The historians all saw this coming. In a prophetic post from long long ago (2023), Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains the authoritarian playbook, and it all starts with stifling the universities.
As the GOP transforms into an autocratic entity allied with foreign far-right parties and governments, it’s worth understanding how Orbán and other illiberal leaders target universities. They don’t only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning to reinforce their ideological agendas, but also seek to remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.
She then reviews the strategies used by tyrants like Viktor Orbán, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, César Ruiz Danyau, and Ron DeSantis, who all cracked down hard on the universities. Their usual approach is to declare themselves the guardians of public morality, while deploring the licentiousness and depravity going on with young people in college (an idea that can only be fostered if you’re totally ignorant of what’s going on in college — most of my students are more worried about grades, social rank, and what they’re going to do after they graduate.) Of course LGBTQ students are great scapegoats, but only if your imagination is unfettered by reality.
Much of this repression has centered on LGBTQ populations. A 2018 ban on gender studies preceded the 2020 end of legal recognition of transgender and intersex people. In 2021, a law outlawed any depiction or discussion of LGBTQ identities and sexual orientation, and some universities came under the authority of “public trusts” run by Orbán cronies.
LGBTQ students are even more worried about the future than our cis-het students. The authoritarian impulse is always to find the most threatened minority and bully them as an example to everyone else. They must destroy anyone who deviates from the mandatory, uniform pattern of behavior that the dictator demands…which means they must accuse both variations from the required breeder lifestyle and those who think seriously about the cultural consequences of our actions of being agents of chaos.
Watch for higher education professionals to be increasingly targeted as agents of the destruction of family, decency, and nation as GOP politicians compete to seem more extremist and authoritarian —which will bring them even further into line with autocrats such as Orbán.
Far from being “ivory towers” closed off from society, higher education institutions are often front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy. What happens on campus reflects, and often anticipates, transformations of societies as authoritarianism takes hold.
This was all written before the presidential election, at a time when many of us were pretty confident that the electorate couldn’t possibly put a criminal grifter in charge. Ha ha ha, we were so innocent.
Ruth Ben-Ghait, the author you linked to, recently did one of those Wired “the internet asks an expert” bits on YouTube, on the topic of facism. Very good watch.
One of the top comments described it as (paraphrasing, I forget exactly) “a non-stop checklist for whats happening now”.
“History Professor Answers Dictator Questions | Tech Support | WIRED” is the actual video title if anyone is looking.
Columbia University completely caved into the Trump administration’s authoritarian demands to keep federal funding. I expect other private universities will do the same. The EEOC is going after private universities for their DEI programs. That is not a function of the EEOC’s jurisdiction.
We are living in dangerous times.
And at the same time the perversions of republicans and church creeps grows unabated
I remember an episode of the TV series “Inc”, where a main character has the TV news on in the background. The news story is about yet more Americans being caught as they tried to illegally sneak past Canada’s border wall to become illegal immigrants in Canada. I remember considering it absurd enough to be funny. It is much less so, these days.
A U.S. governor made this list?!
#6
He turned the New College into a garbage dump
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/academics/2023/08/16/chaos-reigns-new-college-florida-fall-semester-nears
On a related topic (crossposted with the infinite thread)
USA Describes Ukraine as ‘False Country’
As I sit at my computer, obsessively taking in the daily madness, I had a thought. Is how I feel how non-Nazi Germans felt in 1933? Granted, they didn’t have the communication media we do today, but they did have radio and newspapers and word of mouth. Pretty soon, all but the last would become state run media. So, I have that advantage over the Germans. I still have plenty of non-state news options. At least for the moment. It’s just that watching the disintegration of our democracy in real time feels so unreal. It’s riveting in the same way watching a tsunami inexorably sweep over land is. You can see the destruction and lament all that is being destroyed, but you can’t do anything about it. Everything that could go wrong has. Trump has overcome every obstacle. He is not content to stop his retribution rampage. No target is too small for him. Once he’s brought low his powerful enemies, he’ll look deeper. My one hope is his advanced age. Hitler was only 56 when he died (which seems unreal). Trump is going on 79. All we need to be free of him is a stroke, a heart attack, a hard fall down the stairs. Though a slow walk past a grassy knoll or an evening at Ford’s Theatre would work for me too.
Birger, no. That is a falsehood.
It is not the case that “USA Describes Ukraine as ‘False Country’”.
The actual quotation is:
“There’s a sensibility in Russia that Ukraine is just a false country, that they just patched together in this sort of mosaic, these regions, and that’s what is the root cause, in my opinion, of this war, that Russia regards those five regions as rightfully theirs since World War Two, and that’s something nobody wants to talk about.”
John Watts@9–
The play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco explores that thought.
@#3:
The author of the linled article (and guest on the YouTube video I mentioned), Ruth Ben-Ghait, is a professor at NYU, across Manhattan from Columbia. Columbia caved in large part because pulling federal funding would wreck their finances, and as a private university, that matters a lot.
NYU is also private. Ben-Ghait was already banned from giving an invited lecture at the US Naval College because her topic of dictatorships (Pinochet specifically) hit too close to home for Republicans. She hasn’t been shy about saying Trump, et al. are using every play in the budding dictatorship playbook. How long before NYU is told to fire her or lose THEIR federal funding?
Academic freedom might not be dead in the USA yet, but it is the process of being stabbed repeatedly while the mob cheers.
Crossposted with the infinite thread- inconvenient thruths;
“Imperialism, Propaganda & War: The Truth Biden Hid and Trump Let Slip — Katie Halper”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ab-Q-Ta91u8
-This is about imperialism rather than internal fascism, but the fascism USA has endorsed as a tool in foreign politics has now become a tool inside USA itself.