were not well received. Most of the newspapers to which Horowitz submitted the ad rejected it entirely. At Brown University, angry students stole thousands of newspapers in which the ad had been printed. At the University of California, Berkeley, students marched on the student newspaper’s offices, prompting its editor-in-chief to publicly apologize for running the ad in the first place. The mainstream media quickly picked up on this furor, and the press attention that followed ended up making all the students involved look like fools, while giving Horowitz exponentially more attention than the ads alone did. ‘would have had them in the first place.
Astute observers assumed that this had been his goal all along. In addition to his stance on reparations, Horowitz also harbored a grudge against American academia, which he reportedly called a “left-wing dictatorship.” (He has since written several books expounding this tendentious thesis.) The controversial publicity was clearly designed not to address the notion of reparations in good faith, but to provoke isolated and intemperate reactions among campus activists. Horowitz could then use these reactions to advance the idea that all of academia was biased and intolerant, while he, the author of books such as Hate Whitey and other progressive causes And The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America’s Future, appeared to be the righteous party. A hell of a thing!
I thought about the hubbub of Horowitz reparations this week, as I watched police officers march on college campuses across the country, tasked with clearing the encampments of students and others protesting the sinister excesses of Israel’s war in the Gaza strip. Many people have written extensively about the Gaza campus protests, the various official responses to them, the validity of the arguments made, and the relative merits of the tactics used to advance and/or suppress these arguments. But whatever your opinion on any of these topics, no matter what you think about the protests and how they unfolded, I suspect everyone can probably agree on at least one thing: no one in the history of the universe is more easily launched by bad-faith right-wing agitators than by students, professors, and administrators.
Whenever conservative demagogues look for jerks and idiots to help them make the left look like fools while advancing some stupid reactionary rhetorical topic, they know exactly where to turn: the sunny quads of American academia. Students, faculty, and administrators routinely fall into traps set by right-wing political actors, traps that are typically designed to use isolated incidents of alleged identitarian excesses on campus to denigrate liberalism more generally, thereby sending swing voters toward the All-American Party. the arms of the robust Republican candidates who will run for office that year. Colleges and universities are the American right’s favorite punching bag, because their residents never see the uppercut coming, and they never, ever learn how to avoid the blow. They are like Washington’s generals: they lose, lose, lose, lose, lose.
Transforming alleged campus excesses into a broader political narrative of liberal chaos and disorder has been a favored conservative tactic since at least the late 1960s, when Main Street disapproval of liberal-led protests youth against the Vietnam War helped derail the 1968 presidential election. an anthropomorphic sheet of sandpaper named Richard Nixon. Modern right-wing media have built their brand primarily on the backs of left-wing students and professors, whose minor protests and fringe agendas have been systematically transformed into major issues by commentators eager to denigrate academia and liberalism in general . The contemporary Republican idea that America is on the brink of collapse is largely a culture war trope propagated by activists such as Christopher Rufo, who have transformed their own deliberate misinterpretations of obscure academic disciplines such as critical race theory bogeymen with which to terrify viewers and voters into believing their heritage is under direct attack.
It is not difficult to understand why the reactionary right is so angry with academia. On the one hand, the collegial spirit of free inquiry and rational debate goes directly against Trumpian authoritarianism because we said so, not to mention the questions raised and other logical errors that animate modern Republican discourse . The identity-based disciplines found in many schools threaten a reactionary worldview rooted in the supposed superiority of a monochromatic past; Many members of the religious right, meanwhile, seem to see heresy in the way liberal arts educations attempt to teach students to think for themselves. And I have long suspected that some of today’s most duplicitous Republican pundits and politicians are motivated in part by bad memories of their time in office. own years of college, during which they felt isolated in their own conservative worldview and then transmuted those feelings into simmering, lifelong resentments.
Or maybe they’re just political opportunists who know that collegial actors will consistently take the kinds of actions that allow the law to paint them as fools. There was probably a bit of all this that worked on New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik when, a few months ago, she lured several college presidents to Congress and insisted that the Some student protesters’ use of the word “Intifada” and the phrase “from the river to the sea” amounted directly to calls for genocide, and then watched them fumble their responses in a truly embarrassing manner.
The subsequent resignations of the presidents of Penn and Harvard, respectively, were unforced errors on the part of highly educated people who, first, should have more directly questioned Stefanik’s partisan premises and, second, probably should have realized that the popular notion of campus that discourse sometimes amounts to violence would ultimately be co-opted by right-wingers eager to exploit campus unrest for their own political gain. (I often remember how, back when the rise of the social web was leading many otherwise intelligent people to profess that the Internet would soon bring about a state of digital utopia, the writer Evgeny Morozov kept saying formulate a very incisive speech: (point that almost no one wanted to hear: bad people also know how to use the Internet.) The scalps of Liz Magill and Claudine Gay were nice trophies for the ambitious Stefanik, who, according to rumors, would be in vying for Donald Trump’s vice presidency But the hearings and subsequent change in leadership also helped promote a narrative of widespread chaos on campus — a narrative that is a boon for Republicans in an election year.
So it wasn’t much of a surprise when Congress held a second round of hearings on allegations of campus anti-Semitism. And it was hardly a surprise when, eager to avoid the fate of her former peers, Columbia University President Nemat Shafik was directly receptive to her inquisitors’ premises and took a stance tougher than his predecessors against alleged anti-Semitism on campuses. And that Also It was not surprising when, in direct response to Shafik’s testimony, Columbia students set up a protest encampment on the lawn outside Butler Library, which was followed by multiple police actions, complementary protests at other schools across the country and the resulting flood of media attention. turned this fabricated campus crisis onto the front page of national news for weeks.
For the purposes of this column, let’s leave aside questions about the merits of the protests and the various police and administrative responses to them. It is incredibly obvious – at least to me – that virtually every party involved here has been steamrolled by the American right. Seeking imagery and intrigue that it could then spin into broader narratives of chaos, intolerance, and disorder during a critical election year, the right turned campus protests in Gaza into congressional hearings on campus anti-Semitism, and was convinced that everyone involved would respond in kind. clumsily that they would be able to exploit the whole thing for months.
And, believe me, that is exactly what right-wing politicians and media will do. Although campus protests may subside once the semester ends, the images and discussions that resulted from them will linger throughout the spring and summer. The right will draw false equivalences between the brief occupation of Hamilton Hall and the events of January 6; they will denigrate President Joe Biden and liberal politicians for “allowing” the protests to take place; they will incorporate it into immortal tales of decaying liberal cities and elitist intolerance; and they will make everyone involved look like fools while presenting themselves as the righteous ones – the heroes of this whole stupid situation. David Horowitz is probably very proud.
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