Two-Dimensional, Morally Disoriented "Reality"

Served up by CNN’s Sreenivasan interviewing Prof. Jason Stanley

CNN’s Sreenivasan interviews Yale professor Jason Stanley. Stanley lumps together a wide range of what he considers “right wing” and facist developments. In the process he completely obscures the authoritarian tendencies on the left.

Hari Sreenivasan: Right now. We’ve also had, you know, polarization and polarization of the protests that are happening on campuses while simultaneously there is also an attack on the types of material that is allowed to be taught on college campuses. We see. You know, maybe it’s economic reasons. Maybe it’s cultural reasons and maybe a lot of factors. But we also see kind of an attack on just the idea of the humanities or liberal education.

Well we know where the journalist stands. And, surprise, his guest could not agree more.

Jason Stanley: So let’s begin with the attack on universities that is the canary in the coal mine of fascism.

Or, at other times (like Germany in the 1930s), the universities become the center of fascism. Right now, some would argue that the control that DEI and Woke Cancel Culture have exercised over who gets hired, who gets invited to speak, and who gets promoted, gives an awfully authoritarian cast to universities that claim to promote “progressive” values. Today, attacks on DEI and Cancel Culture are both dismissed as “right-wing fanaticism” (as with Stanley), and the cause of great alarm. But as Umut Ozkirimli puts it:

It is telling that most ‘progressive’ commentators who purportedly reject cancel culture [ie deny it exists] are also its foremost practitioners when it comes to debates over trans rights, leading cancel campaigns against women, lesbians and, yes, transgender people, for raising concerns about certain aspects of trans-rights activism, or even the definition of the term ‘woman’.

The same people who dismiss the “fear mongering” and “reactionary moral panics” of the anti-DEI-Cancel Culture warriors on the right, engage in precisely the same kind of fear-mongering and moral panic when it comes to the many matters about which they are sure they are right. This has led them to ally with a death cult that embodies the most toxic aspects of right-wing fascism. Thus, adopting this Jihadi right-wing fascist antisemitism into their anti-Zionist language, the DEI-Cancel-Culture Left protested aggressively against Israel and Jews at the most prestigious schools in the US and Europe starting on October 8. They not only protested dead Palestinians, they celebrated dead Israelis.

None of this makes a dent on Stanley. On the contrary, he went on Mehdi Hasan’s relentlessly propagandistic new station Zeteo, and told Rula Jabreal (dating Roger Waters) that claims of antisemitism in campus protests are nonsense. Given his commitments to the rights of others as-a-Jew, his post-October 7 persistence in defending Hamas promoters should ring alarm bells.

Here he lays out the global vision of the one-eyed Left.

Central European University was ejected from the country of Hungary by Viktor Orban for teaching gender ideology. We’re seeing this imitated point by point by American autocrats like Ron DeSantis. So autocrats know that dissent and critique comes from universities. They know that student movements are often central parts of social movements for democratic change.

Autocrats know that dissent and critique comes from universities, but since the Nazis and the Bolscheviks, democrats also know that universities can produce very dangerous, authoritarian, even totalitarian, ideas which, when enabled to dominate the public sphere, can give wings to their authoritarian tendencies. How does one fight those ideas – DEI, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, now empowered through cancel culture, all now arguably “left”-wing movements with fascistic tendencies - without registering in morally simplistic minds as “right-wing fascism.”

Look at Bangladesh. What just happened in Bangladesh? A student protesters overthrew the autocratic leader of Bangladesh. That’s the kind of thing that autocrats, authoritarians, those who want to build a one party state are afraid of. They’re afraid of student movements. What we’ve seen is we’ve seen nonviolent student protests, protest testing, American funding of a genocide in Gaza, protesting Israel’s aggression in Gaza.

Nothing says support for genocidal right-wing religious fanatics than calling Israel’s action in Gaza “genocide.” Embrace the Great Projection. Stanley illustrates, embodies, the radical moral disorientation of self-proclaimed progressive academia.

These are anti war protests, so just like the Vietnam anti-war protests and then we have moderate liberals joining the right wing authoritarian forces and cheering on police, militarized police going on campus and confronting antiwar protesters.

Anyone who can’t tell the difference between the ideals of the anti-War movements of the 1960s and the dark embrace of a death-cult – we love Hamas! – of the 2020s has so flattened history that real live experiences (history!) become mere slots for a relentlessly two-dimensional paradigm. As a result, he sees “moderate liberals” joining “right wing authoritarian forces, cheering on the militarized police (because these protesters are putting flowers in the gun barrels), without a clue as to why liberals who choose life might finally say, enough to increasingly aggressive “protestors.”

And this concerns me greatly because when the left and the center last and the liberals are separated and at each other’s throats, then the autocrats and authoritarians when history tells us this.

Disagreements between liberals and radicals register for him as “at each others’ throats,” creating an opening for the authoritarians to surge. Instead, presumably, the liberals should follow the left into their embrace of a death cult? He clearly has no idea of what consist the liberal objections to his reading of the situation.

So what we have here is an attack on universities, egged on by moderate liberals, egged on by newspapers like The New York Times.

This is astonishing. The NYT is one of the most compliant of progressive newspapers, notorious among many – not only those sympathetic to Israel – as riddled with misinformation. Readers, for example, would never come across reporting on the genocidal sermons of Palestinian imams. At most, allusions to “incitement.” If Stanley views the NYT’s few dissenting articles, critical of the Left narrative that these protests are peaceful and legitimate and idealistic, just like the ’60s, as evidence that they’re egging on the fascists, then his Overton window stretches from The Nation far left to al Jazeera far right.

And that is exactly what authoritarians want. If you look at India, for example, in 2019, more large scale student protests for Muslim equality against the citizenship Amendment Act. These were nonviolent protest, supporting Muslim equality. They were represented as anti Indian. And there was a harsh militarized reprisal to these protests.

Actually no. Despite some demonizing and violence, both the courts and the police operated effectively to limit violence on a highly volatile, even existential, issue. In the context of third-world democracies, India might deserves merit for how their political institutions, including the judiciary, dealt with what could have become either a descent into civil war or the kind of authoritarian society that Stanley depicts as already there.

So, so this idea that universities critique that universities make of of patriotism and nationalism and student movements for equality are somehow anti-national, is very familiar from authoritarian movements. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing here.

But it is possible that student movements for equality can (and have) become anti-national , even Oikophobic (repelled by their own culture). Is it possible that currently, that ecumenical move of openness on the part of university culture to the “other,” has the (hopefully unintended) impact of making the cognitive task of the Caliphators so much easier, that’s a legitimate concern not so much for “nationalists” as for patriots who recognize that, so far, only the (democratic/constitutional) nation-state has protected citizen rights.

Who’s the Islamophobe here? The person who (justifiably) fears triumphalist Islam’s threat to democratic culture? Or the person who so fears the disapproval of triumphalist Muslims (CAIR, SJP, etc.), that they not only won’t criticize them, but they’ll side with their most extreme causes?

We’re seeing a wind up, too. What if Trump wins the use of militarized force against protest?

Watch out. Our enemy’s victory will be our inability to continue protesting on behalf of genocidal death cults.

We’re also seeing a very developed attack on the greatest university system in the world. The United States has the greatest universities system in the world, and the Republican right is dismantling it with the help of what Martin Luther King called the “moderate liberal.”

Of course, this Republican right is responding to a sense that the radical Left has occupied academia over the last generation, deeply corrupting two of its greatest contributions to world culture – humanities and social studies – with a subversion of language, a substitution of a combination of ethnic diversity and homogeneity of thought for standards of merit… To the point where a chaired professor at Yale, specialist in both linguistics and propaganda, can call the claim of the death of 40,000 civilians in urban warfare a “genocide,” and think that “the whole world” will (or at least should) agree with him. As does, apparently, his interviewer.

Florida has essentially dismantled tenure. Ohio and Indiana are essentially dismantling tenure with politicized tenure review.

As if tenure review has not been politicized for decades. Why do you think academia is overwhelmingly liberal-left? When I was a graduate student in the late 1970s, it was already clear in a field like Near-Eastern studies, that certain minorities were no longer welcome (and would end up in previously WASPY think-tanks). Shortly after 9-11 2001, a Princeton graduate student in Middle Eastern Studies was advised not to study Jihad because he’d never get a job in academia (he did, and he did not and he too ended up in think-tanks).

The AAUP, the American Association for University Professor, report on Florida is terrifying. And let me conclude by pointing out a fundamental element of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is all about creating a culture of fear, and that’s what these attacks on schools and universities are doing. They’re creating a culture of fear and intimidation for anyone who criticize, criticizes the nationalist ideology that the far right is promulgating.

Note. The first point is: we (good people) should be terrified by what’s happening. The second: authoritarians are using fear-mongering to shut us up (we who have been shutting people up for over two decades) and are now selling you a death cult as a progressive cause.

It would be hard to find a more impressive combination of lack of self-awareness and projection. On the one hand, there is not even a hint of acknowledgment that Woke has been inflicting a culture of “fear and intimidation” for decades on anyone deemed insensitive - microaggressions! On the other, he projects these own (but denied) techniques – moral panics – onto one’s foes: “the nationalist ideology that the far right is promulgating.” As if there were anything on the right (much less the far-right) to compete with the sophistication and hegemony of progressive ideologies like CRT and Queer Theory.

If this is the quality of teaching at Yale, then the critics of the universities are right. This is bland, flat, mediocrity, from someone who has published widely on linguistics and propaganda!

Not to be a fear-monger, but if the fate of democracies depends on the quality of its public sphere conversation, then CNN and their guests put us in serious danger.