Academia and Journalism Again

 I've talked a lot about what has gone wrong both with academia and journalism in recent decades.  In recent weeks, I have run across two spectacular examples--one from each of those professions--that really make my point.  

About six weeks ago, Lawrence D. Bobo, a professor and dean of social sciences at Harvard, published a very controversial op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, arguing for limits on criticism of university adminsitrators (like Lawrence D. Bobo) by faculty and staff.  I had some sympathy for his position--I agree that it is better not to have intra-university fights in public--but like almost everyone else, I rebelled against the idea of formal limits on expression or punishments for violating them.  Bobo attacked some colleagues, including Larry Summers, for encouraging donors and politicians to intervene in university matters.  I on the other hand want to discuss some other very revealing parts of his op-ed. Here are four key paragraphs.

". . . .it is critically important that faculty play a role in educating students about the history and nature of social protest — its successes and failures, when it is ethical and when it is not. Boycotts, teach-ins, sit-ins, walk-outs, and marches are venerable tools for expressing grievances and pressuring institutions.

"Students should learn about the premises that guide and undergird non-violent direct action protests. They should learn about making strategic choices of targets and proper or allowable modes of engagement. They must also learn from the example of heroic figures like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis to recognize and accept the fact that breaking the law is likely to involve consequences, including the risk of arrest.

"Modern student protest appears less and less likely to target major non-University events, businesses, or government bodies. Rather, they’re comfortably situated in the confines of college campuses, directing demands for change at university administrators and boards of directors.

"While this certainly draws in media attention, it is flawed. Targeting protest at those charged with a pastoral duty of care for their students and an indirect-at-best relation to the protesters’ core grievance considerably removes these efforts from the inarguably heroic actions of college students who burned draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War, registered black voters in Mississippi or Alabama, sat in at segregated lunch counters, or joined marches for women’s liberation and gay rights."

Born in 1958, Bobo was in elementary school during the great protests of the mid to late 1960s, but these remarks essentially try to institutionalize the spirit of that time.  Now of course, any political history of any era should include the history of mass protests, but Bobo evidently wants to make the technique of mass protests an essential part of college curriculums.  This clearly implies, first of all, that society suffers from profound injustice, and secondly, that we cannot rely upon established democratic processes to fix it.  It encourages the idea, so dear to 60s activists, that institutions are inevitably corrupt and that virtue only exists outside them among oppressed groups. 

Bobo does balance his deep belief in protest with an attempt to protect universities against it, but to do so, he ignores a lot of what happened in the late 1960s.  Not content to protest against the Vietnam War--more often than not, without burning their draft cards--students in those days turned against anything that smacked of war on campus, such as the ROTC program at Harvard, which was abolished for several decades beginning in 1969, a most unfortunate step.   Most importantly of all, he is endorsing the idea first stated in the SDS Port Huron statement of 1962, and recently repeated by historian and former Harvard president Drew Faust in her memoir:  that universities are the best place to begin sweeping social changes, and thus should be judged by their contribution to them.  That has given professors, particularly in the humanities, a license to structure their courses around their preferred political causes, rather than basing them on what has happened and what has been written in the past, or on preserving and extending the western tradition, which has become a target of intellectual and social change.  And those developments have completely alienated one whole political party from universities as they now exist, with increasingly significant consequences.  It is also largely responsible, in my opinion, for the eclipse of the humanities as major pillars of the college curriculum.  

And on the journalistic front, my new exhibit comes, almost inevitably, from the dean of US op-ed writers, Thomas Friedman, who has won three Pulitzer prizes over the last forty years.  Since at least 2002, as Friedman's official biography makes clear, he has explained to us at regular intervals how the world's problems--and especially the Middle East conflict--could be solved if everyone were as smart as he is.  He is still boasting of his advocacy of a broad Arab-Israeli peace deal in 2002, despite its failure ever to happen.  Early this week, he fantasized that Benjamin Netanyahu in his speech to a joint US session of Congress might adopt the Friedman program in toto, including an immediate cease fire deal in Gaza and an agreement with Saudi Arabia to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for "credible, good-faith negotiations [with the Palestinians] with the explicit goal of a two-state solution, with mutual security guarantees."  This would also pave the way, he wrote, for a broad alliance against Iran.  

Netanyahu gave his speech yesterday to rapturous appaluse from every Republican and a good many Democrats.  He spent so much time on the idea of the anti-Iran alliance that I wonder whether Friedman had some advance information about it.  But he said nothing whatever about a two-state solution.  He insisted that Israel must retain security control over Gaza when the war is over--that is, sovereignty; he declared that Jerusalem must never again be divided; and he said nothing at all about the West Bank, where settler terrorism and gradual ethnic cleansing have accelerated since October 7.  Friedman in his column repeated the myth that Netanyahu doesn't dare offer peace to the Palestinians because of the "crazy far-right members of his cabinet," rather than admit that Netanyahu isn't interested in any such deal himself.  Even before October 7, Netanyahu presented the UN General Assemby with a map of the region that showed the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean as part of Israel.  Friedman suggested that Netanyahu offer a two-state solution to the Palestinians between July 28 and October 27, when the Knesset will not be in session, and his coalition will not be able to overthrow him.  I would advise Friedman not to hold his breath.

The great expansion of universities in the post-Second World War period vastly increased the size of our professional intellectual class, which includes both academics and journalists.  This new class has arrogated themselves the role of Plato's philosopher kings, whose superior wisdom would give them the right to govern the rest of us.  Simultaneously respect for elected officials has fallen to the vanishing point.  And sadly, when the world refuses to obey the dictates of our many Bobos and Friedmans, they simply take this as evidence that the rest of humanity, sadly, is not yet as smart as they are.

The Fall of the Demoratic Establishment

 A new Democratic establishment has ruled the party almost unchallenged for the last 32 years, beginning with Bill Clinton.  Its prophet was Gary Hart, who nearly defeated the last candidate from the earlier Demcratic establishment, Walter Mondale, for the nomination in 1984 by explicitly repudiating the New Deal legacy and appealing to young yuppies instead of industrial workers and their families.  Bill Clinton, the first new Democratic president, governed as a fiscally responsible Republican, working with a Republican Congress for most of his term.  The Democrats have become the party of the meritocracy, and our meritocracy of professionals sees itself every bit as entitled as any aristocracy ever did.  The increasing importance of social issues, including women's rights and gay rights, increased the Democrats' sense of moral righteousness even as it cut them off from large segments of the population.  Meanwhile, their strength among Hispanics, the fastest-growing segment of the population, convinced them that demography would keep them in power for the indefinite future.  

The first indication of weakness in the new establishment came in 2008, when Hillary Clinton, the establishment's designated candidate, crashed and burned against a fresh face, Barack Obama.  Coming to power in the midst of the greatest financial crisis in 80 years, Obama could have set the country on a new course and revived some of the principles of the New Deal, but he turned out to be an establishment acolyte, as his appointment of Larry Summers showed.  He agreed that the economy had to be rebuilt from the top down, not from the bottom up, and his failure to do much for the unemplyed in his first two years cost him the Congress.  He also essentially adopted George W. Bush's strategy in the war on terror, ramping up the war in Afghanistan, orchestrating more disastrous regime change in Libya and in Egypt (twice), and eventually resuming the war in Iraq.  The establishment got another brief shock in 2016, when Silent generation leftist Bernie Sanders outpolled Hillary Clinton in the initial primaries, but the DNC managed to ensure her nomination.  Then it turned out that the blue wall was vunlerable, and the Republicans, who had turned on all their establishment candidates, beat the Democrats, who had stuck with theirs.

The election of Donald Trump, I now believe, had a dreadful effect on the Democratic Party and its media supporters.  It increased their feeling of moral righteousness ot a whole new level and persuaded them that they deserved victory merely by virtue of not being Trump.  It also encouraged them, both before and after 2020, to rely on legal processes to ruin Trump's career, no matter what the mass of the American people felt about him.  Trump's worst enemy as president, in actual fact, was himself, and he did enough to alienate the public, particularly after the pandemic struck, to make him vulnerable in 2020.  The Democratic nominating process in 2020 has been understudied, in my view, and exactly how Biden managed to be nominated is not yet entirely clear. As I have mentioned many times, his own earlier attempts to win the nomination, in 1988 and 2008, had ended in disaster, but the vice presidency earned him new name recognition and access to leading Democratic donors that now served him well.  He was lucky that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren divided the left wing vote in the early primaries, and that Kamala Harris bailed out before the first primary, leaving him in position to pick up the black vote.  By the time of the South Carolina primary he was overwhelmingly the establishment candidate and he cruised to an easy victory.  And he won a solid electoral college victory thanks to wins in six key close states.  After Trump tried and failed to overturn the election result and underwent a second impeachment, everyone seemed to assume that the Trump threat was over.

Once in power, Biden issued a string of executive orders reflecting the concerns of "progressive" Democrats, mandating diversity, equity and inclusion programs throughout the federal government and supporting transgender rights.   In his first three years, 66 percent of his federal judgeship appointments were women and 66 percent were nonwhite.  He continued the Trump strategy of fighting the economic effects of the pandemic with unprecedented infusions of federal money, and he had no strategy when high inflation followed.  He and his immigration czar Harris did nothing for a long time to reduce illegal entry into the country, and they have done nothing to alleviate the worst housing crisis since the end of the Second World War.  His infrastructure bill has yet to show many results, and his bill to deal with climate change--disastrously renamed the Inflation Reduction Act--passed only after he made significant concessions to the fossil fuel industry.  And for all the talk of the 2022 Congressional election as a victory for the Democrats, the Republicans actually won the national popular vote for House candidates by 3 percent, and were therefore somewhat unlucky to emerge with such a small majority.  Last but not least, his near-total support for the Netanyahu government in Israel has cost him support among Arab-Americans--key in Michigan--and young people.

And sadly, Biden's sense of entitlement has now taken over his life, making it impossible for him to acknowledge that he is no longer fit to be president, and thus needs to end his candidacy.  Like Trump,. he now casts himself as the one indispensable man.  According to a source deeply involved in Democratic politics, he will not even talk to anyone now who wants him to drop out of the race.  The assassination attempt on Trump has taken the spotlight off of his decision, and the clock is ticking.  Biden's insistence that he should--or must--be the candidate insults both the candidates who could replace him and the Democratic electorate as a whole.  We can, and need to, field a competent candidate.  Yet he may not get one.  And every day that passes increases the odds that if Biden does drop out, he will give way to Harris--another establishment darling who has never demonstrated real appeal to the American people, but whom much of the Democratic elite believes deserves the White House because she is a black woman.

74 percent of the nation feels--correctly--that Biden is too old to be president.  He trails in nearly every poll in big states, and additional states such as New Hampshire and possibly even New York are coming into play.  The Democratic elite is too sclerotic, it seems, to do what has to be done--despite the laudable efforts of Hakeem Jeffries to make it happen.  And despite all the Democrats' apocalyptic rhetoric about Trump, I honestly don't think they care that much whether they win or lose.  They are part of our wealthy elite and will still survive and prosper.  Apparently, they still need at least one more hard lesson.

Explanation

 I returned from a European vacation on July 3, planning to do a blog on the Supreme Court's immunity decision.  Unfortunately I tested positive for COVID on July 6 and it took nearly an entire week for me to feel alive again.  (I was never seriously ill, but I was seriously uncomfortable.) I'm still having sinus problems.  There is much to talk about, obviously, and I should have something new within a few days.

The Democratic Debacle

 It is still too early to know what the outcome of the post-debate controversy about President Biden's candidacy for re-election will be.  On the one hand, no leading Democratic politician has yet called for him to step down--a sad contrast in my opinion to 1974 when, for different reasons of course, prominent Republicans abandoned Richard Nixon.  On the other hand, stories indicate that leading donors--once again, a constituency that the White House is more likely to respect--still believe that the party needs a new candidate.  I am taking a moment, however, to say that the behavior of Biden, his family, and above all the people around him and the DNC leadership disgraces the Democratic Party.  They seem motivated by a feeling of total entitlement, with no regard for the fate either of the party or the country.  If they succeed in getting Biden renominated, they will deserve his defeat, no matter what it turns out to mean for the country.

Three quarters of the population, polls show, think that Biden is too old to continue n office.  The debate proved to most of us that they are right.  But he and his family and his staff don't care.  They simply repeat their mantra that the nation has to re-elect him in order to prevent the catastrophe of a Trump victory.  I agree that the Trump victory will be a catastrophe, but it does not follow that we have to rally around Biden now to avoid it.  Instead, it makes it all the more essential to come up with a stronger candidate than Biden to prevent it.  

From Bill Clinton through Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and now Biden, Democratic leaders have combined neoliberalism on the economic front with progressive stances on social issues and lip service to New Deal principles, confident that this proves them more virtuous than the Republicans.  This will be the third election in a row in which they assume that the nation must prefer them to Trump.  There is however no such mandate.  A new poll now shows Trump a few points ahead in New Hampshire--and let us not forget that a simple switch in New Hampshire to Al Gore would have given him the White House without Florida.  Evidence from New York also suggests that Trump may do considerably better in the popular vote in blue states, and thus in the nation as a whole, this time.

Throwing the Democratic nomination open now would take over the news cycle from the issues of Biden's age and Trump's latest outrage, a most welcome event.  The country would love to see some new blood in the race and watch the spectacle of candidates fighting it out, perhaps even in multiple ballots, which last occurred in 1952.  Do not forget that Abraham Lincoln, who was not even a true national figure in early 1860, emerged from such a battle in the Republican convention of that year.  But today, I read, the Biden forces want to give him the nomination via DNC ballot even before the convention meets. They originally made this plan to meet a deadline fixed in Ohio, but Ohio has lifted that deadline  The only reason to use a DNC vote now is to quash opposition to Biden before it can get off the ground.

The moment of national crisis that Strauss and Howe first predicted thirty years ago is here.  It requires us all to think first of the fate of the nation, not of ourselves.  The Biden White House is failing that test.

How we got here

 The catastrophe of last night's debate is simply one more milestone in the gradual collapse of the American political system as it developed from the 1930s through the early 1960s.  We cannot go back and redo these decades, and the collapse may get worse before it gets better.  Yet we perhaps experience some catharsis by tracing the tragedy, just as we must face more and more death as we grow older, all the while knowing that life will continue.

How did Donald Trump become a candidate for president in the first place eight years ago?  Our professional politicians became complacent and lost touch with the American people.  Neither party seriously opposed the changes instituted by Ronald Reagan and consummated under Bush I and Clinton: the tax cuts on the rich, the failure to control spending on elections, and the collapse of the effective regulation of Wall Street.  Meanwhile, the influence of television on elections replaced well-thought out prose with images as the currency of politics.  We stopped paying much attention to what the average politician said--something that never happened in the age of radio.  Trump understood slogans and sound bites, and he made his reputation as a reality TV host.  Neither Jeb Bush nor Marco Rubio nor Hillary Clinton could, as it turned out, defeat him.  Clinton also suffered because of Barack Obama's very sluggish response to the financial crisis, his failure to do much about the changes that had brought it about, and his adoption of most of George W. Bush's foreign policy.  The Republicans nominated their outsider, Trump, in 2016, while the party establishment defeated the Democratic outsider, Bernie Sanders. Trump won.

And how did Biden become the next president?  Here I must return to one of my well-worn themes--the catastrophe of the modern vice presidency and its effects.  Hubert Humphrey, George H. W. Bush, Al Gore, and Joe Biden had all tried for their party's nomination and failed dismally at least once, and Walter Mondale had never tried for his at all.  Yet each of them, after subsequently being chosen as vice president, immediately became the front runner for the nomination in the next election.  The vice presidency (and Hillary Clinton's eight years as first lady) earned each of them the necessary name recognition and the access to leading contributors that they needed. The two most successful Democratic politicians since John F. Kennedy--Bill Clinton and Barack Obama--did NOT win the nomination because they had been vice presidents.  They relied on real personal appeal.  

Exactly how Biden became the front runner in 2020 after two disastrous showings in Iowa and New Hampshire is not clear to me.  Uncle Google tells me that two books have been written about that campaign, but I can't check them now.  I do suspect that Kamala Harris--another disastrous presidential candidate who became vice president and heiress apparent--dropped out before the New Hampshire vote, after threatening Biden's standing with black voters, in exchange for a promise of the vice presidency.  James Clyburn, another venerable member of the Democratic establishment, swung the mostly black Democratic vote in South Carolina for Biden, and he was on his way.  He won the election because a bare majority of the country was sick of Trump. Now, if he stays in the race, he will probably lose it because the nation is sick of him and knows he isn't up to the job.  He will also lose because he, like Clinton and Obama, assumed that the free market would indeed fix the economy.  Richard Nixon in 1971 imposed wage and price controls because he knew that inflation threatened his re-election.  Biden looked helplessly on while inflation destroyed his approval rating.  

Something else has changed in the Democratic Party in the last 60 years.  Harry Truman in 1945 called for national health insurance, and in 1948, for civil rights legislation.  Faced with a conservative coalition in Congress, he could not bring either of those proposals even to a vote--but he stuck to them for the rest of his presidency.  They became part of the Democratic program, and Kennedy and Johnson eventually got them through.  Bill Clinton gave up his health care plan after one Congress's worth of failure.  Obama's cap-and-trade proposal suffered a similar fate.  Biden has balanced some environmental initiatives with new opportunities for the fossil fuel industry.  No one believes that the Democrats can accomplish much anymore.

Now, Biden has shown that he does not have the mental acuity we expect as a president.  Not only did he suffer one complete breakdown over Medicare, but he could not credibly explain what he was trying to say about the social security cap.  He let Trump bring him down to Trump's level, so that in the last part of the debate they began arguing about who was the worst president of all time.  Yes, nearly everything that Trump said was false--but is that so surprising?  Our academic elite gave up the idea of truth several decades ago, in favor of the idea that everyone has the right to their own truth based on their own life experience, and that the concept of truth itself is just a political weapon.  If they will not stand for truth, who will?  What does it mean when, as I pointed out here, a former Washington Post executive editor and a former head of CBS news announce that journalism has to move "beyond objectivity?"  

Our system worked when we still valued intellectual integrity and understood the need to control our emotions.  The great attack on those traditions began in the late 1960s and has continued until now.  We can keep them alive as individuals, but the tide is running in the other direction.