I t’s no accident that Donald Trump’s vaunted wall along the US-Mexico
border became such a potent metaphor for a floundering American polity. The
US has boundary problems — and not just with illegal immigrants (whoops,
undocumented visitors). A mighty flux of standards and principles is
symptomatic of an economy in freefall. Nothing is settled. All values are put
up for re-negotiation. Steamrolling and bullying are the new fair play.
Foundational ideas, such as the first amendment, erode under a flood of
special pleadings. There is no center left to hold.
The latest identity politics fracas at Princeton University is
instructive. Princeton students’ Black Justice League demanded both the
vilification of former university president Woodrow Wilson as an
arch-segregationist at the same time they demanded a segregated “cultural
safe space for black students.” The pusillanimous current Princeton
president, one Christopher Eisgruber, entertained their “demands” perhaps
knowing that the threatened “indefinite” occupation of administration offices
would be cut short by the Thanksgiving week vacation. (So far, the occupying
force of the Black Justice League has not demanded delivery of free turkey
and cranberry sauce — turkeys problematically have distinct regions of white
and dark meat.)
The past ten days have also seen protests against free speech at snooty
eastern elite Amherst College and a “white privilege retreat” at the
University of Vermont for students “self-identifying as white” — why not
“students of whiteness?” — with required reading on “The Invention of the
White Race,” “White Privilege, Male Privilege in Race, Class, Gender,” “The
Feminist Classroom,” and “The Abolition of Whiteness.”
You might whiff a general drift in all this of antagonism against people
of whiteness and men in particular. Hence it’s extra-specially unfortunate
that the oafish and sadistic Donald Trump is so conspicuously out there
representing that identity group. I suppose what that shows is that the
process of boundary dissolution can really call out the demonic. The sad part
is that white men of principle and reason are so beaten down that none dare
oppose the forces of identity vengeance on the loose.
The fugitive truths surrounding the Black Lives Matter protests are too
unpleasant for the public interest to digest. For instance, the behavior of
the new Holy Trinity of Black Martyrs, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and
Tamir Rice, in the incidents where they lost their lives. All were doing
something likely to get them into serious trouble: 1) beating up on an armed
sentinel, 2) groping inside a patrol car for a policeman’s gun, 3)
brandishing a pellet gun designed to look like a .45 automatic in a public
place. I’d go so far to suggest that the Black Lives Matter movement has
become so virulent because it’s increasingly obvious that black behavior is
so embarrassingly bad and nobody knows what to do about it, especially black
people. (Check the national murder rates.)
The colleges and universities have become the theater for these
histrionics because they are institutionally so vested in the wish for better
outcomes that evolved from the civil rights struggles of the last century. A
general failure of those expectations has driven the colleges collectively
crazy — or, more precisely, made them places for the enactment of craziness.
The careers of reasonable people are hostage to the new campus Red Guards,
who operate much like Mao Zedong’s lunatic minions of the 1960s, who were set
loose to distract public attention from the enormous failure of Mao’s
five-year plan economy.
A reasonable argument can be made that the temperament of the USA is worse
than that of Germany in 1932. We’re more foolish, feckless, and savage, our
politics more ridiculous, and the wave we’re riding is much more dangerous.
