8 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(02/20/20 10:57am)
As students who have been actively involved in and have benefited from Alexander Hamilton Forum lectures, debates and dialogues, we write to set the record straight and defend deliberating on the Green New Deal.
First, we believe the Hamilton Forum is the most politically and philosophically diverse program on campus, both in terms of the speakers it hosts and the students involved. Since its inception in 2018, the Hamilton Forum has hosted the world’s leading Marxist economist, Richard Wolff; the editor of the foremost magazine of the American Left, Michael Kazin; a lion of the civil libertarian left and the first female president of the ACLU, Nadine Strossen; and Harvard professor and clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Randall Kennedy. The Hamilton Forum has also hosted several speakers on the political right, like New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, as well as speakers from the political center, such as former Clinton domestic policy advisor William A. Galston.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Political diversity is not a bug, but rather the most impressive and beneficial feature of the Hamilton Forum.[/pullquote]
On Thursday, Feb. 20, the Hamilton Forum will host Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass and economist Robert Pollin, the latter of whom has actually designed Green New Deals for states like New York and Washington. This political diversity is not a bug, but rather the most impressive and beneficial feature of the Hamilton Forum.
In a recent op-ed entitled “We don’t need a Koch sponsored Green New Deal,” two students wrote that debates like the one happening this Thursday challenge “progressive ideals.” “The speakers don’t have to disprove every argument as long as they can plant doubts in our heads,” the authors wrote. “By hosting the debate, the organizers of the forum choose which questions to ask, therefore reinforcing and normalizing discourses that question climate activism.”
To us, this sounds like education. We think that challenging ideals, raising doubts and normalizing questioning is what good educators do. Shouldn’t we “normalize” the questioning of all political viewpoints, including both climate activism and opposition to climate activism? In fact, this would make a good, aspirational motto for our campus. “Middlebury College: Normalizing questioning since 1800.” Put it on the stationery, sweatshirts and key chains.
It is also puzzling that someone would suggest that the Hamilton Forum cherry-picks “questions to ask.” Does anyone really believe that it is the Hamilton Forum that determined the Green New Deal should be a topic of public and academic debate in America in 2020? It is important to discuss the hotly debated issues of our day, and we certainly believe that the Green New Deal is one of them. Also, as anyone who has attended Hamilton Forum events knows, the hosts leave a long amount of time for unfiltered student questions, and those questions come from students of every persuasion. Afterwards, speakers stay behind to continue discussion over dinner, which are some of the best out-of-the-classroom intellectual experiences we have had here at Middlebury.
Some maintain that the Hamilton Forum takes direction from outside sources. This is demonstrably false. As the list above indicates, no foundation or organization could possibly see the Hamilton Forum as its mouthpiece because the diversity of speech is so vast. You would need to be a Marxist, populist, libertarian, nationalist, neo-liberal, socialist, anti-traditionalist, Catholic, anti-populist, traditionalist and centrist to see the Hamilton Forum as your mouthpiece. We have never met any such individual.
The Hamilton Forum receives grants from external foundations just like many other programs on campus, and it operates with complete academic independence, as is evident in what we have said above. Additionally, anyone who wonders whether the Hamilton Forum’s director — Political Science Professor Keegan Callanan — is susceptible to political pressure should review his record of standing on principle and speaking his mind, even as a non-tenured professor back in 2017.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Challenging ideals, raising doubts and normalizing questioning is what good educators do.[/pullquote]
Those who speak of “Koch funding” for the Hamilton Forum leave out a key factual detail. The Hamilton Forum’s grant from the Institute for Humane Studies is funded by the Clifford S. Asness Family Foundation’s Free Speech and Open Inquiry Program, with no grant funds from the Koch family. Why do the editorialists never mention this fact? Could it be that they realize it may “put doubts in our heads” about their narrative?
The broader principle regarding gifts and grants to Middlebury is that there should be no political purity test. A purity test barring donations on the basis of a donor’s political views would be out-of-step with Middlebury’s stated commitment to political diversity. It would be discriminatory. It would be a great way to alienate a substantial portion of the alumni donor base. Middlebury should no more discriminate on the basis of political viewpoint in its acceptance of grants and gifts than it discriminates in its admissions or (let’s hope) in hiring new professors.
Middlebury is not a political campaign. We are a learning community, and we are here to ask important questions together, to be challenged, and to challenge ourselves.
Akhila Roy ’20, Joey Lyons ’21, Quinn Boyle ’21.5, Max Taxman ’22, Maddy Stutt ’21.5 and Rati Saini ’22, are 2019–20 Alexander Hamilton Forum fellows.
If you would like to attend Hamilton Forum events and dinners, you can sign up at go/joinAHF.
(04/25/19 9:49am)
Two years after the Charles Murray incident, Middlebury finds itself again ridiculed in the national press. The Wall Street Journal and other national media outlets are portraying, with good cause, the decision makers at our college as opponents of the free and open exchange of ideas; an exchange that is vital to liberal education.
The Murray debacle, which turned violent and left one faculty member injured, epitomized a widespread and flawed understanding that freedom of speech does not apply to controversial ideas. In that episode, the opponents of free speech were protestors who exercised a “hecklers’ veto” to silence ideas with which they disagreed, even using violence to achieve their ends. I set forth the reasons why this form of protest is wrong, and especially wrong in an academic setting, in an earlier article, so I won’t reiterate them here.
Last week, however, both the organizers and the protesters of a planned lecture showed a renewed commitment to the open exchange of ideas. The lecturer was Ryszard Legutko, a Polish politician and philosopher. Legutko has made offensive comments about women, racial minorities, and the LGBTQ+ community. Previously, however, Legutko was a member of Solidarity, which courageously helped bring an end to communism in Eastern Europe. Now, he is a representative to the European Parliament and a leader of Poland’s Law and Justice Party, one of several far right parties that are rising to power in Eastern Europe and throughout the world.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]To understand how to deal with a problem in our own domestic politics, it is valuable to engage and refute thinkers like Legutko.[/pullquote]
Students who chose to protest Legutko’s lecture repeatedly emphasized that their event would not be disruptive. As Grace Vedock, a protest organizer, noted in The Campus, “It was never our intent to prevent the event from happening; we have reiterated at every step of the process that we did not want to impede his right to speak.” The Wall Street Journal quoted another organizer of the protest, Taite Shomo, as stating “It is unequivocally not the intent of this protest and those participating in this protest to prevent Legutko from speaking. Disruptive behavior of this nature will not be tolerated.”
Meanwhile, the sponsors of the program, including the College’s Alexander Hamilton Forum, were not endorsing what Legutko might say during the lecture or might have said in the past. Instead, the lecture provided interested Middlebury students an opportunity to actively question and debate a prominent representative of the right-wing politics that are increasingly dominant in Eastern Europe and throughout the world. Moreover, there are significant connections between the rise of authoritarianism in Eastern Europe and the American alt-right.
Thus, in order to understand how to deal with a problem in our own domestic politics, it is valuable to engage and refute thinkers like Legutko. We can more effectively combat troubling ideas in the real world if we practice doing so in a relatively controlled setting like a college campus. I consider Legutko’s political activity and views offensive, but I should be prepared to deal with people who think like him in the world beyond Middlebury. To fight bigotry, we must understand how bigots think so that we can articulate arguments that discredit them. Some say both that “morally correct arguments do not need defending,” and that “our world is plagued by bigotry, hate, and violence.” How do we combat these ills if not through a loud, consistent, and powerful defense of our moral principles? Free discourse benefits progressives who use it to show that inclusivity and compassion are superior to intolerance and hate.
Last week, the College had a chance to redeem itself from the Murray debacle and promote both the free and open exchange of ideas and productive protest. Middlebury was set to have a difficult, yet productive, event. Some students were committed to listen to this speaker and possibly challenge his views with hard questions. Others planned to stay outside the talk and vigorously, but peacefully, protest. The administration, however, deprived us of these opportunities.
In the wake of the Murray incident, President Patton claimed that “free speech lies at the heart of our purpose as an institution, and we cannot allow force or disruption to undermine it.” Last week’s events, however, exposed this rhetoric as empty. Middlebury’s leaders lost sight of the College’s educational mission. They denied both those who wanted to attend the speech and those who wanted to protest it the opportunity to challenge Mr. Legutko. Mere hours before the talk, the administration canceled the lecture because of vague and unspecified “potential security and safety risks.”
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]The administration deprived us of these opportunities. [/pullquote]
College Provost Jeff Cason and Dean of Faculty Andi Lloyd, in an email to the faculty, asserted that “our assessment of the potential safety risks of Wednesday’s planned lecture did not reflect concerns about threats from student protesters or students attending the event. Rather, we were concerned about the safety of those participants.” However, neither Provost Cason nor Dean Lloyd, or anyone else in the administration, has provided specific evidence regarding what threatened the safety of the “participants.” My professors constantly push me to back up my generalizations with evidence. It is disappointing that, in an intellectual institution, our administrators do not adhere to the same standards.
Even if there was evidence of security risks, it is the duty of the administration to create effective plans to ensure the safety of both those who wanted to attend Legutko’s lecture and those who wanted to protest his appearance on campus. An institution with Middlebury’s resources should be able to perform this basic function. If our school cared about the free exchange of ideas, including controversial ideas, it would undertake this duty, not shirk this responsibility.
The administration’s email can also be seen as a subtle attempt to silence classroom discussion about its handling of this event. In the same email to the faculty, Provost Cason and Dean Lloyd admonished Middlebury’s professors that “students have reported concerns about potential retaliation by faculty whose position on the event may have differed from their own … At this time of heightened tensions, we ask all of you to pay particularly close attention to how even well-intentioned comments may be received as retaliatory or punitive.”
What is the intended message of this warning if “even well-intentioned comments may be received as retaliatory or punitive” and possibly expose a professor as maintaining an unsupportive and disrespectful “classroom environment.” The message may reasonably be received as a warning not to talk about this incident in class. As such, it is a condescension to both the students and faculty members, all of whom are adults and fully capable of engaging in lively debate about this incident. The message could easily chill classroom discussions. Thus, it could be seen as a clumsy attempt to forestall open and free conversations about the administration’s (mis)handling of this event.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal in 2017, President Patton professed her dual commitment to free expression and inclusivity. However, her administration’s actions during the past week revealed a leadership more concerned with public relations than either of these principles. I agree with the protesters that they deserve an apology from the administration.
Moreover, the administration should adopt the Chicago Statement so that the College’s commitment to free speech runs deeper than President Patton’s rhetoric. Thus far, sixty universities and colleges have endorsed the Chicago Statement, which states: “Although the University greatly values civility, and although all members of the University community share in the responsibility for maintaining a climate of mutual respect, concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.” An endorsement of the Chicago Statement would signal Middlebury’s recommitment to the intellectual principles that make our education valuable and worthwhile.
(01/17/19 10:57am)
Donald Trump’s election stunned the Democratic Party. An unprecedented campaign yielded an unimagined result. Election night climaxed with televisions splashing images of sobbing Hillary supporters and euphoric MAGA-hatted Trump acolytes.
Democrats were due for this rude awakening. Republicans have dominated the recent political landscape, and, prior to the 2018 election, Democrats held fewer elected positions in the United States than at any time since the 1920s. However, it took someone as appalling as Trump for us to realize our current political inefficacy and start discussing a viable path to restored political power.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake summarized the Democrat’s historically bad position in 2016. Republicans in that year controlled:
- 33 of 50 governorships: a record.
- 68 out of 98 state legislative chambers: tied for the record.
- The entire legislatures in 33 out of 50 states: another record.
- 4,171 out of 7,383 state legislative seats (56.5 percent of all seats): yet another record.
Republican power at the local and state levels eclipsed Democrats’ power even before Trump took office. Liberals were either ignorant or complacent about that fact. Our party needed revamping: one that cared not only about getting the issues “right”, but also one that valued winning elections. After all, in a democracy, the losers do not get to make the rules. After the 2018 election, that revamping may become a reality if we can set aside ideological purity for pragmatic decisions that win seats in diverse districts (beyond liberalism’s coastal strongholds).
Once Trump took office, his antics and bigotry energized Democrats. The erratic President and his controversies captured our attention. We watched as Trump and a GOP Congress chaotically pursued a regressive agenda that featured tax cuts for the rich, an almost successful attempt to repeal Obamacare, a ballooning fiscal deficit, a retreat on climate change regulations, and the separation of children from their families at the border.
In last November’s midterm elections, the Democrats, led by Nancy Pelosi, implemented an effective electoral strategy. Rather than repeating Hillary Clinton’s failed strategy during the 2016 campaign, which emphasized Trump’s moral failings but did not articulate a clear alternative vision to cure the country’s ills, Democratic leaders encouraged their candidates to stress health care, increased wages, decreased prescription drug prices, and other kitchen-table issues. The Democrats’ economic message in 2018 resonated with a broad coalition of voters across the country, and the Party gained forty seats and won the House.
Despite their midterm success, Democrats remain divided over how the party should proceed.
One group argues that Democratic candidates won elections because they advocated progressive policies like universal basic income, Medicare for All, and free college, while also calling for the abolition of ICE and Trump’s impeachment. Fearless progressivism, they claim, stirred the base of younger voters, many of whom were women and minorities. This cadre was led by the exciting victories of representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, and the near victory of Beto O’Rourke in dead red Texas.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Democrats seeking to flip Republican voters and win contested districts must focus on health care and jobs.[/pullquote]
However, Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley did not gain seats for the Democrats. They simply took seats that had been held by reliable, albeit a bit more centrist, liberal Democrats. O’Rourke lost. Moreover, their progressive voices have pushed the party left, endangering moderate Democrats in centrist areas.
More centrist Democrats recognize that, if you want to address Democrats’ lack of political power, you need to win seats that were previously Republican or hold onto Democratic seats in areas that often vote conservative. Last November, Pelosi helped Democratic candidates find success in moderate districts by resisting her party’s pull to the left. Pelosi’s San Francisco voters pushed her to confront Trump on immigration and funding for Planned Parenthood, but she refused. “Those things are in our DNA, but they are not in our talking points,” Pelosi said.
Research shows that Pelosi’s strategy of forsaking hot-button, wedge issues in favor of a focus on economic populism is best. Extensive polling and focus group research collected by the House Majority PAC indicates that Democrats seeking to flip Republican voters and win contested districts must focus on health care and jobs.
There are many examples of Pelosi’s strategy bearing fruit. For example, Conor Lamb won a traditionally Republican district in western Pennsylvania by emphasizing health care and tax equity. This was a big gain for the Democratic Party, and should not be dismissed because Lamb took conservative stances on gun rights and supported Trump’s tariff policy, positions that aligned with the voters in his district. In West Virginia, which Trump carried by the widest margin in the entire nation (an astounding 42 percent gap), Democrat Joe Manchin held on to his Senate seat because voters saw him as fighting for the economically disadvantaged. To do this, Manchin had to show some conservative bona fides, such as voting to confirm Justice Kavanaugh, opposing abortion, and receiving an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association as recently as 2012. While he would not have been an ideal Democratic candidate in Massachusetts or California, he was the only kind of Democrat that has a shot at winning in West Virginia.
[pullquote speaker="" photo="" align="center" background="on" border="all" shadow="on"]Because of the more extreme left’s quest for purity on this issue, the Democrats lost an important Senate seat.[/pullquote]
Liberal purity on social wedge issues often undermines moderate Democrats who campaign in red states and threatens recent Democratic successes. Take the midterm election in Missouri, a state Trump won by nineteen points. Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill lost her seat last November in part because of criticism from abortion activists. Throughout the election, young progressives denounced McCaskill for not being a sufficiently prominent, vocal supporter of women’s reproductive freedoms. What these progressive attacks failed to acknowledge was McCaskill’s strong, pro-choice voting record.
In an interview with the New York Times after her loss, McCaskill called the abortion activists “irritating … It would’ve been one thing if I ever wavered, but I’ve had to take a lot of tough votes on this issue over the years. I have been standing in the breach for women’s rights as it relates to reproductive freedom for all of my adult life.” In the end, Missouri elected Senator Josh Hawley, a staunch pro-life Republican. Because of the more extreme left’s quest for purity on this issue, the Democrats lost an important Senate seat. They also ironically replaced a consistent vote for reproductive rights with a Republican whom Planned Parenthood called “An anti-abortion zealot who wants to take America back to the days of the 1950s.”
The left needs to stop setting up circular firing squads. When activists make contentious issues litmus tests for holding office, it hurts moderate Democrats campaigning in conservative states. Our candidates need to be able to attract votes in socially-conservative districts without fearing retribution from coastal progressives. As former House Speaker Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.” Let’s broaden the Democratic tent, and allow centrist voices to campaign in moderate districts.
(11/01/18 9:47am)
Last Thursday, the Alexander Hamilton Forum hosted “The Courts in the Age of Trump,” a discussion that featured two distinguished legal scholars: Professor James Fleming of the Boston University School of Law and Professor John McGinnis of Northwestern University. They debated the implications and likely behavior of the Supreme Court, which now has a clear conservative majority. The conversation took a predictably partisan turn, with both professors extending advice to dejected liberals in the wake of Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Before considering how Democrats should deal with courts in the Trump era, it is worth asking: how did we get here? How, as Fleming put it, is our nation’s highest court composed of “an alleged sexually-harassing perjurer (Clarence Thomas), an occupant of a stolen seat (Neil Gorsuch), and an alleged sexually-assaulting perjurer with a Trumpian temperament (Brett Kavanaugh)?”
In 1991, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee berated Anita Hill and then voted to confirm Justice Clarence Thomas, who Hill said had sexually harassed her when he was her boss. A comparable controversy ignited this October when Professor Christine Blasey Ford accused then-nominee Kavanaugh of sexual assault. Twenty-seven years after Hill, the same Committee with some of the same senators allowed the accuser to speak, but confirmed the nominee anyway.
The Republicans not only captured the Supreme Court; they did so with morally objectionable tactics and Justices. Many Democrats are understandably jaded. However, as Professor Fleming advised, “in the rough and tumble world of fiercely partisan, constitutional democracy, we have to be resilient.” Instead of lamenting the current state of the Court, we must devise strategies to resist conservative decisions.
Rather than dealing with the Supreme Court as it is, many progressives have promoted a fantasy that we may be able to impeach Kavanaugh. Even before Kavanaugh’s confirmation, progressives were considering ways to remove him. Progressive groups have raised money and collected 125,000 signatures for a petition to impeach Kavanaugh. Heidi Hess, the co-director of the liberal group CREDO Action which organized the petition, asserted that House Democrats should “know that progressives expect them to use their full power to get Kavanaugh off the bench if they gain control of the House.” While Hess’ rhetoric might appeal to disheartened progressives, it is counterproductive.
I argued in the column last week that Democrats should avoid talk of Trump’s removal or impeachment since such rhetoric infuriates and activates the tribal reactions amongst Republicans. Similarly, progressives should refrain from efforts to impeach Kavanaugh. The Kavanaugh controversy has helped Republicans excite their voters and reduce the enthusiasm gap with Democrats. Donald Trump Jr.’s tweet on October 5 illustrates the Republican tactic.
(09/27/18 9:54am)
Three years ago, The Middlebury Campus Editorial Board published “The Coddling of the Middlebury Mind.” The editors critiqued what they perceived as Middlebury’s “culture of protectiveness.” They argued that the college’s emphasis on safe spaces and political correctness insulated students, depriving them of opportunities to confront uncomfortable or offensive viewpoints and thereby become better at refuting them with reason and evidence. “The world-at-large is not Middlebury,” the editors wrote, “and we fear we are leaving here unprepared for the ‘unsafe spaces’ that await us.”
Less than two years after The Campus published that editorial, the Charles Murray incident took place. The protests, which turned violent and left one faculty member injured, came to epitomize progressives’ flawed understanding of freedom of speech as a principle that does not apply to offensive ideas.
In the world beyond Middlebury College, the Supreme Court has repeatedly, clearly and correctly stated that, while we are understandably disturbed by offensive speech, and therefore logically want to silence this speech, it is a key function of the First Amendment to protect hate speech. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is the difficulty of deciding who will determine when speech becomes “offensive” and what criteria will be used to make this decision. I, for one, do not want President Trump or Attorney General Sessions deciding what speech they will use the levers of government power to punish because they determine that it is “offensive.”
In the recent case of Snyder v. Phelps (2011), the Court, by a vote of 8-1, held that the First Amendment protected the Westboro Baptist Church’s admittedly offensive and hateful speech, even though it was delivered in the presence of a funeral for a soldier who died in Iraq. The Court acknowledged the odious and homophobic speech at issue and the pain it must have caused the family to endure that speech while burying their son. Nonetheless, both liberal and conservative justices (only Justice Alito dissented) agreed that, while a majority of people may speak back and refute offensive speech, they cannot prohibit it.
The Murray fiasco kindled a national debate within the left. Some scholars, journalists and prominent Democrats demanded a renewed commitment to the open market of ideas. They asserted that if we allow vigorous debates about policies and ideas, liberalism would win based on facts and reason, not censorship.
Others argued that attacks on political correctness reflected a lack of understanding of the challenges that offensive speech inflicts on marginalized groups. Progressives, like New York Times writer Charles Blow, argued that nothing valuable comes from engaging conservatives in discourse. “The Enlightenment,” Blow declared, “must never bow to the Inquisition.”
Blow’s comments, however, represent a problem with modern American political dialogue. While we often hear about how alternative facts and echo chambers have corroded bipartisan conversation, the left has failed to address some of its own issues. One such issue is our tone. Polls show that Americans particularly dislike the righteous condemnation of the left, and that is one of many factors that have driven the Democratic Party into the wilderness (we now control fewer elected positions in the United States than at any time since the 1920s).
Part of that sentiment arises from the idea that the left, particularly on college campuses, should be empowered to censor ideas that it considers offensive, instead of prevailing through open argument based on facts and reason. “When the loudest voices on the left talk about people on the right as either beyond the pale or dupes of their betters,” writes libertarian journalist Katherine Mangu-Ward, “it is with an air of barely concealed smugness.” The left’s tonal issues have handicapped our ability to talk to — let alone appeal to — voters who may help the Democratic Party win some elections. At the risk of stating the obvious, in a democracy, if you consistently lose elections, the other side dictates policy.
Right-wingers have responded to the left’s self-righteousness with increasingly toxic trolling. It is a self-perpetuating cycle of worsening discourse: “the more smugness, the more satisfying it is to poke holes in it; the more toxic the trolling, the greater the sense of moral superiority,” Mangu-Ward notes.
If liberals can restore the primacy of debate and dialogue at Middlebury and beyond, they will win many of these debates. More importantly, they will persuade some previously skeptical voters and thereby restore the Democratic Party’s political relevance. This process starts with dropping demands for censorship in places where we have the power to do so and realizing that we can learn from people who disagree with us. Equally important, we can win some of these arguments as opposed to simply stopping them from happening in the first place.
Joey Lyons is a member of the Middlebury College Class of 2021.
(09/13/18 9:54am)
Editor’s Note: In this recurring column, Joey Lyons will explore strategies to help Democrats win elections.
The United States experienced an unprecedented summer. It endured a record-setting heatwave, a tumultuous Supreme Court nomination, a presidential scandal involving a foreign power, convictions of several people associated with Trump’s campaign and signs of administrative unrest brewing in the White House.
At Middlebury and across the country, people are witnessing the country’s institutional decline and contemplating what it means for the future. In the Trump era, what is the state of our democracy? Where do we go from here?
I’m friends with both Republicans and Democrats. Their political conversations, mirroring the rise of tribalism in our country, have become more tense over the years. The stark partisan divide encourages silences. Discourse between the right and left, even amongst family, is rare and, more often than not, unpleasant.
There is a reason why people avoid bipartisan conversation. A large segment of the population has developed an allergic reaction to the left--to the way we talk, to the way we campaign and to the issues we stress. As a Democrat who wants Democrats to win elections, I am interested in how we can span the ideological gap while maintaining our values.
President Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral victory provoked a visceral reaction from the left. Bracing themselves for four years of Trump, stunned Democrats grappled with their failure to win elections. The debate over the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and the rise of Trumpism divided liberal commentators.
Expressing the fears of many Democrats, CNN analyst Van Jones advanced the “whitelash thesis” in the early morning after Trump’s win. “This was a whitelash against a changing country,” Jones said. “It was whitelash against a black president in part. And that’s the part where the pain comes.” Given the white supremacist rhetoric that resonated from the Trump campaign, Democrats readily embraced Jones’ impassioned conclusion.
However, some liberals rejected the whitelash thesis, pointing to demographic voting patterns in the national exit polls. Huffpost’s Ian Reifowitz noted that “Trump did a slim 1 percent better among whites than Mitt Romney did four years ago.” While Reifowitz conceded that Trump’s racism attracted some white voters, he believed the slight improvement indicated that the bigotry dissuaded an almost equal amount of whites from voting Republican.
Racial animus alone cannot explain Trump’s election. While there are plenty of racists in America, and Trump courted them with vigor, Clinton lost in 2016 because she failed to carry Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin. All of these states voted to make Obama the first African-American president in 2008 and returned him to the White House in 2012. It seems impossible that these states suddenly became racist in 2016 when they were progressive enough to elect Obama in the prior two elections. The Clinton campaign’s failure to concentrate on the economic issues that affect the vast majority of Americans doomed Clinton’s efforts to win the presidency. She neglected the flyover zone and that is where the Democrats lost the election. In order to secure an electoral victory in 2020, Democrats must find a balance between appealing to certain identity groups and putting forth solutions to economic issues like wage stagnation that affect most Americans, including the white working class.
On local and state levels, Democrats should emphasize identity politics in regions where such an emphasis appeals to voters. The victories of Ayanna Pressley, Kara Eastman, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the 2018 midterm elections have shown that emphasizing identity issues on the campaign trail can be a powerful mobilizer for political action. Progressives energize the party by providing voices for social movements and championing the rights of minority groups. However, the politics of identity do not resonate nationwide. Democrats cannot allow the progressive Blue Wave to dictate our national platform.
We can only govern if we win. We cannot help anyone if we do not hold power. To achieve electoral success, we must tap into a large segment of the population by advancing a unifying message and highlighting policies that benefit the majority of Americans. As New York Times columnist Mark Lilla writes, avoiding “narrower issues that are highly charged symbolically and can drive potential allies away” will allow the left to motivate and, eventually, reclaim voters. A focus on policies that have universal appeal, such as protections for unions, expansion of the earned income tax credit, and Medicare for All, is key for Democratic success. By championing domestic programs that benefit everyone, post-identity liberalism will help Democrats on the campaign trail win elections. Once in office, we can work to assist marginalized groups.
Joey Lyons is a member of the Middlebury College class of 2021.
(02/28/18 10:44pm)
The philosopher George Santayana stated, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” While that is true, the memory of the Civil War also shows that the misuse of history can be as damaging as the failure to remember it. Those who can control the memory of the past can manipulate it to control both the present and the future. To understand the lessons and legacy of the Civil War, one must acknowledge its causes.
Opposition to slavery was partly inspired by the North’s initial involvement in the Civil War. As the fighting progressed, Northerners increasingly became committed not only to abolition, but also to racial equality. The North’s victory and Reconstruction seemed to promise that black Americans would be included in America’s democracy.
However, the Redeemers, those who sought to reestablish white rule in the South, crushed the possibility that racial equality would be an outcome of the conflict. After the war, the Redeemers embraced the “Lost Cause” ideology, which portrayed the Confederate cause as a battle over states’ rights, not slavery. One way that the Redeemers promoted this new narrative was through the construction of Civil War monuments.
According to the Historical Marker Database, the Civil War is the most memorialized conflict in American history, with at least 13,000 public markers and monuments dedicated to it scattered across the country. As a result, Civil War memorialization has had a tremendous impact on the way Americans have interpreted the war’s meaning. After the war, the Redeemers began erecting monuments that minimized the significance of slavery as a cause of the Civil War, and instead depicted the conflict as one between the North and the South’s irreconcilable views on federalism. In their eyes, the war was not fought over slavery, so they had no obligation to promote equality as atonement for slavery in its aftermath. Using their monuments, the Redeemers falsified and distorted history in order to skew America’s perception of the war.
One such monument is in Colfax, Louisiana. According to an article by Richard Rubin in The Atlantic, in 1873, a group of Redeemers surrounded black Americans who were attempting to assert their political rights and slaughtered them. The Colfax monument describes the event as follows: “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event ... marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” By remembering black Americans’ attempts to vote as “misrule” that was valiantly ended with a mass killing, this monument, and others like it, justified further discrimination. Armed with the false idea that “misrule” was synonymous with the granting of rights and power to black Americans, white America became comfortable with the rise of Jim Crow. This monument still stands as of 2015. We should remove it and other such memorials because they pervert the past and the present. A museum contextualizing the monument within the history of American racism would be a better location for this memorial.
Misguided historical memories often promote modern injustice. It raises the question: Should we remove the Jefferson Memorial because he owned slaves, or rename Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School because he was a racist? The impulse to do so is understandable, but this could cause people not to learn from our past. Moreover, when a monument is not a purposeful distortion, but instead honors complex but flawed figures like Jefferson and Wilson, it would be better to encourage contextualization, education and conversation around these memorials rather than erase them.
To do so, memorialization societies — groups that organize reenactments and promote public commemoration of the war — as well as museums and other public educational institutions should emphasize the role racial injustice had in igniting the Civil War and the fact that the Union hoped that the outcome of the war would improve race relations. Moreover, simply placing placards that identify all of the war’s causes next to existing monuments might hinder the spread of the Redeemers’ myths.
Lastly, another approach would be to build monuments that recognize the significance of slavery and racial justice in connection with the war. This has already been done. For example, Augustus Saint-Gaudens built a majestic memorial to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment. This monument, which is located in a place of honor across from the Massachusetts State House, commemorates a regiment of valiant black soldiers who fought for the freedom of enslaved black people.
In a similar fashion, in the Chamberlain Freedom Park, located in Brewer, Maine, monuments constructed in 1996 celebrate the Civil War as a struggle not simply over federalism, but also as a battle for freedom and racial justice. This park has statues honoring the Gettysburg hero and Maine resident Joshua Chamberlain. However, it goes even further by presenting a statue of a slave striving for freedom on the Underground Railroad within the context of the Civil War.
The past is not forgotten. It is all around us. You can open newspapers today and see history’s lingering hand in discussions like the recent ones about the contemporary use of the Confederate flag and in events like the resurgence of white nationalism in Charlottesville last summer. Because the “Lost Cause” lingers, the struggle to promote a different interpretation of the Civil War must persist. This is the only path to a just future.
(01/24/18 11:23pm)
Racism is a contemporary problem in South Africa. However, its roots are deep. In Cape Town, monuments to colonialism and apartheid are physical reminders of the city’s racially troubled past. Many of these memorials celebrate oppressors, falsely portraying them as heroes. Such misguided historical markers can promote modern injustice. By idolizing white supremacists, Cape Town’s colonial and apartheid-era monuments perpetuate a legacy of racism that divides Capetonians and undermines racial progress. At the same time, however, the memorials serve as important reminders of Cape Town’s difficult past.
As Capetonians work to reconstruct their public spaces, arguments over colonial and apartheid monuments have erupted. For example, in 2015, students protested the existence of Cecil Rhodes’ statue on the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) campus. These demonstrations, which evolved into the “Rhodes Must Fall” movement, ignited public debate. Student activists claimed that Rhodes’ statue honored a reprehensible man who exploited, dispossessed and oppressed non-white people. These protesters had history on their side, as Rhodes’ legacy is horrible.
Rhodes, a British imperialist, was responsible for the displacement, enslavement and deaths of millions of Africans. Using “mercenaries and gangs to evict people from their land,” he seized 8.8 million acres for his mining empire and exploited the Africans living on these lands. Rhodes treated African lives as expendable and his “mine workers routinely died during mine explosions and floods.” As Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, he laid the foundation for apartheid. Rhodes’ treatment of colored and black Africans was abhorrent, so the controversy surrounding his statue was understandable.
The “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, which attracted considerable media attention, necessitated a response from UCT. After a month of protest, UCT’s council recognized that Rhodes’ vices outweighed his virtues and decided to remove his memorial. Rhodes fell on April 9, 2015. However, the debate over how South Africans should curate their memorial landscape remains contentious. Symbols of white supremacy and the legacy they uphold continue to linger.
Symbols of white rule are scattered across Cape Town and each has the potential to provoke controversy. Sabelo Mkhabela, a journalist for Livemag, spotted seven memorials to colonizers during one sweep of the city’s central business district. As Mkhabela indicated in his article, “Statues from our colonial past,” all of the monuments honor figures who persecuted non-whites. These memorials are not going to disappear, so Capetonians, as well as all South Africans, must be more proactive in the way they address such distressing historical symbols. As South Africans confront painful memories, they should look to Germany as an example of how a nation should deal with its grisly past.
In the wake of World War II, the German public experienced a sort of amnesia; they were unable or unwilling to acknowledge the war’s atrocities. The Holocaust was so disturbing that the temptation to forget and to repress was powerful. However, in order to maintain this horrific memory, the German government constructed thousands of Holocaust monuments, established museums in almost every major city and opened concentration camps to the public. These efforts remind people that extreme hatred gives rise to persecution and suffering. Similar projects should transform South Africa’s memorial landscape, making it a better reflection of both its regrettable apartheid past and its democratic present and future.
Memorialization societies, museums and other public education institutions should recognize colonial and apartheid-era monuments as teaching opportunities. The lives of South Africa’s colonizers and oppressors are worth recounting. By telling the unpleasant stories of the country’s historical record, educators can make the public more aware of past and present injustice. For instance, putting placards that identify a person’s contribution to white supremacy next to a statue would not only acknowledge that figure’s imperfect character, but also the nation’s legacy of racial oppression. Sibusiso Tshabalala, another writer for Cape Town Partnership, detailed eight other ways the city can contextualize problematic monuments in this article. Contextualization of memorials would educate the public and encourage South Africans to consider the current impact of colonialism and apartheid. It is vital that the country preserve and learn from the past as it seeks to move forward to a bright future.