How to be a Woke Professor
How to be a Woke Professor
Step 1: Attack those who disagree with you as "fascist," with the same rhetorical dishonesty and aggressive denunciation characteristic of fascism. I.e., fight "fascism" fascistically!
[The Woke professorial commitment to democracy, circa 2016]
Last night, the Bucknell Philosophy Department invited this exemplar of the Woke professoriate to campus to speak:
I wrote something about Stanley and one of his curious works a few years ago at First Things.
He responded in a short letter that was fully in the spirit of the poorly argued book that I had reviewed. Here is our exchange in the letters section.
As I’ve posted the First Things piece here previously, I also include below a much longer version of my review of How Fascism Works.
One is tempted just to laugh at such a spectacle, and indeed the argument advanced by Stanley is risible. But he is at a prestigious university, and the mainstream media love to parade such ideas to buttress their own ideological biases. The dangers posed by such foolishness are great. This is a conscious effort to widen the already-existing divisions in the culture and ultimately to make them irreparable. I encourage you to take a look at the book and to gauge directly just how much of traditional, patriotic American life and values are, in his estimation, “fascist” or on the road to being such.
This is how our institutions of higher education decay. People with such views come to dominate whole departments, disciplines, and institutions. In short order, the authority higher education once had among the larger public begins to disappear, as the level-headed recognize just how much nonsense is being perpetrated on campuses. More and more, I believe the whole higher ed system will crash under the weight of this insanity. I hope those who come after us are wise enough to build something more resistant to the Woke virus that is currently raging uncontrolled there.
How The Destruction of the Academic Ethic and Professorial Culture Works
Imagine that you had recently discovered a book titled How Brain Cancer Works. You would doubtless be quite thrilled, if you took the author and the title seriously, to come across such a volume. Brain cancer is an objectively awful thing—on this we are in agreement, yes?—and we are morally obligated to work hard to fully and thoroughly understand it in order to effectively extirpate this unmitigated evil from the world.
With great enthusiasm, then, you might embark on a careful reading of such a book. As you proceed, though, it turns out to be a strange book. The author of a book that purports to be about brain cancer turns out to know extraordinarily little about the announced subject. He has no medical background whatsoever, and no history of research on the topic, though he is very keen to invoke the numerous members of his own family who have suffered from brain cancer as a reminder of how seriously we must all take the topic. Not without surprise, this emotional heartstring playing tends to have the effect—doubtless well understood by the author--of dissuading the good-natured reader from paying too much attention to the considerable evidence that the author is only minimally acquainted with the topic of his own book. There are almost no scholarly works on brain cancer cited in the book’s bibliography, nor does the author ever substantively refer to any such works in his own text. Through the length and breadth of the book, the author gives you the distinct impression that he only started to think about brain cancer very recently—roughly, you guess from clues in the text, within the last 3 to 3 ½ years, beginning somewhere around November 2016.
In time, you eventually find it impossible to avoid the realization that the thing he is calling “brain cancer” is in fact a different thing altogether from the thing that people who study and know a lot about brain cancer refer to by the term “brain cancer.”
You anticipate a symptomology in such a book, and this author obliges. But the symptomology too is bizarrely imprecise and confused. Virtually every symptom imaginable--fever, nausea, headache, double vision, stomach pain, itchiness, muscle aches change of appetite, nausea, weight loss, weight gain, general fatigue—is presented as alone or in any combination near-certain evidence of brain cancer. It goes without argument, the author insists, that these symptoms can have almost no other causes but brain cancer. And yet he also claims that these myriad symptoms only indicate brain cancer when they appear in a well-defined subset of the population—tall people. Others not in that subset of the population who show some or all of these symptoms can be diagnosed with certainty—based upon their identities—to be wholly free of brain cancer. In fact, in them, the symptoms are a sign that they are in exceptionally vigorous health.
Is it not something close to a certainty that you would come away from the reading of such a book convinced that the author could not be a serious person, whatever his pedigree and claims to authority? This is the most generous interpretation, in any event. Such a book might be authored by an unserious person, but it might also be the product of a consummately serious and determined con artist, explicitly intent not on informing but on deceiving and misleading readers.
You, generous reader that you are, want to give him the benefit of the doubt absent other evidence. But you are forced to admit that you cannot really say for certain which of the two categories describes the author. The one thing you can say with absolute certitude is that his book is worthless to the task of understanding brain cancer. More, it is likely harmful insofar as it will convince some uninformed readers that they have learned something about brain cancer, and those readers will then go about in the delusional manner of the author, finding it everywhere it is not, and they will be wholly unprepared for any encounters with the dreadful real thing.
Make a few substitutions—“fascism” for “brain cancer,” “whites” for “tall people”—, modify the symptoms appropriately, and in essence everything in the above several paragraphs is true of the astonishing book, How Fascism Works, that Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at Yale University, has written. That books of this nature and quality can be written by people with positions in prestigious universities and published by fêted presses says virtually everything one needs to know about the cultural moment in which we currently find ourselves.
For Professor Stanley’s is not even a bad book on fascism. It is not a book on fascism at all. Stanley is engaged in the now ubiquitous political strategy of attempting to use empty accusations of fascism as a crude bludgeon of political opponents with the explicit goal of shrinking the legitimate American political spectrum in such a way as to exclude as morally equivalent to genocidal totalitarianism all ideologies that take national sovereignty and traditions seriously. His is a book that cannot inform readers about its claimed topic. Indeed, there is little likelihood that scholars of fascism will trouble themselves for a moment with this book unless they are asked to write reviews, and in that case they can be uniformly expected to read it with a sense of utter puzzlement and confusion.
In a scholarly world that was not deeply off the rails, Jason Stanley would be embarrassed to have written such a book and to have misused his academic authority in such an egregious manner. In such a world, he might well have been sufficiently shamed by the mere thought of having his name attached to such a book that he would have foregone writing it in the first place. He would in any event have been unable to find a publisher willing to foist such a useless and dangerous mess on the public. Alas, we are no longer in that world.
Stanley Payne, an historian of fascism with many books on the topic to his name, deals frankly with people who would equate all groups on the right that make any criticisms of liberalism and Marxism with fascism. To do so, he writes in a massive 1995 tome, is “a little like identifying Stalinism and Rooseveltian democracy because both were opposed to Hitlerism, Japanese militarism, and western European colonialism.” At the end of the book, he directly takes on the question of the likelihood of contemporary fascist movements coming to significant power in a country like ours: “How great is this danger [that a new kind of fascism vaguer in contours can again “develop power”]? In the Western world, very slight” (my emphasis).
This, then, from another Stanley, who, unlike our Stanley, knows this topic expertly. It would be interesting to know if our Stanley even knows who the other one is, as he does not cite him. Our Stanley cites only one expert on fascism in the entirety of his book. This scholar, Roger Griffin, elsewhere has this to say about the kind of project in which Jason Stanley is engaged:
“Yet the way “fascism” is bandied about so liberally and assertively in public discourse could suggest that dedicating a whole volume (even a thin one like this) just to clarifying its connotations and surveying the type of historical phenomena it embraces is somewhat ‘over the top’. For many journalists and political commentators, it is clearly self-evident what fascism means. At the height of the US presidential campaign of 2016, for example, Republican candidate Gary Johnson, when asked if Donald Trump was a fascist, replied cryptically: “It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.” Leaving aside the allusion to the cartoon character Donald Duck, this reply implied that it could be directly deduced from Trump’s political pronouncements and behavior that he was indeed “a duck,” in this case a fascist (Pager 2016). But, as should become obvious after a moment’s reflection, at least to readers of this book if not to presidential candidates or their interviewers, the entity ‘fascism’ cannot be compared to a waterfowl.”
Stanley has authored a book of which Gary Johnson could be proud, filled to the brim with “it quacks like a duck, eh?” insinuations and virtually nothing else. Though we cannot hope to learn anything about fascism from him, he can perhaps teach us a good deal about what a growing chunk of the academic left thinks about politics and about those who fail to agree with them politically.
One’s amazement with this book begins with the subtitle: The politics of us and them. A book purporting to be about an exploration of that topic, which through its length and breadth presents such a politics as a very, very bad thing, but that itself is a treatise in just that variety of very, very bad politics--this is an intriguing phenomenon. It is akin to the first-year college relativist trumpeting the ancient Sophist’s maxim “all statements of truth are relative to the position of their speakers” and never realizing that the axiom becomes less compelling when it is applied, as it must be, also to his own statement. Of course we forgive the undergraduate such naivete, but Jason Stanley is not an undergraduate; he is that student’s teacher, making precisely that novice’s error.
As is de rigeuer in accounts like this one, Donald Trump is breezily depicted as a fascist, or at least something in the trajectory of fascism. Readers might do well to remind themselves that some 63 million Americans voted for then-candidate Trump in 2016. By Stanley’s reasoning, then, those tens of millions of his countrymen are fascists, or at least fascist sympathizers. Enough Americans to have elected a President—1/5 of the entire population of the country--are, in Stanley’s analysis, a fearsome, depraved “them” who are to be as ferociously opposed by the righteous “us” for whom he is writing as possible.
Stanley is at pains to repeat as many straightforwardly false anti-Trump talking points gathered online from places like Vox and Daily Kos as he can fit into a thin book. We are treated, for example, to a pat reiteration of the lie that CodePink radical Desirée Fairooz was arrested and charged merely for laughing at a Congressional hearing. The video of her disruption of the hearing and removal is, like the many pop-left “news” accounts of it, available online, so, had Stanley been interested in doing so, he could easily have checked the veracity of this claim. It can be plainly seen in that video that Fairooz doesn’t simply laugh at the hearing. She yells repeatedly and refuses to stop when asked to do so, disrupting the proceedings of the hearing, and then she physically resists the security guards who endeavor to escort her out of the room. This obvious disorderly conduct, not her laugh, was the justification for the charges against her. But how much less effective is the truth when the goal is to produce a hysterically overwrought caricature of the administration Fairooz and Stanley are protesting?
In a chapter on law and order, Stanley begins with a statement about the Central Park 5, a favorite anti-Trump topic given the fact that citizen Trump was outspokenly critical of them. In Stanley’s narrative, these men have been proven “totally innocent.” This is consistent with the Netflix miniseries “When They See Us,” which is likely the main source of the leftist online news world Stanley clearly reads, but unfortunately not with the facts of the case. Those facts indicate that the five were certainly involved in the violent mob attack on several different victims of which the rape was a part, and they testified that they had physically participated in assaults during the episode. Several of the five also testified that they had simulated sex with the rape victim with their clothing on, and there was semen in their pants to indicate just how far those simulations went. Some also told police that they fondled the victim’s breasts and held her down while the rapist violated her. These individuals are “totally innocent” in just the way that, as per Stanley’s charge, 63 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump are fascists.
Stanley is scandalized that the current American ethnic majority thinks with anxiety about no longer being a majority. But he off-handedly reiterates the trope that by 2050 the anxiety-producing thing about which the ethnic majority are so foolishly and counter-factually anxious about will come to pass. Given that the country has, from its inception, been a white-majority country, why is it as a matter of principle so outlandish to imagine that this majority might be somewhat concerned that this fundamental aspect of American society is changing? Wouldn’t the Chinese be likely to evince concern if demographic trends in China indicated that ethnic Chinese would cease to be a majority in their country within a matter of decades? And just how and why is America changing in this regard?
Stanley claims it is “irrational” and even indicative of a fascist mentality to insinuate that there has been a conscious elite effort to change the US in a multiculturalist direction. But where, then, did the trajectory toward the 2050 shift come from? Was it a natural by-product of American social, political and cultural business as usual? No one who knows anything about the facts could believe such a thing. The single factor most driving the demographic shift is a specific political action. This was the proposal and passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which was created, sponsored, argued for and ultimately passed by a sub-set of American elites, with the cover of other elites who systematically and utterly misinformed the rest of the country about its likely consequences.
White nationalism is a bad thing, we learn in this book, something essentially equivalent to fascism. Black nationalism, on the other hand, is “equality driven,” so it is another thing altogether, a political form of expression of legitimate grievance. We get no details on how e.g., the black nationalism of the Nation of Islam, with its thoroughly racist mythology about the creation by genius black scientists of evil, subhuman whites, who lived like beasts in caves and generally pursued depravity, is consistent with Stanley’s framework here. This is a constantly reiterated mantra of the contemporary multicultural left. Things that are terribly bad when white people do them are magically transformed into benign, perfectly comprehensible, good things when black people do them.
Fascists, in Stanley’s lexicon perfectly interchangeable with nationalists, also tend to be critical of refugee overload in the US, which Stanley presents as a logical impossibility. No argument is made by him on this point, however. It is simply assumed that no reasonable case for limiting refugees could conceivably be made, and only white supremacy could motivate such an effort. One must ignore a sizable number of inconvenient facts to hold to this claim. There is considerable evidence of ethnic enclaving of a more permanent variety than we saw in the past on the rise in recent decades. It also is the case that refugees as a group constitute a long-term economic burden owing to their frequently great cultural distance and low educational and occupational stocks of capital, which the available evidence suggests are only partially adjusted upward over the generations. This is passed over in complete silence, and anyone who insisted on lingering here for debate and discussion would be demonstrating his fascist tendencies.
It is fascist, Stanley says, when political parties refer positively to men as heads of families and breadwinners. Fascism is the force behind the antagonism expressed in some corners to allowing biological men who identity as female to use public bathrooms for girls and women. Stanley is pleased to inform us that the reason for this fascistic response has to do with the tremendous threat to patriarchy posed by men who have chosen to identify as women. In any event, we are told, there is no evidence that “transgender girls” pose any threat to “cisgender (nontransgender) girls.” Readers not yet fully woke will note that Stanley cannot even bring himself to describe girls as girls—they are to be identified only by reference to boys and men who think they are girls (“nontransgender”). This is the way non-fascists think and write about such things, with the same startlingly surreal lens that permits the Human Rights Campaign to insist that only transwomen have “vaginas,” while the genitalia of “nontransgender girls” and women are to be referred to as “front holes.”
The lack of a desire to spend time in large cities such as Vienna or New York (“Sodom and Gomorrah,” in Stanley’s sneering chapter title on this topic) is also fascist. Stanley’s argumentative style here is exemplary of the trajectory of the entire book. He begins citing Mein Kampf and Hitler’s denigration of Vienna, where the “ever-present fungoid growth” of Jews is unavoidable. He then goes seamlessly into a 2017 US poll showing a significant rural-urban divide on attitudes toward immigrants. Without a hiccup, the line is drawn from Hitler expressing anti-Semitic bile to rural Americans indicating simply that they like the communities in which they live and don’t particularly desire to see them transformed in ways that would make them indistinguishable from urban centers.
The general contempt for rural America—and the concomitant, uncritical celebration of the urban—in this book is impossible to miss. Fascists idolize and mythologize farmers and hunters and those who obtain their own food. They denigrate city dwellers for their lack of such self-sufficiency, and thus are we good anti-fascists justified in our suspicion of those who do not live in and love the metropolis. Beyond the way in which they are mythologized, those farmers and hunters have attitudes and beliefs that must be classed as fascist. For example, they are more likely than city dwellers to value self-reliance and to believe that successes and hardships faced by an individual are to some degree his responsibility and under his capacity to alter through action, whereas those in urban areas are more likely to believe that people suffer primarily because of “difficult circumstances beyond their control.” Anti-fascism, it would seem, requires a total surrender of the notion that individuals might have any degree of agency in their life trajectory or responsibility for the consequences of their actions.
Certain kinds of violent crime are indications of the rise of fascism, especially mass shootings, which Stanley describes as “the most salient instances of violent crime…[which are] not specifically connected to urban areas and…usually committed by white men.” What does Stanley mean by “salient”? The definition of that word is “noticeable or important.” The idea that mass shootings are the most important violent crimes in American society is, on a quantitative level, as about as far from the truth as a claim can be. Such shootings make up only a tiny percentage of the murders committed in the country annually. Between 1983 and 2012, a period of 30 years, about 550 people were killed in the US in mass shootings. In 2012 alone, more than 11,000, twenty times that amount, died in gun homicides. In Chicago alone, in 2019, there were 330 black male victims of homicide. That is more than half the total of mass shooting deaths in the whole country over a three-decade period.
In another chapter with a charmingly over-the-top title (“Arbeit Macht Frei”), Stanley suggests that the movement behind right to work legislation is fascist. Why? Because a lobbyist, Vance Muse, who was one of the early advocates of giving industrial workers freedom to decline to pay union dues, had benighted ideas about race that were nonetheless fairly widespread among Southern whites in the 1940s ideas and that are now thoroughly rejected by nearly all Americans, including nearly all of those who are involved in the right to work movement. Here is a professor of philosophy committing a logical fallacy that would rightly merit a failing grade on a test in an undergraduate course. An individual X was the first person to advocate for A, which is an idea I don’t like but that is also advocated for and seen as perfectly reasonable by a fair number of others. That same individual also believed B, which also happens to be an idea I don’t like, and this second idea B, unlike A, is considered beyond the pale by most people. Therefore, anyone who supports A must also support B, just as individual X did.
One could, if one were amenable to such things, play Stanley’s own game against him. He affirmatively cites W.E.B DuBois several times in the book in his analysis of the Reconstruction Era in America, which DuBois believes was on the way to becoming a smashing success in racial integration and equality when racist whites derailed it. DuBois became an unapologetic Stalinist later in his life, and he died an unrepentant apologist for the murderous Soviet regime of the Stalin years. Are those who support DuBois’ view of Reconstruction necessarily also supportive of his view of the Gulag and the forced famines and the rest of it? The reasoning is the same as Stanley’s reasoning on right to work.
What else is fascist? Much, much more, it turns out.
Belief in “the value of the individual” and meritocracy is a sign of fascism. Economic libertarianism too, which is, we learn, nothing more than “the Manhattan dinner party face of social Darwinism,” the latter of which is (you guessed it) fascist. Why is meritocracy a fascist belief? Because Hitler somewhere in Mein Kampf says something positive about it. Great Books programs in colleges are also fascist because they tend to draw from the writing and thought of white men.
Conspiratorial thinking is fascist, though presumably not the conspiratorial thinking that would have it that candidate Donald Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin to fix the result of the 2016 election (and they are—it goes without saying, no?--hard at work right now to do the same in 2020). Mythical glorification of the American past and American heroes from the past is fascist too. As I write during Martin Luther King Week, amid plentiful mythologization of the slain civil rights leader, I wonder at the exception I am quite confident Stanley would make here. Just as black nationalism is separated from white nationalism, the mythologization of blacks would be made into a thing completely and categorically different from the mythologization of whites. The sad predictability with which authors purportedly dedicated to the erasure of racial difference nonetheless do everything they can to perpetuate distinctions between individual and groups based on race is one of the mechanical laws of contemporary pop political writing and punditry.
Any hesitation on the question of inequality that demonstrates the slightest inconsistency with stock Blank Slate orthodoxy, that is, that all inequality is entirely a product of malign environmental forces and could (and should) be undone through social engineering, is evidence of fascism. Stanley dedicates a few particularly benighted paragraphs to his thoughts on the question of what pre-social contributions to inequality might exist. Like most of those who hold to his position on this, he genuinely seems to know next to nothing about this rich and complex literature, yet that does not for a moment trouble his willingness to vigorously pontificate on the topic.
The perspective on free speech presented in John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” comes under attack as well. Of course, Stanley pontificates, a commitment to free expression that is too broad simply opens up territory for colonization by fascists. That territory must be restricted and guarded. By whom? People like Jason Stanley, presumably.
This is but a small subset of the litany of absurdities to which one is treated in this book.
One would think, in light of this remarkably deluded demonstration, that the year was not 2020, but, say, 1936, a few years after the rise to the German chancellorship of a certain Austrian-born WWI veteran, and that totalitarian shock troops were awaiting the signal to bring down the curtain on civil society and sweep away everything standing in the way of dictatorship and death camps. A sober American looks around his country today and sees danger rising, to be sure, but it is danger emanating from processes and trends that are quite unrelated to the claims made by Jason Stanley. The cohesive glue of cultural identity and norms are rapidly dissipating into a mist of narcissistic display and the acting out of pathological fantasies that can no longer even be called by that name. Social solidarity and concern for national life are relentlessly attacked and denounced as assaults on the liberty to escape all responsibility and care for community through whatever ill-considered and self-destructive set of behavioral innovations is currently au courant.
In the midst of the deliberate burning away of the bonds that have united Americans of all races in the past, Jason Stanley, a professor at Yale University, sees a fascist overlord preparing to load “the resistance” into trains for transport to the work camps. The situation almost beggars belief altogether.
A straightforward way to understand where Stanley’s book sits in the intellectual landscape is to see it as the propaganda equivalent on the left of Jonah Goldberg’s 2008 screed Liberal Fascism. In substance, the two books—ideological mirror images—are almost indistinguishable, certainly in their entire lack of scholarly rigor and in their ideological tediousness. Each is ploddingly, relentlessly determined to show readers that all the worst things in the world can be neatly attributed to the political enemies of the author, and each is presented to the public by an author so self-righteously, monomaniacally certain of the spectral evidence he presents as to make Cotton Mather appear a fretting relativist by comparison.
The telling difference is that next to no serious intellectuals could have been troubled to entertain Goldberg’s book for more than a few minutes, given how patently non-existent were the author’s intellectual expertise on the topic and his reputation as anything other than a not particularly thoughtful ideologue. Stanley’s book, by contrast, is being assigned by professors in classrooms in universities, despite the fact that it is no more—and perhaps even less—serious than Goldberg’s.
That students in universities who (happily) never encounter Goldberg on fascism will be assigned Stanley on fascism tells you everything you need to know about which group of ideological hacks has more of a footing in institutions of higher education. Neither book will convince anyone not already a member of its author’s political faith community, but of course “us” and “them” books such as these two are not written to convince “them.” The point of writing such books is to exacerbate conflict and vanquish enemies.
How ironic that Jason Stanley, like Jonah Goldberg, has written an “anti-fascist” book that any real fascist could not help but admire.
Hi all,
I’ve been at this project now for around eight months. Hardly seems possible, but I just checked the calendar and I believe that is the right math.
So, this is a note to you: Thank you.
I’m tremendously flattered by your interest in what I have to say about life, art, politics, death and I’m grateful that you read my ramblings. Every writer desires to be read (Lovecraft’s letter accompanying his submission to an editor notwithstanding) and thus owes a debt that cannot really be repaid to readers, however much the writer sometimes pretends not to recognize this (it’s part of the persona, you see…).
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