How Courage, Kindness, and Creative Iconoclasm Can Counter the Tramp of Fascist Feet
His devotees love his dark-Disney rebellion so unconditionally that they mawkishly march to his every whim even if his cronies in Congress and on Fox News do so out of a snake-oily salesmanship.
As a lecturer, I’m alarmed by this new wave of attacks on our institutions. Although education in particular has always, more or less, been under the boot of conservatives – consider Governor Ron DeSantis and his anti-woke campaign in Florida – it was nothing near the level it is today. I’m not worried about my job so much, although there’s a measure of that, but more the sheer Trumpian vindictiveness stomping on good schools like Columbia, Harvard, the University of Virginia and, most recently, UCLA. I find these aggressions especially galling considering 17 percent of Congress members have Ivy League degrees, as does Trump, his VP, and DeSantis.
To be clear, conservatives have an absolute right to say what they will about higher ed, even if they and their children took or will take advantage of it. For me, however, their current goose-stepping upon our storied fixtures (including the press, law firms, and even museums) violates not only the Constitution and the rights of citizens, including educators and students alike, but is also an assault on the very founding. The First Amendment aside, Thomas Jefferson’s self-inscribed tombstone states flatly that he’s the Father of the University of Virginia without even mentioning he was a two-term president. That’s some heavyweight advocacy for educational independence.
I also went to Columbia, by the way, but only after close to two decades caught in the hamster wheel of drug-war incarceration – wherein I had to break bread regularly with white supremacists – and can factually state that I’ve never been even slightly indoctrinated by either. I’m against trans athletes in women’s sports, for one, and said so in The “Washington Post.” I also published a column entitled “The Hamas T-Shirt Fan Club” criticizing the pro-Palestinian protests I witnessed daily on campus, and have unflinchingly affirmed that I’m a pro-police ex-con and not at all in tune with the coddling of criminals in my home town of San Francisco. I do in fact teach DEI, but only in its direct relation to the D of I and the subsequent documents that cemented its footsteps. So I take it personally when the Don’t Tread on Me crowd are allowed to tread all over me and mine, their feet reeking of lies, broken oaths, and a draft dodger. But even more infuriating is that our beliefs are as valid and as protected as theirs, an absolute lost on far too many. Luckily the First Amendment – you know, the one that comes before the Second – still allows me to respond in any way that I see fit.
I lecture at UC Berkeley; composition in spring and fall, creative writing over the summer, and in all of my classes the theme is the same: Conformity Sucks, with an added emphasis on natural rights. My composition classes in particular stress how it was almost always iconoclasts who threatened and sometimes overthrew the often-robotic conformity that the mainstream lent to oppression, with Thurgood Marshall, MLK, Rosa Parks, and the very recently tread upon Harvey Milk set as prime examples. But for my summer courses iconoclasts also make great fictional characters. Our literature and pop culture are indeed replete with them – think of Disney alone and its slew of fashionably rebellious protagonists like Ariel, Belle, Merida, and Mulan. Nor is it any accident that they’re all women.
But there’s a shadier side of trendy iconoclasm that frequently leads to suck-up conformity, and of which Trump is a definitive example. His devotees love his dark-Disney rebellion so unconditionally that they mawkishly march to his every whim even if his cronies in Congress and on Fox News do so out of a snake-oily salesmanship. What I try to instill in my students is that it takes critical thinking to recognize good trouble from bad; thinking that in its turn finds footing in critical reading and critical writing, aka a liberal arts education.
Trumpian populism, by contrast, is emotional, gut-level submission requiring little, if any, actual analysis. To draw out this duality, ponder the American Revolution set against the French and its Reign of Terror. Both were products of the Enlightenment, but the former adhered almost religiously to its tenets of reason and rational thought as the latter disastrously eschewed them; an eschewing very similar to the MAGA faithful dutifully echoing their petulant master’s salacious whine about the endless unfairness of the world, their kindergarten temperament epitomized in the jack-booted tantrum of J6ers and even more so in their subsequent pardons – pardons that each and every Trump voter tacitly supported, including actual Supreme Court Justices. David Brooks, in his article “The Enlightenment Project,” notes how early scholars of the movement encouraged citizens to not so willingly bow to regimes but rather defer to critical thinking, acknowledge empirical truths, and question their own assumptions – which is exactly what our founders, liberal-arts educated almost to a man, did. “Enlightenment thinkers turned their skeptical ideas into skeptical institutions, notably the U.S. Constitution,” Brooks states.
So while France fell from anarchy into empire, America was built, right by natural right, on the principles of the Enlightenment. These principles, although not exactly DEI, are, as mentioned above, near enough – the low-hanging fruit of the Bill of Rights. Of course, the left often goes too far, particularly a faction of the LGBTQ crowd. Andrew Sullivan, in his piece “How the Gay Rights Movement Radicalized, and Lost Its Way,” writes that “… as in other ‘social justice’ spaces, dissent was equated with bigotry. Dissenters from gender ideology are routinely unfriended, shunned and shamed…. That’s the extremely intolerant and illiberal atmosphere that now exists in the gay, lesbian and transgender space…. Debate has been all but snuffed out; total uniformity of thought is demanded.” Far from liberally learned, this is not just intolerant but downright Trumpian and is moreover another example of enlightenment going dark.
The physically enlightened, by contrast, from Buddha to Jesus to Gandhi, were first and foremost kindly empathetic. And although all three were classic iconoclasts, none could take that extra step of leading their followers into a violent overthrow of those unwilling to recognize that citizens not only have natural rights, but so too that those rights are God-given. It was the erudite iconoclasm of our founders, almost all of whom had pledged their very lives, that fired up the torch of ruthless nonconformity in the name of altruism.
I therefore can’t help but snicker at tea-party-like activists sidestepping natural rights in the name of the founding; you know, the ones with the flag pins and pocket Constitutions who ignore, or more often tap dance around, Trump’s almost gleeful violation of the very document they claim to venerate. What they conveniently forget is that the Constitution goes hand-in-hand with Enlightenment norms, and this fundamental indifference and/or witlessness is summed up in an oxymoron tattooed on Pete Hegseth’s right arm: We the People and Deus Vult, or God Wills It.
No, Mr. Secretary. God most definitely does not will it. Not in this country. Your thinking of your good buddies in Saudi Arabia and similar theocracies. In America, we the people will it, and your flagrant antinome serves as a stern reminder that our liberation comes, as one of our most esteemed iconoclasts once opined, with an enduring caveat; “if [we] can keep it.” Hegseth’s tatts thus prove that, whether blissfully or no, he is ignorant of a very established (pun intended) axiom; the Enlightenment was as skeptical of religious dogma as much as it was of kings. In this vein, God wills it is a repudiation of we the people. The genius of the founders was that their codification of natural rights into a constitution was the most astute act of governmental benevolence ever to be perpetrated upon a people because it naturally adheres to the religious tenets of empathy and equality but is also purposefully designed to be separate from the tyrannical intolerance that both kings and theocracies often champion.
Which segues us back to Trump’s populist iconoclasm; how it’s perceived as a mandate for he and his ilk to, divine-right-like, chainsaw the tree of liberty and backhoe its rooted enlightenment. Not only is it running roughshod over the Establishment Clause and pissing down the back of endemically American institutions like Columbia, Harvard, UVA, UCLA, PBS, VOA, and USAID, but so too the premise of MAGA 2.0 is a nearly single-minded drive to abandon kindness and then use this abandonment as an excuse to foist a goodly portion of our hard-earned tax dollars onto the ostensibly overburdened shoulders of the chronically wealthy. Nor is this any big secret. If a few are missing or choose to ignore the newfound quashing of compassion combined with the recurring transfer of capital to those who need it the least, two acronyms, DOGE and ICE, are unequivocally crystallizing the cold heart of MAGA. DOGE manifests in tens if not hundreds of thousands dead or dying from starvation or infirmaries because their food and/or medicine have been cancelled or is rotting in warehouses; in the slashing of Medicaid and food stamps and, thus far, the elimination of over 275,000 good-paying federal jobs. This, combined with open attacks on liberal arts, established medicine, and scientific empiricism – hell, even the Library of Congress – is decidedly unenlightened and moreover constructed on the falsity that we are suddenly as poor as Bangladesh and so can no longer afford, Christian-like, to feed the hungry, heal the sick, or even maintain over 200 years of highly effective soft power.
Meanwhile, ICE is bent on asylum seekers, Afghans not least, losing their Temporary Protected Status and also on rounding up all those dangerous protestors, day laborers, landscapers, nannie’s, maids, students, and restaurant and garment workers while marching troops into our streets, as if we are as unstable as Venezuela. And just look how quickly and easily the MAGA minions fell in line with the lie that it’s in fact the mailmen and forest rangers and migrant farm workers, damn it, who’ve been infesting the swamp all along; who are indeed behind the high price of groceries and gas. Get rid of them and pass the savings onto the Elon Musks of the world and we’ll all be literally pelted with cheap eggs from Bangor to Bodega Bay.
Lastly, the absence of critical thinking has left millions of Christians shocked to discover, after voting for the embodiment of lying lips, that they’ve been lied to. But many others still blindly believe that we’ll never have to reap the untold consequences of Trump’s pathological mendacity or even his greed, grift, and malicious acts of vengeance – a single one of which is responsible for the recent bombing of Iran.
All of this, of course, begs a question: What are the leftover enlightened to do? The first is to tread in support of education at all costs, and the second is to use the First Amendment. MLK purposely chose Alabama for his Selma to Montgomery March because he knew the cops would react violently despite the press, and an unfettering of the press is exactly what we need. Democrats should follow King’s lead and inundate the public with pictures/film/stories of DOGE-caused dead and dying; federal workers out of a job; cancer and other medical research cut; Jewish academics at Harvard denied already-allotted grant money in the name of antisemitism; tales of hard working immigrants and asylum seekersimprisoned by ICE; and especially stories of Trump’s two-stepping cruelty set against the intuitive kindness of Americans, including past presidents like Jimmy Carter and GWB, both of whom showered the infirm with unprecedented humanity. The former all but eradicated the Guinea worm, while Trump is typically trying to undo the latter’s successful President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR. The noble march of these two modern presidents had many around the world look up to them, to us, with hope and admiration. Given this history set off by Trump’s vindictive and flagrantly unconstitutional contortions, it should be simplicity itself to prove that the image of the United States as a Shining City on the Hill is being chopped up and sold for kindling, almost exactly like what we’re doing to the planet.